We first published this guide in March 2024. Since then, the information ecosystem around climate has only gotten more muddled in some places—particularly in the United States, where the government is actively trying to rid the country of data and information on the subject. But there are efforts underway to deal with the problem, too. In the European Union the Digital Services Act is in effect and now it’s up to individual governments to implement guardrails around misleading information on social media. In late 2024, the Brazilian government, the United Nations and UNESCO launched the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change, dedicated to multilateral collaboration among States and international organizations to fund research and action promoting information integrity on climate issues, particularly in the lead-up to COP30 in Belem.
It feels like a good time to update the guide with what we’ve learned over the last year. We’ll continue to update it as new narratives take hold, but one good thing about the fossil fuel industry is that they haven’t really come up with new spin in about a century, just slightly updated versions of the same old stories on repeat. Got one you think we missed? Want us to dig into something the industry keeps saying? Send tips to amy at drilled dot media.
Last update: April 19, 2025
MISLEADING MESSAGES
Climate Policy Makes Petrol and Energy Prices Higher
This one gets trotted out every time any government even attempts to pass climate policy, and it works because most people—reporters included—don’t actually know how the price at the pump or residential energy prices are set. But it’s not that complicated! In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy even has a very handy, simple graphic explaining it (see below). The biggest determinant here is the price of crude oil. Ultimately, robust climate policy would make this go down. It could increase prices in the meantime; the American Petroleum Institute has tried to claim, for example, that a move to pause leasing for oil and gas exploration on federal land led to a higher price at the pump. At the time, in 2022, it was far more likely that price fluctuations were being caused first by the threat of Putin invading Ukraine and then by the invasion itself. It’s important to note here that, despite industry claims to the contrary, the commodity price per barrel of oil does not typically map to actual supply and demand, but rather to perceived changes to that supply and demand and how commodity traders are feeling about them.
This is true for liquefied natural gas as well. In a 2025 report, the nonprofits Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen found that more than half of the contracts for U.S. LNG exports were with speculators, or what some call “portfolio purchasers” — oil majors like Saudi Aramco, Chevron, and Shell, as well as large global commodity traders Gunvor and Woodside. These entities buy up gas, then hold on to it strategically, selling to the highest bidder when the price is right, or flooding the market to depress prices strategically.
“In the bigger picture, the idea is to use this glut of LNG that’s coming online globally to open up additional markets in so-called ‘price-sensitive’ regions where companies can lock in natural gas dependency if the price gets low enough,” says Dan Wagner, research director on climate for Public Citizen. “So we’re talking about 20- or 30-year contracts.”
In Australia, LNG being shipped to Japan, where producers claim their gas is desperately needed, is routinely re-routed mid-journey to other countries where it can fetch a better price. Between 2023 and 2024, Japanese gas demand fell by a massive 25% -- a significant drop for a foundational buyer in the global gas market – and traders quickly sought to cash in. Cargos sailing out of Australia that were initially bound for Japan were redirected on the water to ports across southeast Asia in a process known as “reselling”. Where “re-export” refers to cargoes that enter Japan and are then re-exported back out, reselling refers to trades that take place before they ever arrive at the destination.
The decision earned Japanese gas traders eye-watering sums of money and worked to entrench the country’s regional influence in the short-term.
Turning gas into an export commodity has resulted in higher residential energy costs and higher manufacturing costs as well.
In 2024, the Industrial Energy Consumers of America, a trade group representing energy-intensive manufacturers, campaigned via outreach to media and letters to policymakers, in favor of the pause on LNG permitting, noting that the rapid increase in LNG exports had meant skyrocketing prices and volatility that put American industrial manufacturing at a disadvantage. Paul Cicio, president and CEO of the group, told Drilled at the time that the long-term contracts U.S. LNG exporters have inked with customers in Europe and Asia “increase security for other countries and decrease security for U.S. consumers. They reduce both our economic stability and our national security.”
A report released in 2024 from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank, connected LNG exports to a 9 percent increase in prices for residential energy from 2016 to 2023.
Again, oil company execs and industry spokespeople love to pretend this is entirely outside their control, but their announcements and messaging have enormous influence here. Not to mention the fact that oil companies can adjust production according to commodity pricing, and they do it all the time. All of which is to say, while oil companies are of course somewhat beholden to the vagaries of a commodity market, they consistently leverage that market to their benefit.
The LNG Boom Delivers Energy Security and Emissions Reductions
In the wake of the Biden Administration's announcement that it would temporarily pause approvals of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals in 2024, Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, made the cable news rounds, appearing on everything from Fox News to MSNBC warning that this minimal step—which was both temporary and only affected new export terminals, not operational terminals or those already permitted—would bring with it a spike in prices for American consumers and a major threat to energy security. It’s the latest version of the industry’s oldest story, the one it returns to time and again, not just in the U.S. but all over the world. There are lots of variations on it, but the gist is basically: Domestic fossil fuel production keeps citizens safe and bills affordable.
It’s extremely effective because, like all good propaganda, there’s a kernel of truth to it. Domestic energy sources do increase security and prosperity. But for this narrative to work today it has to ignore the fact that renewable energy is also a domestic source, that this particular energy source comes with more danger than security given its climate impacts, and that exports mess with the energy security math considerably. It's particularly bizarre as a way to talk about the impact of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export terminals. In fact the increase in the volume of LNG being exported from the U.S. since the export ban was lifted in 2015 (on the heels of relentless lobbying from the industry, which was desperate to turn the fracking glut into profit) has made energy availability and pricing more volatile for Americans.
It’s clear in the data. When the Freeport LNG plant in Texas exploded, for example, gas prices shot up overseas but they dropped domestically because all of a sudden that big chunk of gas that would normally have been exported from Freeport was suddenly available domestically. Alternatively, when winter storms take regional LNG plants offline and freeze wellheads driving domestic production down unexpectedly, domestic prices spike dramatically because there’s no readily available replacement thanks both to the country's reliance on gas and to the industry’s focus on more profitable exports over domestic energy security.
Whenever media covers a slowdown of fossil fuel development as a "win for climate activists," as many outlets framed the LNG pause in the U.S., it's annoying and inaccurate. But in this case it's particularly so because the instability in the energy market caused by the industry's focus on LNG exports creates problems for all average energy consumers. It also opened the door to another industry talking point: that actually the pause was bad for the climate, because American LNG was replacing coal and “dirtier” LNG from other countries, an argument Toby Rice, founder and CEO of fracking company EQT was making regularly until Trump took office in January 2025.
The idea behind Biden’s LNG pause was to give the Department of Energy time to study the economic and environmental impacts of increasing LNG exports. The study left a few key areas out—methane emissions being one of them—but it also came to conclusions that ran counter to the department’s own rationale for fast-tracking permits to export terminals.
The study reached four noteworthy conclusions:
Despite the fact that LNG is generally not displacing coal, U.S. producers still argue that their product is a climate-friendly alternative because they claim that U.S. gas production is lower-emission than production elsewhere in the world. Those claims are largely underpinned by an emergent certification industry enabling U.S. producers to sell “certified gas” or “green gas,” which is especially important when selling to markets like the European Union, which has adopted methane emissions regulations. These certifications are paid for and privately administered, with little auditing, and often lay claim to methane emissions so low that no gas project in the world has ever actually achieved them, raising eyebrows from environmental advocates.
Jobs, jobs, jobs!
The industry really loves this one and, again, it works so well because there’s a kernel of truth to it. At least there was. There was a time when the fossil fuel industry hired lots of people, paid them well, and all but guaranteed them a job for life. But those days are long gone.
First, over the past decade or so the industry’s push toward automation has been making tens of thousands of oil workers redundant every year. Every time oil prices crash, the industry sheds thousands more jobs, and when prices rebound only a small percentage of those jobs come back. BP, for example, the company currently pushing how it’s “investing in America” and creating jobs in ads across multiple media outlets employs 20,000 people less today than it did 10 years ago. To put that in context, they employ 67,000 people worldwide today, so 20,000 is a significant percentage of their workforce.
Then there’s the way the industry actually treats its workers, which if you couldn’t tell from the fact that there’s now an entire genre of story that’s roughly “former oil worker gets pissed at years of terrible treatment and becomes a solar advocate,” is not great! We’ve covered, for example, the fact that multiple fossil fuel companies are opting not to install basic technology that would save workers’ lives. The industry also pushes for rollbacks of regulations that keep workers safe, and then under-reports worker injuries and fatalities, including during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when offshore fatalities were withheld and misrepresented.
Fossil Fuel Development Will Solve Poverty in the Global South (particularly in Africa)
This narrative is showing up in everything from oil executives’ speeches to Jordan Peterson video clips. And it’s having a real impact on legislation and diplomacy. It puts forth a few key arguments:
Again, it works because there are kernels of truth amongst the lies (speaking of which, there’s an actual term for the strategy of using facts to tell lies: “paltering.”) The Global North did extract enormous wealth from fossil fuels. But a big part of extracting that wealth was extracting it from Global South countries. Unless oil majors are also prepared to lead the way on decolonization and reparations (spoiler alert: they’re not), simply extracting oil from Africa is not going to translate to local riches any more than it has translated to improved energy access. Nigeria, the country with the oldest and largest oil industry on the continent, is a good place to look when vetting claims about the industry’s benefit to Africa: the country is doing worse on almost every metric than it was before its oil boom in the late 1950s, and is last in the world on energy access.
According to Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel, “the data suggest no positive correlation between natural resource wealth and economic growth.” No. Positive. Correlation. This is thanks to something economists call the “resource curse”--the tendency of economies that are overly tied to a particular commodity to focus everything on that commodity, make a small handful of elites rich and eventually tank the economy. Countries with large petroleum reserves suffer a particular strain of the resource curse: the oil curse. They tend to have less democracy, less economic stability, and more frequent civil wars than countries without oil.
Since 1980 as most of the Global South became wealthier, more democratic, and more peaceful, Global South oil producers went the opposite direction. These oil states are no wealthier or more peaceful than they were decades ago and in several cases they’re actually worse off today than before oil was discovered. From 1980 to 2006, per capita income fell in Venezuela (6 percent), Gabon (45 percent), and Iraq (85 percent), for example. In researching his book, The Oil Curse, UCLA political science professor Michael L. Ross concluded: “Petroleum produces the largest problems for the greatest number of countries. The resource curse is overwhelmingly an oil curse.”
Ross also finds that this curse affects Global South countries far more than Global North countries. He says it’s no accident that so much of the world’s oil happens to be in so many of its least democratic and most poverty-stricken regions. Rather, it’s the oil that brought poverty and authoritarianism to those states. And as the industry has expanded into more and more Global South countries, the amount of money those countries earn has gone down not up.
“The low-income countries that most desperately need money are also the most likely to be struck by the resource curse,” Ross writes. “Unless something is done, these windfalls will hurt, not help, people who live on the petroleum frontier.” And despite all those fossil fuel ads showcasing how great oil is for women in Africa and Latin America, the opposite tends to hold true: oil wealth has actually reduced economic and political opportunities for women in most low- and middle-income countries.
A quick look at the entire history of extractive colonialism is another way to smell test this claim. "This fake notion that Europe and the US developed with gas, coal and oil and now it's Africa's turn. That's a huge lie,” Daniel Ribiero, a climate researcher in Mozambique told me recently. “The North developed with colonialism—stealing our resources, enslaving our labor. But also even if you eliminate that phase...we're not allowed to participate in the value chain! These countries developed because of the research, the patents, the technology, the manufacturing, the transport, the markets, the companies, they controlled the value chain. So you could have put in anything at the bottom of the value chain, be it alternative energies, be it oil, gas, even if it was human feces as our main fuel to develop, the value chain is what makes that work. Africa does not have access to any of that. We only can extract and then from then onward we have no part in it.”
“That's why we have no examples of any African country developing with fossil fuels,” Ribiero continued. “It's not possible. This is a false narrative that is being sold just to get support from the masses because right now, short, easy, superficial narratives have a lot of traction and to be able to explain the full picture, it takes more time, more complexity. And the attention deficit generation is not very well adapted to that."
Wind Turbines Kill Birds
The year 2000 called and it wants its disinformation back. This idea has come roaring back with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S. and a surge in renewables worldwide. Again, this one works because there’s a fact in here somewhere. Some birds do die every year by flying into turbine towers or blades, but for every 4000 bird deaths caused by industrial activities, wind farms cause only one.
Offshore wind is even less of a threat to birds; most species avoid the turbines. The impact turbines could have on migratory patterns or shifting feeding grounds could be of concern and is an active area of research. But far more than wind turbines, scientists have identified climate change as the biggest threat to birds. According to Audubon, transitioning to renewable energy will have a net positive effect on bird populations.
Renewables Are Too Intermittent to Power the Grid
In the summer of 2020, Michael Shellenberger—a longtime flak turned nuclear advocate, gubernatorial candidate, expert on homelessness, Twitter files “journalist”, and, now, Elon Musk’s de facto PR guy—loudly pushed the idea that California’s blackouts were due to the state’s embrace of renewables, which Shellenberger argued were too intermittent and unreliable to power the grid. Energy experts who analyzed the blackouts said the chief causes were actually a combination of an extreme heat wave (made hotter by climate change), faulty planning, and the lack of flexible generation sources and sufficient electricity storage. Similarly, during a surprise cold snap in Texas in the winter of 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott blamed wind and solar power for the state’s massive grid failure, when in fact the biggest culprit was methane gas freezing in pipes. Texas’s renewables actually outperformed the grid operator’s forecast during 90 percent of the blackout, and in the rest, fell short by at most one-fifteenth as much as gas plants.
While it’s true, of course, that the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t always blow, a combination of energy demand management and storage that has dramatically improved over the past decade, has adequately addressed those issues. In fact data on grid reliability shows country’s with high levels of renewables actually have fewer outages. Based on the System Average Interruption Duration Index” (SAIDI) metric, Germany — where renewables supply nearly half of the country’s electricity — boasts a grid that is one of the most reliable in Europe and the world. In 2020, SAIDI was just 0.25 hours in Germany. Only Liechtenstein (0.08 hours), and Finland and Switzerland (0.2 hours), did better in Europe. And far from making Texas’s grid less reliable, the state’s embrace of wind energy from 2007 to 2020 dramatically improved the reliability of its grid, which makes it that much more obvious that the state’s current war on wind is driven neither by economics nor by energy data, but by political ideology.
Offshore Wind Kills Whales and Other Marine Species
This is one of the most effective messages at the moment in the fight against offshore wind. And again, it leans heavily on cherry-picked data points, and weaponizes genuine concerns about whales. The Climate Social Sciences Network at Brown University have put together a very helpful website countering all the various stories being told about offshore wind and various marine impacts.
Concerns focus largely on the fact that cables carry electricity generated by offshore wind turbines to land-based stations, and those cables emit electric and magnetic fields (EMF) in the ocean just as they do on land. Which is why scientists have been studying their impact on marine species for a long time; that’s right, electric cables have been running along the ocean floor for decades. The cables beneath Long Island Sound were used in experimental studies by University of Rhode Island scientists to study the behavior of lobster and skate species there in response to encountering EMF like that which will be emitted by offshore wind farms. Because marine species use the natural EMF of the earth to navigate and even sense nearby predators and prey, changes in swimming and foraging behavior of individuals were detectable.
However, the magnetic field emitted by cables like those already in US waters decreases with distance from the cable and never exceeds the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. That means it is essentially impossible for the magnetic field itself to be harmful to marine life, although the studies indicate that some species can detect it. Scientists in both the U.S. and Europe are investigating whether the observed changes in individual behavior translate into significant impacts at the population level of a species. Research is ongoing, but at this point, the studies have thus far concluded with reasonable confidence that the EMF levels emitted from offshore wind cables are unlikely to cause significant risk to marine species.
The North Atlantic Right Whale has been a particular focus of groups and spokespeople advocating against offshore wind. The concern there is that noise from the construction of offshore wind farms, not to mention the construction activity itself, could harm the whales. A valid concern given that it is one of the most critically endangered whale species, with its numbers dwindling from 500 a decade ago to just 340 today. But because it’s so endangered, the North Atlantic Right Whale and the various threats posed to it have been studied a fair amount. And the conclusion of those studies to date is that entanglement in fishing gear and ship strikes are the principal human-caused threats to the whale. In its FAQ on offshore wind and whales, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), notes: “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales. There are no known links between recent large whale mortalities and ongoing offshore wind surveys.”
One of the most effective pieces of propaganda pushing the “wind kills whales” narrative is a short “documentary” created by Shellenberger’s Substack outlet, Public. Shellenberger also claims to have co-founded the grassroots group at the center of the documentary, an East Coast group called the Save the Right Whale Coalition, though he lives on the other side of the country. Titled “Thrown to the Wind,” it claims to reveal that science connecting whale deaths with increased offshore wind has been suppressed. It leans primarily on publicly available data around whale deaths and boat strikes, noting that some of those deaths have occurred in the area leased for offshore wind. Studies conducted on dead right whales on the Atlantic Coast show the vast majority have been killed by boat strikes from commercial fishing boats; while it’s of course true that offshore wind development brings more boats and more boats increases the risk of boat strikes on whales, it's a stretch to go from that to "offshore wind kills whales".
That said, there is scientific backing for the idea that underwater noise of any kind disturbs whales, and the impact of the seismic blasting done to survey for offshore oil drilling is well established. Those impacts are never mentioned by anti-offshore groups. Instead, these groups primarily point to two reports, one done by Shellenberger’s group Environmental Progress and the other by WindAction. Although both call themselves “studies,” they have been self-published and not peer reviewed.
Solar panels leach or off-gas chemicals
In 2016, a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), warning about a potential waste problem up ahead for the first wave of PV panels once they needed to be recycled and replaced kicked off a raft of legit scientific studies on the potential for solar panels to leach chemicals *in landfills*. The most cited was a study published in 2017 in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, which simulated landfill conditions and cautioned that solar panels disposed of in municipal solid waste landfills could break down in such a way that toxic levels of cadmium and lead could be released from them. That study prompted an explosion of blog posts from anti-renewable folks, most notably Michael Shellenberger on his Forbes blog.
Reality
There have been multiple peer-reviewed studies looking at waste management for solar panels, and all of them agree that there is *some* risk of chemical leakage in land fills but that it is low, manageable, and can be mitigated. Those that are frequently cited include:
Scientists began pushing back on this in 2021, particularly in Pennsylvania where it has been particularly popular. Then 2023 brought a thorough debunking of this myth, primarily via scientists at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in the U.S. and a study they published in Nature Physics. Their core points were:
New research from UPenn indicates that properly managing large solar arrays and the land beneath them can actually boost the carbon retained in soil, an outcome that could not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with solar facilities, but may also better preserve the land for future agricultural use.
Nonetheless, there has been a resurgence of this narrative in the U.S., U.K., and Australia since 2022. In the U.S. it became a big talking point in Pennsylvania as more solar farms moved from permitting to construction and similarly in rural Australia, as the number of solar farms hit 100 in 2022 this story started to bubble up more in rural communities.
Renewables Are Taking Prime Farmland
A persistent myth in rural communities is that large-scale renewable projects are taking good farmland out of production. Our research shows an uptick in this narrative starting in the UK and US in 2021, then Australia, Italy and Canada from 2022 onward, which makes sense because it’s only been in recent years that there’s starting to be enough grid-scale solar farms that people notice and might feel like farmland is being encroached upon. In a lot of ways, the same thing is happening that happened with fracking, where developers will lease land from farmers who are struggling to make ends meet, and put a large-scale solar array on it. The key difference is that they don't also poison the water and render the land useless.
Solar farms do require land, of course, but the belief that they consume vast tracts of prime agricultural land is misguided. The total land area required for solar installations to meet the UK’s 2030 solar energy targets, for example, is less than 0.3% of the UK’s land area. In Australia, it’s 0.1%. And while renewable projects typically require more land, the impact of fossil fuel projects on soil and water extends far beyond the footprint of any particular well or refinery.
Meanwhile, corn ethanol, which hasn’t triggered anywhere near the resistance as renewables, has gobbled up around 30 million acres of prime US farmland. You could generate the equivalent amount vehicle power with 200,000 acres of solar panels. Moreover, solar panels on land don’t preclude crops being cultivated on the same land; agrivoltaics, the process of planting under and around solar panels or allowing small livestock to graze around them, is becoming increasingly common.
Similarly, wind can be—and is—co-located with agriculture. A 2024 study by McGill University researchers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, showed that while land use calculations for wind farms often assume the entire wind farm area is being used, the wind power infrastructure (such as the turbines and roads) typically only uses 5 per cent of the entire farmland – the rest is often used for other purposes, such as agriculture.
The research also showed that if wind turbines are sited in areas with existing roads and infrastructure, such as on agricultural land, they can be approximately seven times more efficient, in terms of energy produced per square meter of land directly impacted by the infrastructure, than projects that are developed from scratch.
More CO2 Is Actually Good for the Planet Because it Will Grow More Plants
This was one of the coal industry’s core narratives when people first started paying attention to the issue of global warming in the 1980s and 1990s, but it’s come roaring back in recent years thanks to organizations like the CO2 Coalition. The argument is basically that plants need CO2 to grow, so more CO2 in the atmosphere = more plants growing on Earth. Two early 90s videos backed by the green-sounding but actually coal-backed Greening Earth Society helped this narrative take root back then. “Featured in the video were U.S. government civil service scientists who had no idea they would land in the midst of a pro-pollution/pro-CO2 narrative,” Karin Kirk writes for Yale Climate Connections. “Special interests supporting use of fossil fuels used the inclusion of the scientists, which seemed to give the video credibility, to cast doubt on the idea that climate change would harm people and ecosystems.”
More recently, the claim that CO2 is greening the Earth has been amplified by the likes of (Fox News owner) Rupert Murdoch and Danish climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg. While it’s true that CO2 helps plants to grow, there are diminishing returns on the so-called “plant food effect,” and scientists warn that you can’t look only at CO2’s impact on particular plants or on global greening in general because plants are impacted by things like weather and drought too, which CO2 also impacts. Studies have also repeatedly shown that climate change itself will at some point put an end to the “greening effect,” that as temperatures raise and droughts increase whatever benefit CO2 was bringing previously will be thwarted by new threats. A study Stanford University scientists published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, for example, tested whether excess CO2 in combination with higher temperatures would be helpful to plants and found the opposite to be true. A 2019 study in The Lancet, meanwhile, found that while a higher concentration of carbon dioxide did increase plant growth in 85% of plants, it ultimately lowered their nutritional value, which is not a worthwhile trade-off given that excess carbon in the atmosphere is also linked to scorching temperatures, increased drought, and increased extreme weather events, all of which wreak havoc on crops and other plants.
None of which has stopped people from trotting out the “CO2 greens the Earth” story again and again, the most prominent of which is the CO2 Coalition, headed by physicist William Happer. While working for the CO2 Coalition, Mandy Gunasekara—who rose to prominence as the staffer delivering a snowball to Senator Inhofe during his famed “it’s snowing so global warming isn’t real” speech and, more recently, wrote the EPA chapter of Project 2025—even made the CO2 is good claim while testifying during a Congressional hearing on climate disinformation.
MISLEADING TERMS
Carbon intensity, Energy Intensity and “Low Carbon” Fuels
When fossil fuel and other high-emissions companies use phrases like “energy intensity”, “emissions intensity”, “carbon intensity” and “low carbon,” what they’re talking about is reducing emissions in their own operations. In other words, producing a barrel of oil more efficiently, with fewer emissions escaping along the way. Here’s the rub: Operational emissions (also referred to as Scope 2 emissions), account for ten to 15 percent of fossil fuel companies’ emissions, and they’re not talking about getting rid of them entirely, just reducing them. One pathway to reduction is carbon capture—capturing emissions in their operations—but the vast majority (70 to 80 percent!) of CO2 captured by fossil fuel companies today is used for what’s called Enhanced Oil Recovery: it’s injected underground to get more oil out. Somehow if you use an emission to generate more emissions, that counts as a reduction in emissions intensity. The math, dear sir, is not mathing.
Carbon Capture
In the vast majority of cases, when fossil fuel companies talk about carbon capture, they’re talking about capturing the CO2 emissions of their own operations, which means either capturing emissions from the smokestacks of existing refineries and petrochemical plants, or building new facilities with what's called "pre-combustion" technology that lets them remove some carbon before any fuel is burned. This does nothing about the eventual combustion of oil or the impact of chemicals, or about the various hazardous pollutants that are also emitted by these facilities. Moreover, operational emissions account for less than a quarter of the industry’s emissions. ExxonMobil is currently advertising its carbon capture tech as something that “could” also help other industries reduce their CO2 emissions. “Could” is doing a lot of work here! Check out our comprehensive explainer on carbon capture, co-published with Vox in July 2024, for more.
Even scientists who are in favor of deploying carbon capture technology note that it should not be used as a license to keep burning more fossil fuels, nor should it be deployed at a wide scale until major efforts to decarbonize have been taken. In the leadup to COP28, the International Energy Agency, which has said that carbon capture tech will be a necessary tool as the world tries to reach net zero, was unequivocal about this: “The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals – which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said upon the release of the organization’s report The Oil and Gas Industry in Net Zero Transitions. That didn’t keep carbon capture out of the final commitments out of COP28, which listed carbon capture alongside renewables and nuclear energy…and somehow fossil gas (more on that below)...as necessary to a transition away from fossil fuels.
And then there’s the question of where the carbon goes once it’s captured. According to the Global CCS Institute, between 70 and 80% of all captured carbon is used for what's called Enhanced Oil Recovery, or EOR -- injecting it into the ground to get more oil out. Exxon's current plan is to pipe it from Houston into an underwater reservoir in the Gulf of Mexico. What could go wrong? Compressed CO2 is dangerous, and pipes leak. In 2020, a pilot carbon capture project leaked compressed CO2 in the small Mississippi town of Satartia sending dozens of people to the hospital. Do we really want the industry responsible for thousands of oil spills each year (according to NOAA) in charge of piping a potentially lethal gas around and storing it?
“Unabated Emissions”
The precise definition of “unabated emissions,” or the even more fungible term some oil execs, like Adnoc president Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, seem to prefer, “unabated fossil fuels,” is forever being debated, but experts have coalesced around describing it as fossil-fuel production or emissions that are not being either captured or offset by some other process. In this scenario, emissions that are captured, via either carbon or methane capture at the source, or direct-air capture, which extracts CO2 from the atmosphere, would be considered “abated” and therefore dealt with (see “Carbon Capture” above for details on why that might be problematic). Some people consider carbon offsets to be abatement as well, despite the fact that a growing mountain of peer-reviewed research has found the vast majority of offsets to be junk at best, fraudulent at worst.
Carbon Dioxide Removal (including Direct Air Capture)
The general public often conflates carbon capture—capturing emissions as they’re being created—and carbon removal: extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere at any location. One reduces new emissions, the other pulls historical emissions out of the atmosphere. Which sounds amazing, like a magical vacuum cleaning up all our bad decisions. Direct air capture tech pulls air in through a fan, passes it through a filter to capture CO2 and then stores that CO2…somewhere (see “Carbon Capture” for more details on that front). Other forms of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) include soil carbon sequestration, biomass carbon removal and storage, enhanced mineralization, ocean-based CDR, and afforestation/reforestation.
Don’t get me wrong, most scientists view at least one version of CDR as promising. But even those who are quite optimistic about it (including the IPCC in its most recent report), are careful to describe it only as a tool to be deployed after we have decarbonized in every way possible. Doing otherwise is akin to pouring water into a bucket with a hole. As scientist David Ho put it in the journal Nature recently, "Drastically reduce emissions first, or carbon dioxide removal will be next to useless." Ho went on to explain that direct air capture deployed today would buy us approximately 13 minutes of atmospheric grace.
Methane “Leaks”
At COP26 in Glasgow, more than 70 countries, led by the European Union and the United States, formally announced their commitment to the Global Methane Pledge: a promise to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Two years later, at COP28 in Dubai, that promise became reducing “methane pollution” to “near zero” by 2030, with 50 oil majors publicly backing the pledge as well. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also announced its final methane rule at COP28, requiring equipment upgrades and regular leak inspections, which EPA administrator Michael Reagan said should cut methane emissions from regulated sources by nearly 80 percent by 2038. That all seems like good news. Methane is a potent but short-lived gas, delivering 80 times the global warming impact of the much longer-lived greenhouse gas CO2, which means dramatically reducing it in the near term could buy the world time to act on tougher decarbonization goals. A recent UN report found that if human-caused methane emissions were cut by 45 percent by 2030, half a degree (0.3 degrees Celsius) of warming could be prevented by mid-century. The Global Methane Assessment, released in May 2021, found that reducing methane emissions by 45 percent in this decade could keep global warming to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century, the goal of the Paris Agreement. That math also includes animal agriculture, which accounts for 32 percent of human-caused methane emissions.
But while it supported the methane pledge, the fossil fuel industry also pushed successfully for the inclusion of fossil gas as a “transition fuel” in the final COP28 text. Which means continued expansion of fossil gas development as a climate solution, right alongside a mounting pile of research that finds methane to be just as bad for global warming as coal.
Moreover, to date industry pledges to reduce methane emissions haven’t meant much because the methods used to report methane emissions are not exactly reliable. Sharon Wilson has been capturing the industry’s actual versus reported methane emissions using optical imaging software for years now. Her concern is that without the staff and resources to actual enforce the EPA methane rule it won’t mean much; similarly, industry and government pledges to cut methane emissions are all well and good but without auditing, accurate reporting, and an enforcement mechanism, they’re little more than words on a page and headlines the industry can point to as proof it’s doing something about methane.
To date, the industry has self-reported methane emissions based on a formula that enables underreporting on a massive scale. The official EPA estimate of methane leakage from the gas system is 1.4%, but that comes almost entirely from self-reported numbers from the industry. Studies have documented rates closer to 3.7% or even 9% (!!!) in the Permian Basin.
Satellites and the International Methane Emissions Observatory are starting to help close the gap between reported and real methane emissions, but Wilson points out that if gas operations just keep expanding, it’s hard to imagine emissions regulations catching up to them. Moreover, while the industry mostly uses the word “leak” regarding methane, implying some sort of accident, Wilson has documented time and again that the intentional release of methane is quite common. That happens when gas operations flare—i.e., burn off—gas that it does not make business sense to sell or that is “sour,” meaning that it contains hydrogen sulfide and is toxic. Companies will also vent methane—release the gas directly into the atmosphere, after a well is fracked or as a normal part of maintenance. These are not accidental releases; they’re part of the standard process of drilling for, refining, and distributing gas. “We’ll never bring levels down if the industry just keeps expanding,” she said. “The industry cannot reliably stop methane emissions—all of their available tech is not reliable. We need to stop new permits.
“Certified” or “sustainably sourced” methane gas
There’s still a big risk that methane reduction promises are being used by the industry to make a distinction between “clean” or “certified” or “differentiated” methane gas and “dirty” methane gas, produced by companies that aren’t even pretending to do anything about methane emissions. The science is clear: methane gas is a planet-warming fossil fuel just like coal and oil, and it all has to go if we’re serious about addressing the climate crisis.
This summer, the Department of Energy backed away from plans to set a standard for what level of emissions reductions qualify as “certified” gas. But Biden Administration officials still pushed the idea of “low-methane” gas at COP28, partly as a way to help U.S. exporters retain the toe-hold in the EU energy market secured by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
E&E News reported in November 2023: “The Energy and State departments are working with the European Union — the world's largest gas importer — and with other countries on international standards that will give low-methane gas preferential access to the EU market.”
Like “low-carbon gas” before it, “low methane” gas is little more than a marketing term used to promote the idea of gas as a climate solution. And like carbon offsets, the entire concept of “certified” gas seems to be built on shoddy, unverifiable claims of methane reductions. That hasn’t stopped dozens of utilities across the United States from signing contracts for "certified" “low methane” gas, although Colorado's Xcel Energy did recently back off of attempts to charge customers more for "certified" gas following pointed questions about these issues. Utilities in at least 7 other states, though, have already succeeded in passing on a “green premium” for “certified” gas that may not be delivering any emissions reductions at all.
“Renewable Natural Gas”
Made from methane emissions captured at landfills or industrial animal agriculture facilities, renewable natural gas is one of the gas industry’s preferred strategies for combating electrification. It’s a good story: captured emissions turned into energy! The industry often presents it as not just a zero emissions option but actually a *negative* emissions option because you capture the methane, turn it into gas and voila you've avoided those methane emissions. Except they've left out the part where you transport and then burn that fuel, emitting various greenhouse gasses along the way. Gas companies are into renewable natural gas because it allows them to tell a good green story while locking in gas infrastructure. By even the most optimistic estimate, RNG could only cover about 16 percent of current gas use, the rest would be supplied by the usual fossil gas.
“Clean” Hydrogen (also “Blue Hydrogen” and now “Turquoise Hydrogen”)
The fossil fuel industry has been pushing hydrogen right alongside carbon capture as one of its top preferred climate solutions for a while now. Unsurprisingly, the industry’s interest in hydrogen has grown alongside the expansion of gas. That’s because the primary way the industry is making hydrogen is via methane. Exxon, for example, is talking a lot about “clean hydrogen” in its ads these days, but the company only produces what"s called "blue hydrogen," which is made by combining fossil gas and steam. Not only is it made with a fossil fuel, but also the process produces CO2 as a by-product. Hardly "clean”! The only truly “clean” hydrogen is what’s called “green hydrogen,” which is made by electrolysis separating hydrogen from oxygen in water. Although here again, it’s only truly “clean” if the energy powering that process is not a fossil fuel, because it’s a fairly energy-intensive process. Meanwhile, utilities and industries groups like the American Gas Association have come up with a new version: “turquoise hydrogen,” which confuses things even more. Turquoise hydrogen is produced via a process called methane pyrolysis: heating up methane in a reactor, leaving you with hydrogen and a solid carbon by-product that can then be stored. Because it produces solid carbon and not a carbon gas, the AGA is running full-steam ahead with calling turquoise hydrogen “carbon neutral.”
“Net biodiversity gain”
As part of its Tilenga project in Uganda, which will eventually pump oil through the much-contested East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), Total Energies is drilling in the country’s largest national park, Murchison Falls Park.
Philippe Groueix, the general manager TotalEnergies Uganda, told Drilled that the company conducted an environmental impact assessment for its drilling in 2019, before undertaking any activities in the park.
“We are committed to having a net gain on biodiversity. We have a detailed environment management plan and are working with partners like Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) to implement it,” said Groueix.
Ultimately, delivering a “net gain on biodiversity” will require biodiversity offsetting—the preservation of natural habitats elsewhere to compensate for the loss of biodiversity in Murchison. But to date, the research on biodiversity credits or offsets doesn’t paint a rosy picture. A 2019 review of available research on the efficacy of “no net loss” approaches to biodiversity, for example, “identified large gaps between the global implementation of offsets and the evidence for their effectiveness.” Writing in the journal Science in 2023, Australian researchers Michael Vardon and David Lindenmayer warned about “the risk that trading ill-defined generic biodiversity credits will result in biodiversity loss, not conservation.”
