Influencers

Oil and gas supermajors including Shell and BP are using UK influencers to push false solutions to the climate crisis and manufacture a more family friendly image, DeSmog can reveal. The influencers have included a popular former BBC presenter, a polar explorer, and an exasperated father of five who needs a break and finds it in the form of BP’s rewards app. The campaigns have been deployed across a number of social media platforms and are part of a global effort to give “millennials a reason to connect emotionally” with oil and gas firms, and to tackle their perception as “the bad guys”. DeSmog analysed examples of more than 100 influencers being paid to promote fossil fuel firms worldwide since 2017, from the US to Malaysia, in campaigns that have reached billions of people.