Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014)

Abstract

This paper assesses whether ExxonMobil Corporation has in the past misled the general public about climate change. We present an empirical document-by-document textual content analysis and comparison of 187 climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and paid, editorial-style advertisements ('advertorials') in The New York Times. We examine whether these communications sent consistent messages about the state of climate science and its implications-specifically, we compare their positions on climate change as real, human-caused, serious, and solvable. In all four cases, we find that as documents become more publicly accessible, they increasingly communicate doubt. This discrepancy is most pronounced between advertorials and all other documents. For example, accounting for expressions of reasonable doubt, 83% of peer-reviewed papers and 80% of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of advertorials do so, with 81% instead expressing doubt. We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science-by way of its scientists' academic publications-but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public. Our content analysis also examines ExxonMobil's discussion of the risks of stranded fossil fuel assets. We find the topic discussed and sometimes quantified in 24 documents of various types, but absent from advertorials. Finally, based on the available documents, we outline ExxonMobil's strategic approach to climate change research and communication, which helps to contextualize our findings.

Superintelligence Skepticism as a Political Tool

“…For example, ExxonMobil has been found to express extensive skepticism about climate change in its public communications (such as newspaper advertisements), but much less skepticism in its internal communications and peer-reviewed publications [7]. This finding suggests that ExxonMobil was aware of the risks of climate change and misled the public about the risks.…”

“…This finding suggests that ExxonMobil was aware of the risks of climate change and misled the public about the risks. ExxonMobil reportedly used its peer-reviewed publications for "the credentials required to speak with authority in this area", including in its conversations with government officials [7] (p. 15), even though these communications may have presented climate change risk differently than the peer-reviewed publications did. (As an aside, it may be noted that the ExxonMobil study [7], published in 2017, has already attracted a skeptic critique by Stirling [49].…”

“…However, even if the AI projects themselves do not exhibit skepticism, the corporations that host them still could. Such a scenario would be comparable to that of ExxonMobil, whose scientists confirmed the science of climate change even while corporate publicity campaigns professed skepticism [7].…”

“…Whereas most literature on politicized skepticism (and similar concepts such as denial) is backward-looking, consisting of historical analysis of skepticisms that have already occurred [1,2,[4][5][6][7], this paper is largely (but not exclusively) forward-looking, consisting of prospective analysis of skepticisms that could occur at some point in the future. Meanwhile, the superintelligence governance literature has looked mainly at institutional regulations to prevent research groups from building dangerous superintelligence and support for research on safety measures [8][9][10][11].…”

The role of college and university faculty in the fossil fuel divestment movement

“…With improved understanding about how fossil fuel companies strategically sought to cast doubt on what is known about the connection between burning fossil fuels and climate change (Gelbspan 1998, Supran and Oreskes 2017, the question of who bears responsibility for the negative societal implications of fossil fuel based energy systems is increasingly being asked (Frumhoff et al 2015, Ekwurzel et al 2017, Shue 2017. As devastating storms, floods, heat-waves and droughts grow in frequency and severity, the question of who is responsible for climate change is growing in salience (Frumhoff and Allen 2017).…”