Remember when the fossil fuel industry couldn’t stop talking about climate change? In 2020, when oil prices plunged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Oil promoted efforts to cut carbon emissions and trumpeted various energy “innovations”: transforming algae into fuel (Exxon Mobil), capturing carbon (Chevron), and producing green hydrogen (BP). Critics deemed it “greenwashing” — highlighting small sustainable investments to distract people from the pollution at the core of their business.
It didn’t take long for oil companies to move on from those old talking points. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, supply disruptions drove oil prices up, and oil giants switched to a new message: Fossil fuels are essential to “energy security,” and they’re here to stay. That’s according to a new report from Clean Creatives, an initiative pressuring PR companies and advertisers to stop working with fossil fuel clients, that analyzed more than 1,800 advertisements, press releases, and social media campaigns from BP, Shell, Exxon, and Chevron between 2020 and 2024.
“Oil companies are not trying to follow the winds of the sustainable transition anymore,” said Nayantara Dutta, the head of research at Clean Creatives. “They’re not trying to necessarily look like the good guys.”
The political mood has changed dramatically from 2020, a time when world leaders seemed poised to finally take climate change seriously, to the present day, when wars, political chaos, and rising costs have shifted their focus. Big businesses, politicians, and the news media have gotten quieter about climate change. The Clean Creatives analysis is one of two new reports that trace how oil giants — which have much to gain from the world failing to confront climate change — changed their narrative over this period. The new research shows their green-coded language was in retreat long before President Donald Trump returned to office.
As oil companies look to expand their natural gas infrastructure, they have to carefully consider how they’re selling it to the public. To build more pipelines, plants, and wells, oil companies need not just formal permits from governments, but also an informal kind of permission known as a “social license to operate” — essentially, earning enough public acceptance to maintain legitimacy and head off opposition, such as protests and legal challenges. “They hire the best PR agencies in the world to try to basically dupe you into believing that they’re socially responsible,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, for example, companies began using national security and economic resilience as a means to justify expanding production, no matter where they were. That argument sometimes blurred into a broader claim that the world simply needed more fossil fuels. “Energy demands are rising, and the effects are being felt everywhere,” said the voiceover for one ad in 2022. “That’s why at Chevron, we’re increasing production in the Permian Basin by 15 percent, and we’re projected to reach 1 million barrels of oil per day by 2025.”
But the current moment is bringing into question the narrative that fossil fuels are key to ensuring a country has reliable, affordable sources of energy. The U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran has sparked the biggest oil supply disruption in history, with about 15 percent of the global supply stuck in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping pathway along Iran’s coast. Gas prices in the U.S. have soared, with the national average for a gallon of gas jumping 87 cents in a month. The situation has piqued interest in electric vehicles, showcasing how dependence on fossil fuels leaves people vulnerable to swings in the price of gas. Meanwhile, natural gas prices have risen sharply in Asia and Europe, where political leaders are calling for more investment in nuclear energy to weather fossil fuel price shocks. “The energy security argument about natural gas is kind of being turned on its head,” Brulle said.
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This tumultuous state of affairs made Jennie Stephens, a professor of climate justice at Maynooth University in Ireland, ponder what would have happened if the world had turned to renewables earlier; if, say, oil companies hadn’t been working for decades to slow down action on climate change. “If we had been able to commit collectively to a global fossil fuel phaseout, we would be in a very different position, right?” she said.
Stephens’ recent research, published last week in the journal Energy, Sustainability, and Society, found that when oil companies do talk about renewables, it’s often in a way that reinforces negative perceptions about wind and solar power. Along with researchers at Northeastern University and Columbia University, Stephens analyzed how BP, Exxon, Shell, and the French oil giant Total Energies discussed solar, wind, and other sustainable energy sources in their annual reports from 2016 through 2022. “We found out that they were talking about renewables as kind of in service of expanding fossil fuels,” Stephens said. At times, this has been literal, such as Total’s recent floating offshore wind project that powers an oil and gas platform. After 2020, oil companies began highlighting downsides of renewables more frequently, discussing their costs and intermittency, the study found.
In parallel, oil companies retreated from the message that they were “partners” in the “energy transition” and began backtracking on 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. It claims that companies shifted from greenwashing to “gaslighting” — sowing doubt among the public that the world needs to stop building fossil fuel infrastructure, a step the United Nations’ leading body of climate scientists has said is necessary to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate goals. “We call it gaslighting because they’re confusing people about what the truth actually is and about what their operations are achieving,” Dutta said.
In 2024, oil and gas companies leaned into the idea that fossil fuels are a fact of modern life, emphasizing talking points about how oil and gas were needed for a “balanced energy future.” “The specific vocabulary being used is ‘responsible, balanced, pragmatic,’ to make people feel like the logical solution is an investment in fossil fuels,” Dutta said. While Clean Creatives’ analysis ended in 2024, the general message stayed the same in 2025, she said, though companies adapted by positioning fossil fuels as essential to technological advancement, particularly for data centers powering AI.
The current oil shock, along with falling costs for solar and wind power, poses a challenge for oil companies and the stories they tell. “The argument for energy security and cost are now not on the side of fossil fuels, and so they’re kind of in a real rhetorical problem here,” Brulle said. “So I’m sure that the PR companies that are being hired by the oil companies are going to have to do some real interesting work to continue to justify fossil fuel expansion.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Big Oil has moved on from ‘greenwashing.’ Here’s the new playbook. on Mar 18, 2026.
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