COP, LOOK, LISTEN ISSUE 5 | 22 NOV 24

Welcome back to COP, Look, Listen. To date, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, for the most part, has escaped scrutiny on climate disinformation. Microsoft’s reporting under the EU’s Voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation states quite brazenly, and without evidence that because “their colleagues and employer [sic] are watching … our members don’t tend to use LinkedIn to engage in the mass dissemination of misinformation.”

The most cursory of glances says otherwise when it comes to the climate. LinkedIn’s own policies state that they “remove specific claims, presented as fact, that are demonstrably false or substantially misleading and likely to cause harm”. Climate misinformation is not specifically included, but it should be, as climate change (and climate disinformation) are already causing harm.

One thing is certain, though, its members across the world are subjected to greenwashing claims from the fossil fuel industry. And why not? There is a wide network of climate experts on the platform looking for professional information: energy market professionals, journalists, negotiators at the annual Conference of the Parties. Why not flood the platform with ads that delay progress to a 1.5C or lower world, just as we see on other platforms?

LinkedIn is a place Big Oil can dress for success.

CAAD researchers curated a small list of English-language keywords or phrases for fossil fuel oriented solutions alongside a list of fossil fuel advertising accounts on LinkedIn. Researchers used LinkedIn’s developer API to discover adverts from January 1st 2024 to November 17th 2024 that used at least one of the keywords or phrases and one of the fossil fuel entities.

More than a thousand ads world-wide boosting fossil-fuel oriented solutions Over the past year, fossil-fuel producers have been placing adverts related to carbon capture and storage (CCS); the terms “carbon capture” and “low carbon” are common in these ads. Shell and ExxonMobil in particular advertise CCS on LinkedIn, selling these fossil fuel oriented solutions around the world. We have made clear before on COP, Look, Listen this technology is but a very small piece of the decarbonisation needed to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. But through their relentless advertising, fossil fuel companies continue to push the technology way beyond its natural shelf life.

Figure 1: total advertisements on LinkedIn from selected fossil fuel entities between January 1st and November 17th 2024. Note that single adverts can appear in multiple categories if they use more than one keyword or phrase, which is why we have not provided a potentially misleading grand total.

As seen in figure 1, only around 3 in 10 adverts have full data including impressions. This is because LinkedIn only provides such data for adverts in the EU, where doing so is required under legislation. For this reason it is impossible to know the real scale of the English-language advertising taking place for adverts that are not placed in an EU territory.

Our dataset is dominated by Shell and ExxonMobil, but other entities also put up plenty of ads on fossil fuel oriented solutions. Generally, these entities advertise consistently throughout the year, with no marked difference for COP29 nor any COP specific advertising. Because, as we have previously noted, researchers’ access to data is in dire straits, we cannot identify whether companies are spending more or less during particular periods.

Low-carbon solutions promoted globally

From the adverts we do have impressions data for, it’s clear that the promotion of fossil-fuel oriented solutions is taking place globally on LinkedIn. This advertisement from Shell Low Carbon Solutions promotes its various “LNG decarbonisation pathways”, and gathered 200K – 500K impressions from mainly the UK, UAE, Australia and Canada. Another Shell advertisement about its carbon credit programme totalled 500K – 1M total impressions, largely in Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia. It is worth noting Shell’s existing, poor track record with such schemes.

Figure 2: A “Shell Environmental Products” advert promoting carbon credits.

Another Shell ad promotes CCS technology primarily in Brazil but also in Argentina, Indonesia, Italy, the Netherlands and Vietnam. A third promotes “decarbonisation goals” in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the US, Japan, and many other countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and East Asia.Meanwhile, ExxonMobil is using LinkedIn for its various carbon capture projects and processes. One advert that we presume ran in Singapore because that is where the ad agency is based, boasts that “CCS can combat climate change!”

ExxonMobil thinks of the children

ExxonMobil has run several ads over the past year showcasing children learning about the benefits of CSS, under the guise of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. These ads feature kids sharing that “most of the time, we’ve been learning about carbon capture,” and “we need more people to do carbon capture, because this is affecting the world”. While we don’t know the full content of ExxonMobil’s educational course, we hope it does include this global study which finds that nearly two million children worldwide develop asthma every year by breathing traffic-related pollution produced by fossil fuels.These ads presumably ran primarily in the US, but all we can say for certain is that they did not run in the EU, as there is no geographical targeting data.

Figure 3: An “ExxonMobil Pipeline Company” advert promoting its teaching of carbon capture as a part of a “lower-carbon future” to kids.

Other firms, same approach

Other fossil fuel advertisers like Eni, ADNOC, BP, Aramco, Enbridge and Petrobras have also run between 150 to 200 ads across our keyword and keyphrase list. Again, because very few of these ads have impressions data, this number is of limited use, as we cannot determine the scale of the advertising. It is probable that just one or two of these adverts, or even dozens, could be broadcast to millions of people worldwide each. We just don’t know.

LinkedIn’s developer API: limited utility, but it’s the best we currently have

LinkedIn’s public ad library is incredibly difficult to use, and not suitable for large-scale research. For this reason, we set out to use LinkedIn’s developer API. which allows us to programmatically search its API database for adverts. This API provides a number of search parameters, including advertiser, date range, keyword and country to access this database. However, the outputs with which to analyse data, which can be downloaded onto spreadsheets, are missing crucial information, including the title of an advert, text within an advert, or the full date range of an advert. Impression data are provided within the outputs, but these data are mostly incomplete.

Therefore, researchers must click every single data point to see all the relevant advert information. Systematic analysis with LinkedIn’s most easily accessible tool is thus at best incredibly laborious, and at worst impossible. To our frustration, in this newsletter we have only been able to draw attention to total numbers of ads posted, as well as examples of specific ads. Given there are over a thousand, there’s a lot we might have missed.

Many CAAD researchers are looking to gain vetted researcher access via the EU’s Digital Services Act legislation, but platform rollouts of researcher access to data has been slow and information has been sparse. X and Meta have formal proceedings against them regarding lack of compliance around data transparency, but there has been relatively little attention to date on Microsoft’s LinkedIn. It remains to be seen if such tools will become meaningfully integrated with disinformation research, at least at the EU level.

What now?

First and foremost, this is yet another piece of the mounting research showing that fossil fuel industry actors continue to use multi-billion dollar marketing budgets to promote content broadly not in line with achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. We – and others – recommend an outright global ban on fossil fuel industry ads. The climate science is clear that we can’t keep drilling for oil and digging up coal, so why let them continue advertising it?

Platforms, including LinkedIn, clearly respond to legislation, as demonstrated by the extra data LinkedIn provided for ads placed in the EU. Legislators must work across the globe to ensure platforms are minimising the harm of climate misinformation, including greenwashing, and crucially by providing transparent data to select researchers. Because platforms tend to interpret laws in the most favourable way for themselves, and act very slowly, legislators must also focus on proactive enforcement of laws.

Finally, the large majority of agencies advertising for fossil fuel companies on LinkedIn, including IPG Mediabrands and McCann Worldgroup, appear on Clean Creatives’s 2024 F-List. We’re pleased that LinkedIn does provide this data, as it helps us increase scrutiny on the PR industry regarding its role in the climate crisis. Employees, the public and policymakers can influence the PR industry to think again when helping planet wrecking companies delay ambitious climate action.

GOOD TO KNOW

McKinsey doing the dirty work. “We are serving a client portfolio that is likely on the 3 to 5 degrees warming trajectory… this portfolio contains more than half of the world’s worst polluters.” In a just published investigative piece, the Centre for Climate Reporting shows how the world’s largest consulting firm, McKinsey, profits from quietly adding fuel to the climate crisis. Hundreds of pages of court filings and interviews reveal the identities of thousands of entities connected to the firm’s complicit support of some of the world’s biggest polluters. At that rate, perhaps McKinsey should coach LinkedIn on how to up its greenwashing game. We strongly encourage you to take a look around the files yourself.

Spanish-language disinformation on COP29 follows US trends.

Our monitoring has found that Spanish-language disinformation specifically focused on COP29 appears lower than during previous COPs, following similar trends seen in English-language monitoring. There has been a predominant focus on the US election outcome, alongside well-worn, bad-faith claims around elite hypocrisy. Meanwhile, disinformation about Argentina’s sudden withdrawal of its negotiators from this year’s summit was marginally present, but limited to networks of hardline support for Milei.

Figure 4: A post on X from Spanish-language account @Agenda2030_ which boasts over 350,000 followers and spreads the Agenda 2030 conspiracy theory. English translation; “ What are those planes, dad? Those are the private jets of 50,000 delegates going to the climate summit in Azerbaijan to save the planet from climate change.”

The (carbon) market is not always right. The decision by countries last week to bulldoze ahead with Article 6.2 and 6.4 of the Paris Agreement, is set to give the greenlight for international carbon markets to open the floodgates for false solutions with little critical oversight, facilitating among other things, the potential commercial roll-out of geoengineering projects. Perhaps before the gavel drops on COP29, country delegations should take a gander at this fresh research. The synthesis finds that less than 16% – yes, 16% – of carbon credit schemes resulted in real emissions reduction.

GREENWASHING TRACKER – AI EDITION

No, we haven’t used AI to find these ads. These are all ads we’ve found lately – not necessarily during COP29 – that co-opt AI as a justification for more fossil fuel extraction. AI is a technology that continues to provide no real value, which is why proponents need to keep selling it as “inevitable”. And instead of solving the climate crisis, it appears to be doing more harm than good. Looks like we can add “justification for extending fossil fuels” to the long, unpleasant list.

Front group misrepresents scientific article

This fossil fuelled front group has put out several adverts on the need for AI, such as the one pictured in figure 5. However, more galling is an advert run on October 11th promoting a scientist’s article in Nature, using their headshot as the main photo of the ad to push its own agenda on US energy policy. We presume this was done without the scientist’s permission, as the article is grossly misrepresented. The scientist states “we need pragmatic actions to limit AI’s ecological impacts now … the industry could prioritize using less energy, build more efficient models and rethink how it designs and uses data centres.” The front group’s conclusion? That wind and solar simply cannot keep up with the demand. In our own respect for this scientist’s privacy, we have not presented this advert. Instead, go read and share the article.

Figure 5: Another ad run by Affordable Energy for New Jersey on Meta’s ad library, October 30th, 2024.

Voices for Cooperative Power. (Fossil Fuels Only)

Voices for Cooperative Power is an advocacy campaign from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), a largely coal-reliant and anti-climate-action trade association that, nonetheless, benefits from climate policy. Its ad shown below promotes a CBS interview where the NRECA CEO scaremongers about blackouts, a continuation of its sustained work to spread that disinfo narrative as a tactic to oppose climate policies.

He blames AI, in part, for increased power consumption, states that renewable energy is unreliable, that there is “a lot more need for natural gas” and “need to increase our pipeline capacity”. He then complains about EPA proposals to “shut down coal and natural gas” and claims they are “relying on hope” as a strategy.

Figure 6: Ad running on Meta’s ad library, January 12th 2024

Williams is making clean energy (not) happen

Oklahoma based methane gas company Williams, describes itself on Facebook as handling “approximately one third of the natural gas in the U.S. We make clean energy happen.” (Methane gas is in no way clean.) Williams is a key member of another front group under a recent CAAD spotlight for advertising Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future. Just with the previous ad, this company also placed an ad promoting a broadcast news appearance of its CEO.

Alan Armstrong was featured in a nearly 4-minute CNBC interview, where he claimed investment in energy infrastructure is going to be necessary to meet demand from AI data centres, and that the Trump election shows people “want access to low-cost natural gas.” Fact check: Wind and solar are now usually cheaper than any fossil fuels.

Figure 7: Ad running on Meta’s advertising library, November 14th, 2024

Aramco

Saudi Arabia’s state-owned Aramco, the largest single corporate emitter, responsible for some 4% of the entire planet’s carbon emissions since 1965, has a robust history of greenwashing, sportswashing, and otherwise making the most of Public Relations firms. In this ad, Aramco points users to “five examples of how Aramco is capitalising on advanced digital technologies,” like “AI, Big Data and IIoT” (Industrial Internet of Things.) The image is a nondescript slightly futuristic indoor space – a far cry from the oil and gas infrastructure that the company operates, and the damages wrought by their pollution. That pollution made Aramco the first $2 trillion company, only recently being dethroned as most-valued-company in recent years by the AI-demand-driven growth of Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft.

Figure 8: Ad running on Google’s advertising library, November 21st, 2024

If you have any investigative leads CAAD should explore, or want to find out more about our research and intel during COP, please email [email protected]. We also have team members on the ground in Azerbaijan who are available for interviews and side-events.Join the climate disinformation conversation – CAAD is on X, LinkedIn and now on Bluesky!