Computational Analysis: How ExxonMobil Frames Climate Change's Market Risks
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Abstract
For fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, public discourse is critically important, as appealing to the public- and investors- provides the capital that facilitates their growth and survival in the market. Despite the environmental and financial risks of climate change, there remains an acute disconnect between the outward facing statements of fossil fuel companies and their actual actions. My research partners the programming language R and Chat GPT4o-Mini with climate communication expertise to answer the question: how has ExxonMobil’s discussion of climate change within the “market levers” frame changed over time? In the past decade, ExxonMobil employed the “market levers” frame the most in June of 2019, March of 2021, and March of 2024, consistent with a general upward trend in frequency of the linguistic frame. 2015 reported the least number of press releases that included the frame, while 2019 included the greatest frequency. I conclude that ExxonMobil’s press releases discuss climate change via the “market levers” frame on a cyclical basis when calculated across a rolling 12-month average. This data provides a baseline for future climate communications research, beyond the scope of historical exploration. By employing R and ChatGPT, my work was able to examine a large corpus of climate change-related passages from Exxon’s press releases and identify patterns in the text that previous literature has been unable to manually identify. This primary data can be used to establish connections between different regulatory frameworks, financial risk, and climate-related communication in the energy industry at large.
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Cope , Julia
Kostick , Heather