Fossil fuel companies' climate communication strategies: Industry messaging on renewables and natural gas
Si, Yutong, Desai, Dipa, Bozhilova, Diana, Puffer, Sheila and Stephens, Jennie C. (2023) Fossil fuel companies' climate communication strategies: Industry messaging on renewables and natural gas. Energy Research & Social Science, 98. p. 103028. ISSN 22146296
Abstract
Research shows that multinational oil and gas companies have recently made a strategic shift away from outright climate denial to more nuanced discourses of climate delay. Communication on social media is an under-analyzed part of the fossil fuel industry's strategy to delay the energy transition away from fossil fuels to a renewable future. This study examines how four companies (Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, and TotalEnergies) are communicating about the renewable transition by analyzing tweets published by their global Twitter accounts. Each of these companies tweets about different renewable technologies in the context of showcasing their own renewable projects. TotalEnergies and BP focus mostly on solar, ExxonMobil on biofuels, and Shell on hydrogen; geothermal and hydropower are hardly mentioned by any of the companies. The number of tweets mentioning renewables increased rapidly after 2015. Topic modeling on tweets about renewables shows that renewables are often mentioned together with natural gas, emphasizing how both are essential for emissions reductions. Similarly, computational text analysis on tweets about natural gas reveals how companies highlight the social good of natural gas including promoting its role in emissions reductions, presenting natural gas as a fuel for a cleaner future, and emphasizing that natural gas is critical to meeting growing societal demand for energy. This pattern of communication - linking renewables to natural gas and promoting natural gas as part of their corporate response to climate change - suggests an evolution of fossil fuel companies' strategic efforts to delay the energy transition and obstruct climate action.
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