1. Advertising as Ideological Production
In the Marxist tradition, ideology is not merely a set of false beliefs that float above material reality — it is material practice. As Althusser argued, ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, constituting their relation to the real conditions of existence. Chevron’s "We Agree" campaign, launched in 2018 with a reported budget exceeding $50 million, exemplifies this process in its most advanced corporate form. The advertisements do not simply lie about Chevron’s environmental record; they produce a world in which Chevron appears as a concerned partner in the fight against climate change.
The campaign features earnest employees, wind turbines, solar panels, and the repeated assertion that “we agree” on the need for cleaner energy. The pronoun “we” is carefully ambiguous: it refers simultaneously to Chevron the corporation, its workers, and the broader public. This linguistic move collapses the antagonism between capital and the communities that bear the ecological costs of extraction. The viewer is positioned as already in agreement with Chevron, a subject whose critical faculties are neutralized by the appearance of consensus.
This is ideological production in the strict sense: not the dissemination of misinformation, but the manufacture of a horizon within which Chevron’s continued extraction of fossil fuels is rendered natural, inevitable, even virtuous. The advertising does not argue; it interpellates. It produces the very consent it claims only to reflect. As we have seen with other spectacles of corporate legitimacy — from police body cameras to platform censorship — the image of accountability substitutes for accountability itself. Compare the function of Chevron’s green ads to the use of body cameras as a spectacle of police legitimacy: both produce a visible performance of virtue that forecloses structural critique.
The commodity here is not oil but the appearance of responsibility. Chevron sells a relationship to the future, one in which extraction and ecological survival are reconciled through technology and good intentions. This is fetishism in the precise sense that social relations (the destruction of ecosystems, the exploitation of labour) are replaced by relations between things — or rather, between images of things: wind turbines, forests, smiling engineers.
2. The Material Reality Behind "We Agree"
Chevron’s 2023 annual report discloses direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions of over 700 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent — more than the annual emissions of the United Kingdom. The company has increased its capital expenditure on fossil fuel extraction since 2020, including the massive Gorgon LNG project in Australia and deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. "We Agree" was produced by the same corporation that, according to the Carbon Majors Database, has contributed more to cumulative historical emissions than most nation states.
Yet the campaign focuses on a $2 billion investment in “lower carbon” technologies — a figure that represents roughly 2% of Chevron’s annual capital expenditure. The ads do not mention that the majority of this investment goes toward carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promises and that in any case does not reduce the immediate emissions from burning Chevron’s products. The International Energy Agency has stated that CCS is not a substitute for emission reductions, yet it functions perfectly as a discursive alibi for continued extraction.
The material reality behind the glossy advertisements is one of deepening accumulation on a damaged planet. Chevron’s profits in 2022 reached $36.5 billion — a record — while communities in the Niger Delta, the Permian Basin, and the Gulf Coast continue to suffer the consequences of contamination, displacement, and respiratory illness. The "We Agree" campaign is not external to this reality; it is a necessary component of it. Without the ideological production of consent, the political resistance to fossil fuel expansion would be far more difficult to manage.
Here again we see a parallel with the operation of ideological state apparatuses in the digital sphere: the production of consensus is never merely representational but actively constitutes the terrain of political possibility. Chevron’s advertising, like platform content moderation, shapes what can be said and thought about the fossil fuel economy.
3. Greenwashing and Commodity Fetishism
Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism in Capital describes how, under capitalism, social relations between producers appear as relations between things. The commodity form conceals the labour, exploitation, and ecological destruction that produce it. Greenwashing extends this logic: the commodity now also conceals its own destruction under a layer of green imagery. Chevron’s gasoline is not simply a commodity whose production conditions are hidden; it is a commodity that advertises itself as not destroying the planet even as it continues to do so.
The fetishism of the green commodity operates at two levels. First, the specific ads about renewable energy investments create the impression that Chevron is transforming its business model. Second, and more fundamentally, the very existence of corporate environmental advertising suggests that the solution to ecological crisis can be delivered by the same corporations that caused it. This is the ideological core of "We Agree": it displaces systemic contradiction onto corporate goodwill.
The campaign’s aesthetic borrows heavily from the visual language of the environmental movement: blues, greens, natural light, a soft-focus humanism. This is not accidental. Chevron appropriates the signifiers of ecological concern precisely to neutralize the movement they belong to. As Raymond Williams observed, culture is not a realm of free play but a field of struggle. The green image is a contested terrain, and Chevron has the resources to occupy it thoroughly.
But fetishism cannot be undone simply by revealing the “truth” behind the image — by pointing out that Chevron still extracts fossil fuels. The fetish is not a lie; it is a structural effect of capital’s need to reproduce the conditions of accumulation. Even if every advertisement were fact-checked in real time, the logic of the commodity form would generate new images of responsibility. The problem is not false consciousness but the material production of consciousness under capitalism.
4. The Limits of Consumer Consciousness
A common response to greenwashing is consumer education: if only people knew the truth about Chevron’s emissions, they would boycott the company or pressure it to change. This position, while understandable, mistakes the nature of ideological production. Chevron does not need people to believe the ads in a simple propositional sense; it needs them to act as if the ads are true — to continue driving, filling their tanks, and accepting the fossil fuel economy as the horizon of possibility.
Althusser’s insight is that ideology does not operate primarily through belief but through practice. The "We Agree" campaign interpellates the viewer as a subject who already agrees, who is already part of the solution, who can consume gasoline with a clean conscience. The material practice of driving to work, buying petrol, investing in oil stocks — these rituals are sustained by the ideological apparatus of green advertising. To critique the ads is not enough; one must grasp why they are necessary for capital.
The answer lies in the contradiction between accumulation and ecological survival. Capital must continue to extract fossil fuels to reproduce itself, but it must also manage the political consequences of that extraction. Greenwashing is not a public relations mistake; it is a systemic requirement of the fossil fuel industry in the era of climate crisis. The advertising does not persuade so much as it organizes consent. It provides a vocabulary for talking about the problem without talking about capitalism.
Consumer consciousness, even when “awakened,” is trapped within the commodity form. An individual can choose to buy a different brand of gasoline, but the structure of transportation, housing, and energy production remains unchanged. The choice itself reinforces the illusion that the crisis can be solved by individual decisions in the marketplace. This is precisely the function of corporate environmentalism: it channels political energy toward consumer behaviour and away from the collective transformation of production.
Chevron’s "We Agree" campaign is therefore not an anomaly but a model. It demonstrates how advertising functions as an ideological apparatus in the fullest sense: it produces subjects who voluntarily consent to their own exploitation and to the destruction of the conditions of life. The task of a materialist critique is not to expose lies but to trace the circuits of capital and ideology that make such campaigns necessary, and to insist that the only real agreement worth pursuing is one that abolishes the power of corporations to decide the planet’s future.