If you’re a regular listener of the New York Times podcast The Daily, you would have heard an ad for ExxonMobil’s carbon capture investments more than once in November.
The ad – which coincided with the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow – told listeners that carbon capture technology could remove more than 90% of CO2 emissions from “carbon-intensive industries” and that the company was working to “deploy this technology at scale”. It gave the sense of an oil company tackling the climate crisis with technology that could solve it – and quickly.
Similar ads have run on NPR podcasts, including Invisibilia and Up First. The American Petroleum Institute has also run ads in podcasts, including on Vox’s Ezra Klein Show (Klein has since left for the New York Times), highlighting that it is “producing more oil and gas while reducing emissions”.
The fossil fuels industry’s sudden interest in podcasts coincides with its recent embrace of social media and newsletter advertising and may well be driven in part by a key difference in the regulation of these “newer” media, regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), versus legacy print, TV and radio media, which are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
