Contribution short abstract

This study investigates how companies use LinkedIn Ads to promote greenwashing and technosolutionist narratives around the energy transition. More than half of the 2,800 analyzed ads promoted misleading environmental claims, normalizing disinformation and reinforcing climate delay.

Contribution long abstract

Greenwashing has become a central component of the broader ecosystem of environmental disinformation, reinforcing climate-delay narratives and shaping public debates on sustainability. This study investigates how ads on LinkedIn have been mobilized to promote misleading claims about the energy transition in Brazil by focusing on the prevalence of greenwashing and on how it is used to distort the climate debate. We collected ads from the LinkedIn Ads Library using an iterative sampling strategy based on keyword searches, combining API requests with scraping. We retrieved 2,800 relevant ads, which were qualitatively coded for signs of greenwashing and classified according to the company’s business sector. The results showed that 1,476 ads (52.87%), published by 389 companies (42.5%), leveraged greenwashing. High-impact sectors, such as oil and gas and mining, frequently promote allegedly “clean” or “sustainable” solutions, even when their practices cannot be considered fully green. The analysis highlights the rise of technosolutionist narratives that promise rapid, technology-driven fixes to systemic problems, thereby neutralizing climate justice demands and displacing political and social dimensions of the transition. These strategies normalize environmental disinformation, reinforce climate delay and hinder transformative change in the energy system. By demonstrating how corporate advertising operates as a device for meaning-making and social legitimation, this study offers insights to understand and challenge power-reproduction strategies of polluting industries within the context of the energy transition. Overall, the analysis shows that LinkedIn is a strategic space for reputational environmental communication, in which consistent patterns of potential greenwashing emerge across sectors.