Greenwashing has been a common practice among companies since the 1980s. There are some companies that take that practice to an extraordinary level. These companies create a sustainability report, dedicate pages on their website touting their environmental stewardship, spend money on projects that make them appear “green” and at the same time spend millions of dollars lobbying the government to decrease environmental regulations and stop any plan to curtail carbon emissions. We will call these companies green gilded as they are coated in a thin layer of environmentalism as a means to deceive the public. This paper analyzes some of the largest US oil producers with an in-depth analysis of ExxonMobil and Chevron Corp. It examines the money they spend on lobbying efforts to undermine actual sustainable policy. It looks into their sustainability reports, money spent to limit their carbon footprint, and money spent on environmental stewardship. It also compares the carbon footprint of each company. It analyzes the dangers of green gilding and bilking the public. It defines and describes what a neo-sustainable approach in the oil business would look like.

Social, political, and economic forces may inadvertently influence the stance of scientific literature. Scientists strive for neutral language, but this may be challenging for controversial topics like genetically modified (GM) crops. We classified peer-reviewed journal articles and found that 40% had a positive or negative stance towards GM crops. Proportion of positive and negative stance varied with publication date, authors’ country of origin, funding source, and type of genetic modification. Articles with a negative stance were more common at the beginning of the millennium. Authors from China had the highest positive:negative ratio (8:1), followed by authors from the USA (12:5) and the EU (5:7). Positive stance articles were six times more likely to be funded by private sources compared to those with a neutral or negative stance. Articles about glyphosate were more likely to be negative compared to articles about Bacillus thuringiensis. Linguistic features of articles with positive and negative stances were used to train a random forest classifier that predicts stance significantly better than random chance. This suggests the possibility of an automated tool to screen manuscripts for unintended biased language prior to publication.

Environmental knowledge and awareness have small impacts on pro-environmental behavior (PEB). Decades of public information campaigns that inform the public how personal behaviors and consumerchoices drive climate change have not changed behavior. Research into motivation for PEB change across disparate fields demonstrates new insights into what motivates behavioral change. This paper provides a review of those literatures, which have not been systematically brought together, in order to generate research questions and propose a new research agenda. The findings indicate the need to test how types of individuals, categorized by what motivates their behaviors, respond to different policy messaging tools.