g ExxonMobilImpact.

Key Finding · Admission architecture

• ExxonMobil does not hide that its emissions are going up. It says so directly, it is projecting a 6% increase in full life-cycle absolute emissions by 2030. That is not greenwashing in the traditional sense. That is something more deliberate.

• It leads its sustainability communications with the position that nobody is doing more.

• A company projecting rising emissions through 2030 while claiming industry leadership is not making a performance argument. It is making a framing argument.

• Then there is the proposed Carbon Emissions Accounting framework. ExxonMobil advocates replacing the GHG Protocol (the global standard every other company in this dataset uses) with its own methodology. The practical effect is not improved accuracy. The practical effect is that ExxonMobil becomes incomparable to any peer. You cannot benchmark a company that controls its own protocol.

• They disclose unflattering data just honestly enough to protect itself against accountability, while building the structural conditions that make meaningful comparison impossible. This frames their company as if nobody is doing better than them in the minuscule good ExxonMobil is accomplishing, and that the standard that every other company is being compared to, does not apply to them since they are using their own framework to determine how successful their sustainability efforts are.

• To put this all simply, ExxonMobil is not hiding the numbers. It is hiding behind them.