‘Give Trees a Hand’ — Ad Agencies Line Up to Sell Sketchy Climate Solutions

This article by Ellen Ormesher originally appeared in DeSmog.

The video opens on an anonymous industrial site, where a woman stands under a clear blue sky. She’s wearing a white hard hat and a grey utility shirt with the name “Regina” stitched above the breast pocket. Smiling into the camera, she tells viewers that “the world needs ways to reduce carbon emissions.” 

Speakers from diverse backgrounds then reassure viewers that, luckily, they’re working on solutions to that very problem, “like carbon capture, and clean energy from hydrogen.” If it weren’t for the logos appearing on their uniforms, it would be easy to miss that these characters are representatives of one of the world’s biggest oil companies — until Regina reappears to say, “Believe it or not we’re ExxonMobil.”

This ad, created by New York-based agency BBDO, barely mentions fossil fuels, even though it was paid for by one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies. These kinds of ad campaigns are popping up all over. 

Even as the ad and PR industry comes under growing scrutiny for its role in polishing up the reputation of the fossil fuel industry — agencies are seeking new ways to give their oil and gas clients a climate-friendly sheen. From claims that carbon capture can “give trees a hand”, to an apparent TikTok influencer touting the technology on behalf of Chevron, firms are deploying their creative talents to sell the perception that the industry is the gatekeeper to climate solutions. 

Yet both fossil fuel companies and their advertising agencies know that carbon capture and storage (CCS) — a 50-year-old technology used to trap carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from smokestacks, then bury the planet-heating gas underground — may never make a meaningful contribution to the climate fight. Despite decades of pledges to deploy it at scale, carbon capture has been plagued by such a litany of failed targets, cost overruns and economic and technical hurdles that the world’s entire existing operational capacity can only mop up about 0.14 percent of annual global carbon emissions (assuming that capacity is working at full tilt, which it rarely is).

The advertising agencies promoting this technology also know that fossil fuel companies — who are spending tens of thousands of dollars on sponsorships at the COP29 UN climate talks that opened in Azerbaijan this week — continue to spend almost all their development budgets on oil and gas.

Sean Buchan, a lead researcher at the Climate Action Against Disinformation research and advocacy group, says that these types of ads represent attempts by fossil fuel companies to distance themselves from their past climate denial. 

“Choosing to spend sizable marketing budgets on greenwashing narratives, like celebrating false solutions, marks a shift in what fossil fuel companies believe is appropriate communications,” says Buchan. 

Among hundreds of oil and gas industry internal documents released by a U.S. Senate investigation into climate disinformation in May, an email chain revealed that ExxonMobil executives met with BBDO in 2016 to discuss a proposed package of ads highlighting CCS and low-carbon fuels. BBDO’s initial ideas for proclaiming the technology’s benefits were so zealous that they prompted a cautious response even from Exxon, whose executives suggested replacing any lines “that imply the technology is live today, and [sic] more the solution more future focused (e.g. we’re building a plant to test this…)”

Buchan believes that carbon capture is often featured in these types of ad campaigns because it would allow oil and gas companies to continue doing business as usual. “In their perfect world they can still build all the fossil fuel infrastructure, extract all the oil and gas and just pay a small tax via CCS to reduce the emissions.”

Seat at the Table

Melissa Aronczyk, a professor of media studies in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, said the promotion of unproven technologies is designed to give oil and gas companies a seat at the climate policy table.

“The whole solutions framework is really about delaying and minimising policymaking, whether it’s at a federal government level or at a state level,” Aronczyk said.

The UK government appears to be buying claims from the oil and gas industry that CCS poses a viable solution to slashing planet-heating emissions. In October 2024, DeSmog revealed that the government’s pledge of £22 billion in subsidies for carbon capture projects followed a steep rise in lobbying efforts by major fossil fuel companies. 

According to research by InfluenceMap, more than 80 percent of CCS advocacy by companies and industry groups, including PR and advertising, is used as part of a more explicit argument to oppose the transition away from fossil fuels, and fails to clarify how the technology might best be used to meet international climate goals.

Data on how much fossil fuel companies are spending on advertising carbon capture is hard to come by because marketing budgets can be divided between any number of appointed advertising agencies. Still, since the ad campaigns themselves are appearing as posters on public transport, online videos, TV commercials, and in widespread social media campaigns, it is likely that agencies are earning millions to produce them.

Crafting the Narrative

An advertising industry designer who has worked on carbon capture campaigns says that most of the work they were involved in was aimed at “rebrands” that made the technology “seem public-friendly” — often by making the science behind the approach digestible for the general public. “If I had a penny for every time they used the phrase, ‘bridging the knowledge gap’…” says the insider, who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions.

The insider stressed that it was not stated outright that the underlying intent of the ads was to maintain public support for oil and gas production — but rather to educate the public on the viability of carbon capture as a solution. 

“In my entire time working on these campaigns I never heard mention of oil and gas companies.”

Documents made public by the Senate investigation, however, show that Exxon knew in 2018 that capturing carbon might be hard, and modelled a much smaller deployment of carbon capture under a low-emissions scenario than rival Shell.  According to one slide from an internal presentation, labelled “Scenario D,” Exxon envisioned fewer than 500 carbon capture and storage sites operating globally by 2050 — while an equivalent scenario by Shell saw 10,000 such facilities by 2070.

Still, in 2019, BBDO developed Exxon’s “Unexpected Energy” campaign, which portrayed carbon capture and storage as a technology that would help “industrial plants … be more like plants.” The ads ran on multiple platforms, including podcasts and in social media.

In a June 2019 email conversation between members of the Exxon PR team, a social media manager named Jayme Meyer responded to lobbyist Gemma Allman’s feedback that the ads should “de-emphasize the concept that catching carbon is difficult or hard.”

BBDO has worked with Exxon since 2011, according to DeSmog’s research. BBDO’s parent company, Omnicom Group, had at least 74 contracts with oil and gas companies across its agencies in 2024, according to Clean Creatives. 

BBDO and Exxon did not respond to requests for comment.

Promoting CO2 Pipelines

Other prominent advertising firms have also worked with Exxon. Edelman, the world’s largest private public relations firm with 2023 revenues of $1.4 billion, has had Exxon contracts since 2020, according to the industry publication PR Week. According to Ad Age, another trade publication, the global media firm Interpublic Group has worked with the oil and gas giant since 2011.

These agencies are far from outliers, and a number of major ad firms have also jumped on the carbon capture bandwagon on behalf of their fossil fuel clients.

In 2023, McCann, a New York-based ad agency owned by Interpublic Group, launched a series of video ads for the U.S. petroleum company Valero, according to an archived page from an employee’s website. In a spot titled “Trees,” a voiceover described how Valero would transport its emissions via a controversial new carbon capture pipeline across the Midwest. This project would “give trees a hand” in trapping emissions, according to the ad.

DeSmog has documented a relationship between Valero and Interpublic Group, sometimes via its subsidiaryCampbell Ewald, that stretches back to 2015. 

McCann and Valero did not respond to requests for comment.

Casual Tone 

Chevron has had a TikTok account since 2022. In a bid to reach Gen Z consumers, Chevron ran a campaign on the platform that boasted of its investment in CCS and other carbon-reducing technologies. 

The posts featured an apparent influencer explaining the techniques in the casual tone common on the platform, using simple production values largely indistinguishable from typical TikTok influencers. 

Several of the videos even boasted the tag “#edutok”, which TikTok itself created as part of an in-app challenge for users to post e-learning videos.

According to a report by Climate Action Against Disinformation, Chevron spent an estimated $1.8 million on promoting these ads in 2023 — a sum that doesn’t include money paid to its advertising agencies.

While it’s unclear which of Chevron’s appointed ad agencies is responsible for operating its TikTok account, according to the latest Clean Creatives research, the oil major holds contracts with several of the world’s largest advertising holding companies, including Edelman, WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic Group, Dentsu, and Publicis. 

In May 2024, Clean Creatives awarded Dentsu a satirical “Excellence in Science Fiction” award for a Chevron campaign promoting carbon capture.

Chevron did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Tasty’

A 2019 campaign produced for Exxon by the London-based agency Group SJR featured videos in the style of Buzzfeed’s then-popular “Tasty” videos. Where Buzzfeed’s videos showed up-close recipes for popular snacks, Group SJR’s videos compared classic food pairings — like peanut butter and jelly — to natural gas and renewables with the slogan “one cannot exist without the other,”

Group SJR also produced five short films for the UK power station operator Drax — the country’s largest single source of CO2 emissions — between 2022 and 2023. 

The campaign, which Group SJR entered for an award, highlighted Drax’s development of industry standards for carbon dioxide removals (CDRs) — a term used to cover approaches used to draw down CO2 from the atmosphere.

One of the videos states that Drax is leading the world in the development of CDRs, using biomass from “sustainably managed forests to generate renewable electricity while also removing CO2 from the atmosphere.”

These claims were called into question in February, when documents obtained by BBC documentary programme Panorama showed Drax had taken timber from Canadian old-growth forests considered “rare and irreplaceable.”

In March, climate campaigners warned that Drax’s plans to manufacture wood pellets sourced from California forests would endanger natural habitats and increase toxic air pollution for rural communities.

Drax’s plan to capture emissions from burning wood pellets by trapping them underground has never been tried before. According to research by the think tank Ember, “not only is there a strong chance [Drax] will fail to deliver its promised negative emissions, but it may also be environmentally destructive” due to Drax’s wood sourcing practices. 

In October, The Times reported that the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire — the proposed site for its carbon capture project — had lost support from the opposition Conservatives “amid concerns the scheme is fuelled by the mass burning of trees”. Claire Coutinho, who had served as net zero secretary when the Conservatives were in power, had herself approved the planning application, but told The Times that the case for the scheme had “simply ­unravelled” on closer examination.

Group SJR, which is owned by London-based WPP, the world’s largest advertising company by revenues, has also worked for Chevron, Shell, and BP.

Group SJR and Drax did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Carbon Neutral Extraction’

In the summer of 2023, ads began appearing on buses, trams, rental bikes, and bus shelters in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal portraying carbon capture as “an important step towards carbon neutral resource extraction.” Posts on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube pushed a similar line. 

The ads were placed by the Pathways Alliance, a lobby group representing the tar sands industry, where ballooning CO2 emissions are undermining Canada’s climate goals. 

In private, the Pathways Alliance was rather less bullish on carbon capture — acknowledging in a December 2021 document, uncovered by the Narwhal, that the technology was “still on the lab bench.” 

Complaints over the ads prompted Canada’s competition watchdog to launch an investigation, which is still ongoing. Montreal’s public bike-rental agency, Bixi, asked for the ads to be removed from its system. The city of Toronto, meanwhile, passed a motion last month aiming to restrict fossil fuel advertising on municipal property, though it stopped short of advocating for a total fossil ad ban. 

The Pathways Alliance’s public-facing ads worked in tandem with lobbying behind closed doors. 

Bluesky Strategy Group, an Ottawa-based PR firm, represented Pathways Alliance at a number of meetings with the Canadian government in 2022 and 2023, according to a paper in the journal Energy Research and Social Science. The paper also identified several types of misleading ads used by the organisation, which represents Cenovus, ConocoPhillips, Canadian Natural, MEG Energy, Suncor, and Imperial Oil (majority-owned by ExxonMobil).

“On the one hand they are talking to the public about their net zero methods,” said Aronczyk, the Rutgers professor, who co-authored the study. “But when we looked at the lobbying reports, there were dozens of meetings with the federal government.” 

Bluesky Strategy Group and Pathways Alliance did not respond to a request for comment.

In June, Pathways Alliance scrubbed its website of all content related to carbon capture, ahead of changes to Canadian competition law that include fines of up to $10 million for ads that mislead the public. 

Additional reporting by TJ Jordan and Kathryn Clare.

For profiles of advertising and PR agencies working for major polluters, please visit DeSmog’s climate disinformation database.