Badvert of the Month: Esso (Exxon Mobil)
Instragram advert for Esso promoting cycling to work
Fossil fuel companies are taking a wild ride over the green(-washing) wave. They do so through a myriad of adverts (such as this one) and marketing campaigns which promote anything but their primary business of ploughing for more oil, coal & gas and tipping the climate further into dangerous territory.
This advertisement from Esso (ExxonMobil’s trading name) is a prime example of that. The video advert, shared on Instagram, features a bike riding through the street with the caption “Dull commute? Liven things up with a cycle. Win your very own e-bike in our daily draw”. The video is part of Esso’s ‘Do the little journeys differently’ campaign, with an entire website page dedicated to it, featuring special tips on cycling (thanks Exxon!), and co-opting the language of long-running active travel campaigns (“So, let’s pedal power-up! You’ll cut your costs, emissions and keep fuel in the tank for the times it’s really worth it.“. )
How can a fossil fuel company, you ask, have any interest in promoting e-cycling which does not rely on the products they sell? Well, so much more than one may think.
Exxon Mobil’s true climate action
By promoting low-carbon behaviour changes and encouraging customers to ‘do the right thing’, such as taking up cycling to work, the oil major is positioning itself as a company that cares about the environment and the future of the planet. Meanwhile, however, ExxonMobil is still basing its entire business model on fossil fuels’ extraction and essentially the destruction of life on earth.
Fossil fuel companies are champions at this game, which serves their interests in maintaining their social licence to pollute by diverting the public’s attention from their highly damaging activities. Advertising plays a key role in fossil majors’ deliberately strategised campaigns to present themselves as positive climate actors, claiming to be ‘Powering Progress’ (Shell) or ‘“helping to deliver energy security and net zero“ (BP).
Underneath the façade of a company handing prizes to win e-bikes and promoting active travel, lies a fossil fuel giant that is one of the world’s greatest polluters and the world’s second biggest carbon emitter as an investor-owned corporation. Alongside its fellow fossil giants Chevron, BP and Shell, ExxonMobil has released more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.
Behind its squeaky clean adverts, Exxon ranks among the top companies who are overwhelmingly overshooting net zero emissions targets. Despite its public announcement to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, analysis finds that this pledge covers less than 15% of its overall carbon emissions (emissions from production are entirely omitted from the calculations, only scope 1 and 2 are included). As a result, experts warn that the company’s plans are grossly insufficient, measured across 11 indicators, to align with safe climate targets.
Rather than winding down its emissions and repurposing its business model to an e-cycling commerce (one can hope!), the company is in fact planning to further expand its harmful operations with projects planned across the globe, including Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Mozambique, Angola, Brazil, Argentina, Guyana, USA, Canada, Russia, totalling to 7,160 million barrels of oil equivalent. The cumulative CO2 emissions from Exxon’s planned investment from 2022 to 2025 alone would amount to powering 15 new coal plants for a lifetime.
Esso’s One Less Drive website page
A breach of CMA guidelines
With our colleagues at Adfree Cities, we recently wrote to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to signal ExxonMobil’s misleading e-cycling ad campaign, which breaches new guidance on green claims, and to demand that they take immediate action against it by forcing the company to remove the adverts. In 2021, the CMA published new guidance on green marketing claims by businesses. The Green Claims Code (GCC) is based on a series of principles stating how companies should operate in regards to making environmental claims about the products and activities they sell:
claims must be truthful and accurate
claims must be clear and unambiguous
claims must not omit or hide important relevant information
comparisons must be fair and meaningful
claims must consider the full life cycle of the product or service
claims must be substantiated
We find ExxonMobil’s advert in clear breach of these guidelines given that it actively misleads the public by appearing to prioritise climate action through encouraging low-carbon behaviours while omitting key information about its planned expansion of harmful fossil fuel projects across the world.
The other aspect that we highlighted to be problematic is how the advert shifts the burden of responsibility to consumers by encouraging them to make behaviour changes while acting as a smokescreen for ExxonMobil’s highly polluting activities. While behaviour change, alongside improved infrastructure to support active travel and reduce fuel consumption, is needed, should this advice come from one of the world’s largest producers of fossil fuels, before it has cleaned up its own act. Exxon has enormous power to shift investment to (e.g.) renewable energy production, and the potential to reduce global emissions on a scale incomparable to citizen actions such as cycling to work. We believe the company should focus its considerable financial resources in this direction, rather than on patronising and misleading advertising campaigns.
This ad campaign epitomises a common tactic among big corporations within fossil fuel industries, who have effectively grasped how to harness low-carbon behaviour change messaging in their favour. After all, popular measurements like the carbon footprint calculator were actively populated by fossil giants who saw the tool’s effectiveness as a way to disguise their disastrous activities from the public while bringing the onus on individual consumption patterns.
Company background: Exxon Mobil
Exxon Mobil is an American multinational oil and gas company headquartered in Texas which was founded in 1866 under the name Vacuum Oil Company. The company was later acquired by Standard Oil and it was not until 1999 that it adopted its current name via the merging of Exxon and Mobil, adding a chemical division to the company.
Exxon has been embroiled in several environmental disasters, including the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska (US) in 1989 which led to the release of 37,000 tons of crude oil into the ocean. The spill remains the second largest in history after BP’s Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Exxon was also implicated in human rights violations in Indonesia for using national army units as security for their project who ended up committing human rights abuses on the local population. After more than 20 years of legal battle, a 2001 lawsuit between 11 villagers of the Aceh province was just recently settled by Exxon who agreed to pay damages to the victim of torture, sexual assaults and beating by Indonesian soliders.
Advert for Humble Oil (now part of Exxon Mobil), 1962. The first international conference on climate change was held in 1961, and the fossil fuel industry had been researching the topic themselves for several years by this point, including a key 1957 study by Humble themselves.
A 2015 investigation by InsideClimateNews, which led to several lawsuits against the company, found that Exxon was already aware of the existence of climate change as early as 1977, based on the conclusions of its internal team of scientists. However, by the late 1990’s Exxon and Imperial Oil (its Canadian subsidiary) were actively involved in seeding doubts about climate change by spending millions of dollars on international climate deniers lobby groups, such as the Global Climate Coalition.
In the midst of a global energy crisis and a cost of living emergency, the fossil giant recorded eye-watering profits at 56 billion US dollars in 2022, surpassing many other fossil fuels giants such as BP and Shell.