Saving Time

by Jenny Odell

Having shifted from funding58 climate change–denial ads in the 1970s to “painting [themselves] green” in the 2000s, those same companies who faced down “self-defeating determinism” are selling the public their own strain of determinism. Energy companies have every incentive to make their future be the future. In a sweeping 2021 study of ExxonMobil’s climate change communications since the mid-2000s, Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran find language that portrays extraction and consumer demand as inevitable: [A] 2008 ExxonMobil Corp advertorial stat[es]: “By 2030, global energy demand will be about 30 percent higher than it is today … oil and natural gas will be called upon to meet … the world’s energy requirements.” Another, in 2007, says that “increasing prosperity in the developing world [will be] the main driver of greater energy demand (and consequently rising CO2 emissions).” A 1999 Mobil advertorial is even blunter: “[G]rowing demand will boost CO2 emissions.” In other words, they present growing energy demand as inevitable, and imply that it can only be met with fossil fuels.59