The DOI matches its Crossref record; 50 of the 50 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014)
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Citations
Cites
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The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
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Hoffert, M. I., Caldeira, K., Benford, G., Criswell, D. R., Green, C., Herzog, H., Jain, A. K., Kheshgi, H. S., Lackner, K. S., Lewis, J. S., et al. (2002) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1072357 · Cited by 1,549
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Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming
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Self-citationQuantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature
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Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?
Stoddard, I., Anderson, K., Capstick, S., Carton, W., Depledge, J., Facer, K., Gough, C., Hache, F., Hoolohan, C., Hultman, M., et al. (2021) · Annual Review of Environment and Resources · doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-011104 · Cited by 574
Psychological Barriers to Bipartisan Public Support for Climate Policy
Van Boven, L., Ehret, P. J., & Sherman, D. K. (2018) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/1745691617748966 · Cited by 228
Perspectives: Advertising and climate change – Part of the problem or part of the solution?
Hartmann, P., Marcos, A., Castro, J., & Apaolaza, V. (2023) · International Journal of Advertising · doi:10.1080/02650487.2022.2140963 · Cited by 54
Shifting echo chambers in US climate policy networks
Jasny, L., Dewey, A. M., Robertson, A. G., Yagatich, W., Dubin, A. H., Waggle, J. M., & Fisher, D. R. (2018) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0203463 · Cited by 41
The politics and profit of disinformation in public health
Maani, N., Kim, K., van Schalkwyk, M. C. I., Petticrew, M., & Zenone, M. (2026) · Annual Review of Public Health · doi:10.1146/annurev-publhealth-071723-124408 · Cited by 8
Metadata
- Authors
- Supran, G., & Oreskes, N.
- Venue
- Environmental Research Letters
- Publisher
- IOP Publishing
- Published
- 2017-08-01
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 084019
- ISSN
- 1748-9326 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2746322868
- Cited by
- 521
- References
- 50
- FWCI
- 118.11
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
