Consider the following excerpt from a 1995 advertorial published by theoil and gas conglomerate known today as ExxonMobil:To those who think industry and nature cannot coexist, we say showa little respect for Mother Nature. She is one strong lady, resilient andcapable of rejuvenation. The environment recovers well from bothnatural and man-made disasters.... Does this justify or lessen theimpact of industrial pollution? Of course not. Our main point is thatnature, over the millennia, has learned to cope. Mother Nature ispretty successful in taking on human nature.1The ad is often pointed to by social scientists as illustrative of a distinct genreof climate change denialism, in which fossil-fuel corporations sowed doubtnot by denying the phenomenon of global warming but by naturalizing it.Comparing ExxonMobil’s public messaging with its private reports, Geof-frey Supran and Naomi Oreskes have shown that ads like these were part ofa public relations campaign meant to downplay the risks of climate change,mounted while the company’s own scientists were internally sounding thealarm.This essay, however, contends with a different dimension of this marketing strategy. I am concerned less with the social or political ends of ads like