In November 2020, the Twitter account of the oil and gas giant Shell asked its followers: âWhat are you willing to change to help reduce emissions?â
The question was a bit rich, given Shellâs own role as a leading emitter, and the tweet was widely panned by climate activists. Shellâs own staff agreed. In an email thread of Shell lobbyists, one said that to call the tweet âgaslightingâ is âa criticism not totally without merit in this case.â Another admitted it was âpretty tone-deaf.â
That exchange was one of dozens drawn from the internal documents of major oil and gas companies (pdf) and released Sept. 15 by investigators from the US House of Representatives. In the documents, which include emails and internal presentations stretching back over several years, staff at BP, Exxon, Shell, and Chevron split hairs between their public statements on climate change and actual business plans, back away from explicitly supporting the Paris Agreement, debate how to promote climate-friendly technologies despite knowing theyâre far from ready to deploy at scale, and disparage prominent climate activists and environmental groups.
Shell staff said reaching net zero emissions âhas nothing to do with our business plans.â
Shellâs core objective to âbe the worldâs most valuable energy companyâ requires a âstrong societal license to operate,â a company lobbyist wrote in a 2020 internal presentation. That will ârequire a careful and continuous balancing act, that conveys credible optimism while setting realistic expectations of how fast both Shell and the energy system can change,â including âthe long term need for oil and gas investments.â
In another exchange from October 2020, two communications officers for the oil and gas giant Shell traded emails to plan a LinkedIn post from the account of Gretchen Watkins, the companyâs US president. The post was meant to describe the companyâs newly released scenario by which it could reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The problem, one of the officers explained, was that the net zero scenario was just that: âa scenario, and so nothing to do with our business plans, but if weâre not careful we could easily confuse external stakeholders.â
Itâs no secret that these companiesâ plans are out of step with what energy economists believe is needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. None of the biggest oil and gas companies have committed to ending all exploration for new drilling sites, which the International Energy Agency sets as the crucial standard for credible climate action.
But the documents, said Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic representative from New York and chair of the House oversight committee, âleave no doubt that, in the words of one company official, Big Oil is âgaslightingâ the public.â
Ultimately, the most meaningful test of these companiesâ climate commitments will come from their earnings reports, not their marketing materials. Capital spending on low-carbon technologies remains a small fraction of what they spend on drilling. Until that changes, these companies are clearly more a part of the problem than of the solution.