Rhetorical Strategies Employed by Big Oil in the Context of IPCC Reports of Climate Change

Andrew S. Mitchell () and Subhes C. Bhattacharyya
Additional contact information
Andrew S. Mitchell: Institute of Sustainable Future, Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Media, De Montfort University, Leicester LE2 9BH, UK
Subhes C. Bhattacharyya: Institute of Sustainable Future, Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Media, De Montfort University, Leicester LE2 9BH, UK

World, 2025, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-31

Abstract: Despite long-standing evidence linking fossil fuel combustion to greenhouse gas and climate change effects, and the growing advocacy for reductions and regulatory limits on their use, fossil fuel corporations remain hugely profitable and influential. In response to scientific evidence linking Big Oil’s corporate activities directly to climate change impacts, tactics favoured by Big Tobacco to medical evidence linking smoking to cancer appear to have also been adopted by Big Oil in responding to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) findings. To examine some of these response strategies, a bespoke corpus was compiled from sustainability reports by a sample of three Big Oil corporations over a twenty-year period corresponding to the IPCC’s publication of the third through sixth Assessment Reports. This corpus is statistically and linguistically analyzed for representations and accounts by Big Oil for its activities and how, if at all, scientific evidence is addressed linking fossil fuel extraction and use to the findings of the IPCC. By highlighting corporate response strategies and preferred narrative accounts to the IPCC evidence, the aim is to equip policy- and decision-makers with key insights to develop more effective counter-narratives to facilitate scientific communications in this critical policy space.

Keywords: climate change; Big Oil corporate narratives; reputational management; greenwashing; corporate social responsibility; computational linguistic analysis; corpus linguistic analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G15 G17 G18 L21 L22 L25 L26 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 R51 R52 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/6/3/128/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/6/3/128/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jworld:v:6:y:2025:i:3:p:128-:d:1751853

Access Statistics for this article

World is currently edited by Ms. Cassie Hu

More articles in World from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().