New Report: “Big Oil’s Deceptive Climate Ads”

For decades, Big Oil has deceived the public about the problem of climate change. Now, as CCI's latest report shows, oil majors are deceiving the public about the solutions.

“Big Oil’s Deceptive Climate Ads: How Four Oil Majors Sold False Promises from 2000-2025” is a first-ever analysis of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell’s climate-related advertisements over the past 25 years. The report, which examines more than 300 unique climate-related ads, exposes how the four Big Oil companies have pushed deceptive ad campaigns that seek to position their businesses as leaders in climate solutions, while in reality they continue to fuel climate catastrophe.

The report identifies seven categories of deception in the companies’ ads:

• Overstating actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
• Exaggerating commitments to renewable energy
• Shifting responsibility to individual consumers
• Selling the false solution of natural gas
• Pushing the false solution of carbon capture and storage
• Seeding false narratives about hydrogen
• Promoting the false solution of algae biofuels

“These deceptive advertisements not only misrepresent the climate impacts of the companies’ products, initiatives, and actions, but also feed a larger false narrative that oil and gas companies are part of the solution to climate change,” the report concludes.

For example, the report highlights Exxon’s advertising campaign about the company’s algae biofuels program, which Exxon claimed would “revolutionize biofuels for more energy and fewer emissions in the future.” In a 2017 ad titled “Energy Farmer,” Exxon says it is researching algae biofuels for the future, while showing scenes of Exxon employees moving through expansive algae ponds and posing in front of vats of algae, “suggesting that the company had already progressed from researching algae in the lab to farming algae at scale.” That misrepresentation was seemingly intentional, according to internal company documents that dictated “everything we see [in the advertisement] feels more akin to farming than science.”

Despite the implication of these advertisements, Exxon knew that algae biofuels would not be commercially viable any time soon. In 2018, an internal Exxon presentation acknowledged algae biofuels were “still decades away from the scale we need” — only to continue advertising the program to the public. In 2022, Exxon ended its algae research program, without ever selling a single barrel of algae biofuels.

The new analysis comes as the four oil majors face dozens of lawsuits from state and local governments that accuse the companies of conducting an ongoing campaign of climate deception. CCI hopes this new evidence will support those efforts.

“Big Oil’s climate deception has evolved from lying about the problem to lying about solutions,” said Center for Climate Integrity President Richard Wiles. “For two and half decades now, these companies have sold the public a false and misleading image of their industry as working to address the climate crisis, all while doubling down on fossil fuels and making the problem worse. Any business that floods consumers with such brazenly deceptive advertising must be held accountable.”