Big Oil has moved on from ‘greenwashing.’ Here’s the new playbook.
Remember when the fossil fuel industry couldn’t stop talking about climate change? In 2020, when oil prices fell in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, major oil companies promoted efforts to reduce carbon emissions and touted various energy “innovations”: transforming algae into fuel (Exxon Mobil), carbon capture (Chevron), and producing green hydrogen (BP). Critics have called it “greenwashing” – highlighting small, sustainable investments to distract people from the pollution that is at the heart of their business.
It didn’t take long for oil companies to abandon these old arguments. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, supply disruptions sent oil prices soaring and oil giants adopted a new message: fossil fuels are essential to “energy security” and they are here to stay. That’s according to a new report from Clean Creatives, an initiative pressuring PR firms and advertisers to stop working with fossil fuel clients, which analyzed more than 1,800 ads, press releases and social media campaigns from BP, Shell, Exxon and Chevron between 2020 and 2024.
“Oil companies are no longer trying to ride the wind of sustainability transition,” said Nayantara Dutta, head of research at Clean Creatives. “They’re not necessarily trying to be like the good guys.”
The political mood has changed dramatically from 2020, a time when world leaders seemed ready to finally take climate change seriously, to today, when wars, political chaos and rising costs have shifted their focus. Big business, politicians and the media have become quieter on climate change. Clean Creatives’ analysis is one of two new reports that trace how oil giants – which have much to gain from the global failure to address climate change – have changed their narrative during this period. The new research shows that their green-coded language was in retreat long before President Donald Trump returned to power.
As oil companies look to expand their natural gas infrastructure, they need to think carefully about how they sell it to the public. To build more pipelines, factories, and wells, oil companies need not only formal permissions from governments, but also a kind of informal permission known as a “social license to operate”—essentially, gaining enough public acceptance to maintain their legitimacy and fend off opposition, such as protests and legal challenges. “They hire the best public relations agencies in the world to try to make you believe they are socially responsible,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, for example, companies began citing national security and economic resilience to justify expanding production wherever they were located. This argument sometimes gets confused with a broader claim that the world simply needs more fossil fuels. “Energy demand is increasing and the effects are being felt everywhere,” said the voiceover of a 2022 ad. “That’s why at Chevron, we’re increasing production in the Permian Basin by 15 percent, and we plan to reach 1 million barrels of oil per day by 2025.”
But the current situation challenges the idea that fossil fuels are essential to ensuring that a country has reliable and affordable sources of energy. The US-Israeli-led war against Iran has triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history, with around 15% of the world’s supply blocked in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route along the Iranian coast. Gas prices in the United States have soared, with the national average for a gallon of gasoline jumping 87 cents in a month. The situation has sparked interest in electric vehicles, demonstrating how reliance on fossil fuels leaves people vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of gasoline. Meanwhile, natural gas prices have risen sharply in Asia and Europe, where political leaders are calling for more investment in nuclear power to withstand fossil fuel price shocks. “The energy security argument around natural gas is kind of turned on its head,” Brulle said.
The planet is overheating. Why does the news look the other way?
This tumultuous situation led Jennie Stephens, professor of climate justice at the University of Maynooth in Ireland, to reflect on what would have happened if the world had turned to renewable energy sooner; if, for example, oil companies hadn’t worked for decades to slow the fight against climate change. “If we could have collectively committed to a global phase-out of fossil fuels, we would be in a very different position, wouldn’t we? she said.
Stephens’ recent research, published last week in the journal Energy, Sustainability, and Society, found that when oil companies talk about renewable energy, it is often in a way that reinforces negative perceptions about wind and solar power. Along with researchers from Northeastern University and Columbia University, Stephens analyzed how BP, Exxon, Shell and French oil giant Total Energies discussed solar, wind and other sustainable energy sources in their annual reports from 2016 to 2022. “We found that they talked about renewable energy as somehow being in the service of the expansion of fossil fuels,” Stephens said. Sometimes this has been literal, as in the case of Total’s recent floating offshore wind project that powers an oil and gas platform. After 2020, oil companies began highlighting the downsides of renewable energy more frequently, discussing their costs and intermittency, the study found.
At the same time, oil companies backed away from the message that they were “partners” in the “energy transition” and began walking back their climate promises in 2023. That year, they promoted a narrative that fossil fuels can expand at the same time as the world reduces emissions, according to the Clean Creatives report. He says companies have moved from greenwashing to “gaslighting,” sowing doubt among the public about the need for the world to stop building fossil fuel infrastructure, a move the United Nations’ top body of climate scientists has said is necessary to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate goals. “We call it gaslighting because they confuse people about what the truth really is and the results of their operations,” Dutta said.
In 2024, oil and gas companies have leaned into the idea that fossil fuels are part of modern life, emphasizing talking points about the necessity of oil and gas for a “balanced energy future.” “The specific vocabulary used is ‘responsible, balanced, pragmatic,’ to give people the feeling that the logical solution is an investment in fossil fuels,” Dutta said. Even though Clean Creatives’ analysis ended in 2024, the overall message remained the same in 2025, she said, even as companies adapted by positioning fossil fuels as essential to technological progress, particularly for data centers powering AI.
The current oil shock, along with the falling costs of solar and wind power, poses a challenge to oil companies and the stories they tell. “The arguments for energy security and cost are no longer on the side of fossil fuels, and so they find themselves in sort of a real rhetorical problem here,” Brulle said. “So I’m sure the PR firms hired by the oil companies are going to have to do some really interesting work to continue to justify fossil fuel expansion.”
