The Legacy of ExxonMobil – Lies, and Laying the Blame on Poor Consumer Choices

ExxonMobil, once the largest American energy company on the planet, has been misleading the public about anthropogenic climate change since 1972. And at present, the company, rather than taking responsibility for its contributions to carbon pollution, and implementing actions to reduce its negative activities on the planet, is continuing to promote the big lie.

If you are familiar with the term “gaslighting,” which seems apt coming from an energy company, that’s precisely what ExxonMobil continues to do when confronting the public space.

• It gaslights us when it talks about carbon pollution from fossil fuel operations by deflecting the issue to focus on meeting energy demand.
• It gaslights us when it foists the blame for fossil fuel use on individual consumer choice.
• It gaslights us when it advertises its green credentials in the few investments it has made in renewables when the vast majority of its operations remain focused on exploring for and extracting fossil fuels.

The ExxonMobil strategy reminds us of other industry liars who in the past have tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. I’m thinking of one in particular, Big Tobacco.

Cigarette companies knew from their own internal laboratory reports that their products caused lung cancer. But that didn’t stop them in their pursuit of profits to the detriment of public health. Instead, they manipulated consumers through messaging. How so?

• By advertising low tar, ultra-light, and natural products, none of which were any safer than the mainstream tobacco brands they sold.
• And by putting filters on products and advertising their benefits knowing that they did little to make them safer, and posed an additional environmental hazard.

But much worse was the deliberate effort to increase nicotine content in each cigarette smoked. Nicotine which occurs in the tobacco plant naturally was enhanced, a psychoactive drug that the industry knew worked on the brain to foster addiction which made consumers buy more.

Big Tobacco knew their products caused cancer, pulmonary and lung disease, heart attacks, strokes, and premature deaths. They knew more people were dying from cigarette smoking than from all the murders, HIV infections, suicides, car crashes, alcoholism, opioids, and illegal drug use. They knew that exposure to secondhand smoke from cigarettes was unsafe at any level.

So what did Big Tobacco do?

• They enlisted “scientists” wearing white lab coats to blow smoke.
• They belittled independent research in academia and medical institutions to hide the truth.
• They hired Hill & Knowlton, a public relations firm, to misinform.

And they were largely successful for a very long time.

The same has been true for ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel energy giants. In fact, ExxonMobil hired Hill & Knowlton to do the same number on the public that they had been doing for Big Tobacco.

But the latest perversion of the truth from ExxonMobil is to saddle the blame on consumers. The company accuses the public of making poor consumer choices. Instead of buying energy-efficient automobiles, high-energy use trucks and SUVs are the rage. Instead of electric and hybrid vehicles, consumers continue to purchase en masse fossil-fuel-powered cars and trucks.

One could say that the automobile industry is complicit in the big lie as well. The industry has never made electric and hybrid vehicles front and centre in their product offerings. They have never priced them to drive consumer demand. Only now are they promoting them in their advertising, another gaslighting exercise, when the vast majority of what they continue to produce burns fossil fuels.

In a recent RollingStone article by Amy Westervelt she writes about the deceptive and misleading messaging of the fossil fuel industry as a whole stating “It’s not just ExxonMobil telling us that it’s consumers, not companies, who are responsible for climate change…Chevron regularly highlights how it’s keeping the lights on for all of us. Shell leans on consumers to “do their part” by choosing carbon neutral energy. And BP famously invented the ultimate tool for pinning greenhouse gas emissions on individual consumers: the carbon footprint calculator.”  

In light of the revelations this last week of the restored U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s take on climate change, and of the latest global review by the International Energy Agency (IEA), both topics that I will be pursuing in future postings here, it is clear that we can no longer afford to be taken in by an industry that would rather lie than take responsibility for its contributions to the growing threat of rising atmospheric temperatures caused by the burning of the products the fossil fuel industry keeps selling.

When Nobel laureates gathered a few weeks ago to talk about the existential climate threat, a prime tenet within the discussion was to “do no harm.” ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy companies believe in doing no harm to their bottom lines, not to the planet and the life upon it.