Photo by Provincial Archives of Alberta on Unsplash
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It’s 1977. ExxonMobil is currently the largest oil corporation in the world, producing 6 million barrels of oil per day. The petroleum behemoth accounted for nearly a seventh of the world’s total oil production. Exxon’s Research and Engineering Department, employing thousands of world-class scientists, circulated a number of alarming internal documents—in them, scientific data that corroborated the findings of other climate researchers showed that Exxon’s unyielding levels of oil production were directly fueling the destruction of the planet. Persistent rising trends in total atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were published 17 years prior, known as the Keeling Curve. The trillion-dollar petroleum industry, the one that made the world go round through the burning of oil, was burning the planet. Temperatures in the Pacific rose 0.3 °C in 1977 alone. Exxon scientists accurately predicted, starting around the 1970s, that global temperatures would rise by roughly 0.2 °C per decade from now on. These were startlingly accurate predictions—basically synonymous with what today’s top climate researchers forecast.
The research conducted by ExxonMobil was confined to the walls of Exxon’s office quarters, never to spread beyond the workplace. The finalized, published research was kept internal. The research that was eventually published was reported in obscure, paywalled scientific journals, far from the eye of public opinion. Exxon decided to take the route of pre-emptive damage control. 895 total promotional advertorials were released into the New York Times from 1985 to 2000, costing roughly $31,000 per advertorial. 36 of them directly dealt with the concept of climate change. Designed to manipulate public opinion and stir up unhealthy skepticism against the anti-oil narrative grounded in actual science, Exxon told the public that “The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” and that “We still don’t know what role man-made greenhouse gases might play in warming the planet.” These statements contradicted all findings by the company’s own staff and actual climate scientists.
Every 4 out of 5 of their scientific research papers point towards climate change being a real, human-driven phenomenon, while every 4 out of 5 of their editorials sowed doubt in the legitimacy of climate change. Exxon even challenges this clear-cut fact, funding analyst groups with its oil money to argue that only 11 of those 36 climate-denial ads were “post-merger”, while the rest were just from Mobil, a pointless red herring that doesn’t change the fact that starting a climate-denial movement with oil money is a strategic move designed to shield the profits of an oil conglomerate against planet-saving, scientific data.
ExxonMobil is just one of many oil giants that have repeatedly maintained a chokehold on climate science. As early as 1954, when Caltech researcher Charles Keeling measured the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, petro giants knew that it was linked to the burning of fossil fuels, or could be attributed to artificially driven activity.
As the public finally caught on, the climate change cover-up was no longer an option.
This is the start of a pivot to the responsible consumerism movement, a movement aimed to “address climate change”, convenient sophistry for a movement aimed at suppressing real climate progress that simply took the place of climate change denialism; from trying to deny climate science to trying to delay climate action. 2024 was the first year in which global average temperatures temporarily passed the 1.5 °C threshold, the estimated threshold for triggering multiple self-feeding tipping points. The plan was to stall climate progress through misinformation campaigns and, nowadays, greenwashing. 25 percent of Gen Z and Millennials consider natural gas to be a “renewable resource”. An ingenious plan, but one that, insofar as people remain uneducated, preoccupied, and confused, will continue to work brilliantly.
Why not ethically consume?
Before we talk about why “ethical” or “responsible” consumerism is, at best, corporate propaganda and virtue-signalling designed to serve the interests of corporations, we need to understand why the concept of “casting a vote” by buying environmentally ethical products doesn’t work.
Let’s say you wanted to buy 2 pounds (2 standard cases) of strawberries at either your local farmers market or your local Walmart. At Walmart, a pound of strawberries releases 0.86 lbs of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, when accounting for every single step of the growing, logistics, and maintenance—in short, the entire life cycle of the product. Around 46-60% of these emissions come from the cultivation process.
Let’s be a little realistic towards this hypothetical farmers market. The lowest carbon footprint possible in growing a pound of strawberries is 0.015 lbs of CO2. That means the farmers market sources strawberries that are grown in facilities that avoid heated greenhouses, which often increase emissions by tenfold, is completely locally sourced, which avoids almost all transport/logistics emissions, and doesn’t use any unsustainable packaging. This is the optimal strawberry. The percentage of farmers markets that can achieve this 0.015 lbs of CO2 emissions per pound is insanely low (only in Mediterranean climates) and virtually unachievable in the U.S, where farmers market practices yield around 0.4-0.8 lbs of CO2 per pound. We can take the low-end estimate and take the 0.4 lbs of CO2 per pound number.
Farmers markets are much rarer than Walmarts, so let’s say that you are one of the people who are fortunate enough to live within a 10-minute drive to one of these farmers markets. However, you happen to have a Walmart just a block away, requiring 2 minutes of walking to reach it. This means that since you’re driving 10 minutes to the farmers market—a relatively short drive, and driving that same 10 minutes back, 6.61 lbs of extra CO2 are released into the atmosphere; walking to Walmart only releases 1.72 lbs of CO2, while the drive to the farmers market increases your total to 7.41 lbs. This means that you just released 4.3 times the CO2 into the air as if you were to just shop at your local, unsustainable Walmart, all the while paying $4.50 to $7.00 for a pound of strawberries that usually costs $3.00 at Walmart. That’s a terrible deal for you as a consumer.
The intricacies don’t just stop there. What if you were commuting to work, and the farmers market only required a 1-mile diversion from your original path for you to drive there, buy strawberries, and drive to work? Then you’d only be releasing 1.45 lbs of CO2, reducing emissions by 18%! What if you instead took a 40-minute round trip by E-bike? That only adds 0.06 lbs of emissions, making going to the farmers market twice as sustainable as going to Walmart. But what if you get paid on an hourly basis, and missing an hour at your job to get these strawberries makes you miss out on $20? You could also have just shopped at Walmart during a lunch break and used those $20 to fund carbon subsidies for natural gas processing, where $20 saves 3,000+ lbs of GHG emissions from going into the atmosphere. That’s orders of magnitude times more efficient, but then an ethical dilemma arises similar to that depicted in Peter Singer’s “drowning child” experiment. Regardless, you cannot effectively market something with “better for the environment” as a selling point without accounting for those factors, with many more unaccounted for that could individually change your decision from shopping at Walmart to shopping at a farmers market.
In rich, prosperous liberal households, this type of virtue signalling can be performed on the daily. 48% of Americans struggle to even pay for enough healthy food to begin with, let alone shamelessly greenwashed food that is multiple times the price of that for questionable carbon-saving margins. There is no shame in not buying these products or avoiding them even when you have an option; consumers care about the environment, almost 80% are willing to pay premiums for sustainable food and products, but only up to 10%.
From denial to delay.
This is a generic timeline of oil industry PR attitudes since the discovery of human-driven global warming.
1970s–1990s: Denial
“The earth could be warming, but we need more research to confirm any of this—it’s not at all the fault of the oil industry.”
Stall regulation (successful, some people are still influenced by this)
2000s: Uncertainty
“Climate change happens—but the oil industry is the backbone of modern society, it’s not worth it to impose regulations.”
Delay policy (still successful and continuing quietly today)
2010s–2020s: Greenwashing
“We’re already part of the solution; it’s up to you consumers to take individual responsibility.”
Defang public anger, shift blame (unsuccessful, but discredits authentic climate movements, preventing real action)
How exactly did 1 in 4 people under the age of 45 come to believe that natural gas was renewable? The answer is 30 million dollars from the propane industry, along with massive greenwashing campaigns made by petro-giants to pin climate change and pollution as “everybody’s business” and categorize oil as “low-carbon”. It’s a shift in strategy that aims to delude consumers into a sense of false empowerment, trying to cut out the negative perception placed upon Big Oil when resolving climate change. On Big Oil’s part, they choose to play the optics. BP spends $53 million a year on environmentally appealing advertising, while Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Total spend $49 million, $41 million, $29 million, and $29 million, respectively, per year on their media strategies. These 5 oil leviathans spend over $200 million a year on greenwashed advertising every year collectively, while also spending $200 million a year, collectively, pushing to delay climate legislation and alter the rules they’ll have to play by in order to achieve climate compliance.
Lobbying has increased; 5,350 fossil-fuel lobbyists have gone to U.N. climate summits over the past 4 years, campaigning alongside real policymakers to lobby for and advocate for an agenda of subversion. For nearly seven decades, Big Oil has sent lobbyists to deceive courts, lawmakers, stifle the spread of accurate science, and, as the general public finally catches onto how much is at stake, decides to switch positions; currently framing consumers as the ones responsible, distracting public perception of how to solve climate change from keeping its eyes on the ball—holding oil corporations accountable. The U.S. Department of the Interior had 65% of its meetings from 2017-19 take place with fossil fuel industry lobbyists, while only 12% took place with conservation/renewable energy lobbyists.
ExxonMobil allocates 19 percent of all branding efforts to environmental appeal. Shell spends 16 percent, BP spends 14 percent, while Total spends 29 percent—that’s nearly a third of all promotional material being climate-focused. That’s half a billion USD a year spent creating illusions of support for ambitious, progressive climate agendas while also quietly sabotaging those same agendas with oil lobbies. In total, these giants spend around $750 million a year to promote climate-friendly images. All five of these companies are still on track to increase oil production by 2026. While Shell touted its carbon cutback efforts 70 percent of the time, only 10 percent of its expenditures went towards investments that were “low-carbon”. The entire industry invests around 12 percent of its capital in “low-carbon” investments—the term itself is greenwashed rhetoric; petro giants have snuck their natural gas investments into the “low-carbon” category, depriving the term of any real value.
Fraudulent marketing comes with fraudulent products. Oil companies overstate their green investments and diversification, amplifying them by orders of magnitude more than their actual share of company investments. ExxonMobil hyped up biofuel research, claiming that the company “offers some of the greatest promise for next-generation biofuels” while having a 10,000-barrels-per-day target that would not even take up 0.2 percent of its current refinery capacity. In 2004, BP popularized the now prevalent greenwashing concept of “carbon footprints”, designed to scapegoat emissions scrutiny onto the collective of consumers. The concept was supposed to make consumers feel responsible for the impact they had on the environment, even though that impact is only made possible by companies like BP. The concept was an integrated part of BP’s 2004 rebranding campaign, renaming itself from “British Petroleum” to “Beyond Petroleum”, changing into a greener logo, and trying to rebrand as an environmentally conscious company.
This greenwashing epidemic is not exclusive to fossil fuels—out of 239 major companies with net-zero targets from the Forbes 2000 list, 60% of them are actively greenwashing their brand image while lobbying for environmentally degrading policies. 90% of companies reference “net-zero” on their websites, while there is almost no correlation between those promises and actual climate action. 100 fossil fuel companies and investors contribute to over 70% of the world’s emissions; trying to place the blame on individuals was never intended to be a solution.
Perhaps unfortunately, only 41 percent of consumers actually believe that it’s their responsibility to solve climate change, let alone pay premiums for “responsibly-made” products. Public opinion shows that this approach is not only obsolete, but it paints a picture of climate change being a monetization plug overplayed by corporations; this is all while corporations are the ones using greenwashing tactics and the concept of “responsible consumerism” to distract from real solutions to the climate crisis. This puts actual climate action into a double bind. Either a) corporations successfully pin the blame on individuals, deluding them into ineffective collective action that ignores holding corporations accountable, or b) corporations face heavy backlash from their customers, while their efforts to subvert the climate movement are seen as efforts to promote it, effectively discrediting the fight against climate change.
If someone is concerned with the impact on the environment that their car has, the optimal solution is not to dump $50,000 on a Tesla, a car that relies on a supply-chain and production process 50 percent more environmentally damaging than that of traditional gas cars, and takes up to 5 years of driving electric just to get on equal emissions footing with traditional automobiles. Greenwashing sets up a false dichotomy between corporate accountability and individual decision-making; it acts like the presence of unaffordable, unsustainable, and greenwashed “eco-friendly” solutions somehow puts all liability onto the consumer. It is the responsibility of corporations to develop cost-efficient, transparent supply chains that give consumers cost-efficient, transparent green products to stock up on—consumers do not prioritize greenwashed versions of products where the main difference lies within the price tag.
Rhetorical analysis.
Greenwashing also comes with dozens of rhetorical tactics used to build brand images. These include, but are not limited to:
Corporate identity- Companies claim to be partners, leaders, and innovators in the transition away from polluting supply chains.
Vague commitments with plenty of wiggle room- Companies tell you that they’re investing in “low-carbon” (don’t forget that category includes natural gas) projects, reaching net-zero, or being pathways to sustainability.
Association with nature- Companies want you to believe that they are part of nature, not the ones destroying it, with natural imagery, logos, market-tested branding, and more.
Responsibility framing- Companies paint climate change as a shared responsibility.
Bridging the gap- Companies will paint using environmentally harmful energy sources or activities as “necessary” to a slow transition to a green future.
Looking forward.
The myth of individual action as a way to rectify the climate crisis is nothing more than a convenient diversion that the corporations causing it can use to keep on destroying the earth while deviating the burden of social and moral responsibility onto consumers, who, under any circumstance, should never be obligated to “consume more responsibly”. Carbon consumption is inextricably tied back to daily behaviors that we can’t control; many of these behaviors are simply a part of the industrial system that makes the world go round. The only way to really take authentic, personal responsibility that 100% works is to: go off the grid, live in the woods, grow your own food, consume only naturally sourced or handcrafted utilities, and detach from the rest of society.
Nobody should have to do that. What needs to happen is political and economic accountability for petro-giants, greenwashing mega-corporations, and the major polluters out there. Companies shouldn’t have to feign interest and engagement with “eco-friendly” products as a demonstration of virtue-signalling; they should invest in green products and eco-friendly technology because it is the future. Currently, supply chains are going to cost companies $120 billion this year due to environmental risks. GHG emissions there are, on average, (deviating by sector) 11.4 times higher than operating emissions themselves. Green tech needs to be competitively invested in, not because it’s humanity’s only ticket out, but because it’s going to become superior to tech that runs on petroleum, coal, or LNG.
Oil companies are still pushing back, and they will continue to do so. The American Petroleum Institute, serving the interests of oil and gas manufacturers across the country, is pushing to give the oil industry legal immunity from any climate-related lawsuits. The Trump administration has repeatedly taken steps backward from real accountability. In October of 2025, French oil giant Total—yeah, the one that spends 29% of its public branding money on greenwashing, was found guilty by French courts for misleading customers, violating consumer trust laws in the E.U. Total marketed itself as a leading figure in the transition to net zero, being the “future of energy”, all while increasing gas production. The largest growing niche of lawsuits against the oil industry is against this type of greenwashing.
Progress is being made, but not in digital shopping cards, checkout lines, or eco-friendly spending habits. Progress is being made, and will only be made in courtrooms, agencies, municipal halls, and in legislation. Responsible consumerism did not replace climate denial by accident; it is not a step forward and never was intended to be. It replaced it because it is more effective at achieving its one goal—to destroy the climate change movement from within.
People like you and me care about the environment. Don’t let ExxonMobil tell you otherwise.
If you have any questions, objections, or thoughts after reading this, let me know! I respond to and like every single comment I get.
Sources:
French energy giant sued- groundbreaking lawsuit against false net-zero advertising
Environmental hazards of supply chains- costing companies billions
People aren’t falling for greenwashing- statistics
https://time.com/6986626/consumers-individual-action-climate-change/
From the United Nations- greenwashing as a climate issue
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/greenwashing
Looking green- rhetorical analysis from the greenwashing playbook
https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ugtheses/786/
Big oil is declaring war on climate lawsuits
The myth of individual action- it will not save us from climate change
Corporate accountability- the future of climate policy legislation
https://fbtgibbons.com/the-future-of-climate-policy-corporate-accountability/
Carbon footprints- consumerist propaganda from BP
https://www.fuelourdemocracy.com/articles/671-controversy-carbon-footprints
Supply chains- environmental impacts
https://online.uwp.edu/degrees/business/mba/supply-chain-management/carbon-footprint-of-supply-chain
Exxon Mobil- putting blame on consumers, not polluters
Exxon Mobil- a climate change cover-up
Oil money- the role it plays in sustainable marketing
https://grist.org/accountability/oil-companies-marketing-greenwashing-report/
Ethical consumerism analysis- an unsustainable means for sustainability
https://www.dollarsandsense.org/the-limits-of-ethical-consumerism/
Corporate hypocrisy- actions of corporations contradict their climate targets
Net zero- an excuse for corporate greenwashing
Advertising influence- oil giants spending money on green advertising
United Nations- big oil lobbyists at climate conference
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/07/fossil-fuel-lobbyists-cop-un-climate
Propane myths- the propane industry rebrands propane as renewable
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/25/propane-industry-rebrand-fuel-as-renewable
Advertising- oil companies increased Google Ads by 218 percent
Strawberry hypothetical sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666784322000274
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352550924002999
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022CResC...600073P/abstract
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Day one of asking you to come to NSD
As someone who has recently returned from living in the desert, I've felt firsthand how hot the stakes are. Your point on holding the larger architects of these systems accountable is of vital importance.