The American Petroleum Institute thinks you’re stupid.
They must, anyway, to believe that anyone will be convinced by the ad campaign they’re rolling out and spending over a million dollars to promote. The two ads, thirty seconds apiece, are fairly short on content, and as always, long on a diverse cast, the likes of which are rare within the industry.
One ad laments the “noise” from pundits about energy, and claims the industry is focused on action and reducing emissions. The other seeks to convince viewers that when it comes to reducing emissions, they’re “on it.”
Neither addresses the fact that continued fossil fuel production is incompatible with a safe climate. Obviously. The industry wants you to believe that it’s reducing emissions. That’s nice, but it’s sort of an empty promise when anything more than zero emissions is too much. The oil majors are in no way going to get to zero emissions with continued fossil fuel use.
Nevertheless, this lie of an ad campaign is interesting in that it represents a fairly substantial break with API’s past denial of the problem. Like Trump’s claim that his move to revoke clean car standards will lead to more clean cars, or Shell’s effort to court The Youth through social media influencers, deniers are increasingly cognizant that the public is not on their side.
And they’ve long known that the science isn’t on their side either.
As far back as 1959, API was warned about the dangers of the greenhouse effect its product caused.
They were warned again in 1968 that rising CO2 concentrations would cause worldwide environmental problems.
Thirty years later, one might expect that they heeded those warnings and perhaps invested in researching new sources of energy, or developed ways to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Or, at a minimum, they could have invested in adaptation measures to protect the people they knew would be hurt by their product.
Instead they decided to go in a different direction, casting doubt on decades-old established science and planning campaigns to deceive the public about their product. In 1998, one of those planning documents was exposed by the New York Times, and in the decades since we have seen that plan play out.
Ten years after that embarrassment API was still at it, and still getting exposed. In 2009, API’s “Energy Citizens” astroturf effort was revealed as just that: a front group.
Now, it’s 2019, and API is still rolling out these ads claiming that it’s all about reducing emissions and being part of the solution. The industry has gone from trying to deny the reality of the problem, to trying to deny its responsibility for causing it, to trying to actually make you believe it’s solving it.
But API has known, for sixty years, that it is the problem. Sixty years of emissions, of carbon-pollution-fueled droughts and heat waves and hurricanes that they decided the public should pay for so the industry could profit.
Thousands of American deaths, and billions in healthcare costs can be laid at their greedy feet. And like the sea levels, those costs are only going to rise.
Pay your debts, API, then maybe we’ll believe you’re serious about solutions.
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