Why some of your favorite podcasts are filled with oil company ads

Exxon and other fossil fuel companies are running podcast ads that suggest they are taking aggressive climate action. Climate experts call them greenwashing

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.