Environment & Energy

hatrack

(64,797 posts) Fri Mar 20, 2026, 07:05 AM 6 hrs ago

Big Advertising Move By Big Oil; From Of Greenwashing To "You Can't Live Without Us", Along W. Lots Of Tech Hopium

Four of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies have spent the last four years systematically shifting away from climate-friendly advertising to push a new message: fossil fuels are here to stay, a report has found. Campaign group Clean Creatives analysed 1,859 communications from BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron published between 2020 and 2024, spanning paid advertisements on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and television, alongside press releases, investor communications and executive speeches.

The report found a “consistent and coordinated narrative shift” from attempts to portray the companies as climate leaders to embracing what Clean Creatives calls “fossil fuel permanence” — the idea that the world can’t function without oil and gas, which account for at least half of the carbon dioxide emissions fuelling the climate crisis. “Despite differences in tone, BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron followed strikingly similar narrative shifts, moving from ‘part of the solution’ to ‘you can’t live without us’ messaging,” Clean Creatives said.

This evolution marks a new era of climate messaging that is more sophisticated than traditional forms of greenwashing based on making false environmental claims and harder to challenge, the report argues. Companies are now promoting speculative technologies for reducing emissions — such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and blue hydrogen — as justifications for expanding oil and gas production.

Clean Creatives calls this “climate gaslighting”, as the oil industry attempts to persuade the public that the climate crisis is under control, while investing in projects that will lock in fossil fuel dependence for decades to come. “Greenwashing has taken on a new form. Instead of making false claims, oil majors are promoting false solutions like CCS and natural gas, even though they are derived from and create long-term dependence on fossil fuels.” said Nayantara Dutta, head of research at Clean Creatives and lead author of the report. “While the world is phasing out fossil fuels, oil companies are crafting a narrative which keeps them profitable and in power.”

EDIT

https://www.desmog.com/2026/03/17/you-cant-live-without-us-how-big-oil-pivoted-from-climate-friendly-messaging-to-normalise-dependence-on-fossil-fuels/

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Big Advertising Move By Big Oil; From Of Greenwashing To "You Can't Live Without Us", Along W. Lots Of Tech Hopium (Original Post) hatrack 6 hrs ago OP

;-{) GREENWASHING Goonch 5 hrs ago #1

Goonch, I know you like posting the cartoons you're generating with AI as replies, but AI companies greenwash too - see highplainsdem 4 hrs ago #3

We have these rules against stalking and harassing .... Goonch 3 hrs ago #4

I am not stalking or harassing. We look at a lot of the same threads, and I've been ignoring the AI-generated highplainsdem 3 hrs ago #5

;-{}.... Goonch 1 hr ago #6

"They cancel each other out." - Reality doesn't work like that. OKIsItJustMe 1 hr ago #7

It's important to remember, too, that what we see of genAI stuff posted online is only the tip of the highplainsdem 58 min ago #8

;-{)... Goonch 51 min ago #9

Yet another example... GiqueCee 5 hrs ago #2

Goonch

(4,928 posts)

1. ;-{) GREENWASHING

Reply to hatrack (Original post)

Fri Mar 20, 2026, 08:10 AM

5 hrs ago

highplainsdem

(61,829 posts)

3. Goonch, I know you like posting the cartoons you're generating with AI as replies, but AI companies greenwash too - see

Reply to Goonch (Reply #1)

Fri Mar 20, 2026, 09:22 AM

4 hrs ago

this article, for instance:

Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/17/tech-companies-traditional-ai-generative-climate-breakdown-report

And an article on the damage AI data centers do was posted in this forum about the same time this OP was posted.

7,500 Residents, 6 Planned Data Centers, 14% Of Town 2B Erased, At Least 450 Diesel Generators - Welcome To Archbald, PA
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127188313

What's driving the environmental harm AI is doing is generative AI - all those "helpful" chatbots being used to generate stuff.

Goonch

(4,928 posts)

4. We have these rules against stalking and harassing ....

Reply to highplainsdem (Reply #3)

Fri Mar 20, 2026, 09:58 AM

3 hrs ago

"No personal attacks or flaming Do not personally attack, insult, flame, threaten, bully, stalk, negatively call-out, ascribe ugly ulterior motives to, or make baseless claims about any member of this community. Do not post in a manner that is hostile, abusive, or aggressive toward any member of this community"....

And I'm not on your lawn.

highplainsdem

(61,829 posts)

5. I am not stalking or harassing. We look at a lot of the same threads, and I've been ignoring the AI-generated

Reply to Goonch (Reply #4)

Fri Mar 20, 2026, 10:27 AM

3 hrs ago

cartoons that you've been having a chatbot make for you and posting lately in various threads here. But I commented on this because it looked so strange to use AI to generate a cartoon about another industry greenwashing when the AI industry is itself notorious for greenwashing.

Did you know when you generated that cartoon that the AI industry has been accused of greenwashing? You must have seen lots of threads here about the environmental damage the industry does. (I just did a search of thread titles here for AI, going back a few years to when ChatGPT was released and genAI started getting criticized here for the environmental damage it does, and there were over 80 threads about AI in this forum during that time, not to mention threads in LBN and GD about genAI causing environmental damage.) And you posted this AI-generated cartoon very soon after a new thread here on environmental harm from data centers was posted.

Goonch

(4,928 posts)

6. ;-{}....

Reply to highplainsdem (Reply #5)

Fri Mar 20, 2026, 12:01 PM

1 hr ago

You have your reasoning and I have my reasons.
Neither will change. They cancel each other out.

OKIsItJustMe

(21,823 posts)

7. "They cancel each other out." - Reality doesn't work like that.

Reply to Goonch (Reply #6)

Fri Mar 20, 2026, 12:29 PM

1 hr ago

For example, this forum talks about "Environment & Energy.” I think most members take science seriously, and, therefore see “Climate Change” as an existential threat.

Some person may post here who does not believe it is. Do the two views ""cancel each other out?” — No. One is true and scientifically based; the other is not, regardless of the poster’s “reasoning.”

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/09/what-you-need-to-know-about-ai-and-climate-change/

What you need to know about AI and climate change
We take a hard look at the good, the bad, and the whoa of AI.

by DAISY SIMMONS
SEPTEMBER 4, 2025

…

But here’s the thing about any AI tool: Despite their differences, they all share an insatiable appetite for energy – lots of it. And as they scale up, their hunger only grows. Early machine learning systems ran comfortably on desktop computers with minimal power consumption. Some of today’s most prominent AI systems use 100,000 GPUs (the specialized chips that crunch AI calculations), drawing as much electricity as a small city and filling server farms that span several football fields. For perspective, Meta’s flagship AI system relied on about 16,000 of these chips, a setup that would fit in a single, much smaller facility. As we speak, clusters of more than 300,000 GPUs are entering the drawing board, too.

…

The climate reality: What we know and what we don’t

Every step of AI computing comes with a carbon cost. According to new analysis from MIT Technology Review, AI data centers now consume 4.4% of all U.S. energy, with projections showing AI alone could use as much electricity as 22% of U.S. households by 2028. These centers typically use electricity that’s 48% more carbon-intensive than the U.S. average.

The training process – where AI systems learn by digesting huge datasets – requires astronomical amounts of energy. Training GPT-4, for its part, gobbled through enough energy to power San Francisco for three days, at a cost of over $100 million.

And training accounts for just 10-20% of AI’s energy use. The real energy hog is inference – what happens every time someone asks a question, generates an image, or gets an AI recommendation. The MIT Technology Review study found that a simple text query uses about as much energy as riding six feet on an e-bike, while generating a five-second video burns the equivalent of a 38-mile ride.

…

highplainsdem

(61,829 posts)

8. It's important to remember, too, that what we see of genAI stuff posted online is only the tip of the

Reply to OKIsItJustMe (Reply #7)

Fri Mar 20, 2026, 12:49 PM

58 min ago

iceberg in terms of how much is generated.

It isn't unusual, for instance, for any AI images you see online to have left an unseen trail of dozens or even hundreds of rejected images behind them - every single one of those rejected images also wasting electricity and water.

Google's Gemini, for instance, allows people using the free tier to generate 100 images, and those paying for the lowest subscription to generate 1,000 images a day.

They know users don't really need to produce that many usable images. They allow so many images both because so much of what AI generates will be even worse than what's posted, and because AI users often have only the vaguest idea of what they want when they start generating, and will pick and choose between wildly different options the AI offers. And if the AI user wants to have the AI edit an image they're mostly happy with, that can require generating lots more images as well, because the AI will often alter another part of the image that the AI user didn't want altered. I've never forgotten seeing an AI user on X whining one day that he'd spent all afternoon trying to get AI to get the cigarette right in an image he'd generated of someone smoking.

There are millions if not billions of AI images generated every day, and that's probably the single greatest AI use creating the race to build those horrible data centers.

Goonch

(4,928 posts)

9. ;-{)...

Reply to OKIsItJustMe (Reply #7)

Fri Mar 20, 2026, 12:56 PM

51 min ago

There is a difference between a view and a reason and in this instance the reason (s) is not apparent to third parties.

GiqueCee

(4,098 posts)

2. Yet another example...

Reply to hatrack (Original post)

Fri Mar 20, 2026, 08:32 AM

5 hrs ago

... of Big Oil's foundational philosophy, "Why should I give a flying fuck what kind of world I leave for even my own children? WHAT HAS POSTERITY EVER DONE FOR ME?"

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