Surprise! Under pressure, Big Oil digs up the tawdry 50-year-old tactics of Big Tobacco.
Remember the Tobacco Institute, the lobbying group for the smoking industry that, 50 years or so ago, claimed that the health consequences of cigarettes were “not proven” and that there was a “controversy” as to their ill-effects?
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Well, meet the American Petroleum Institute, which claims in a new $80 million campaign blitz called Lights On Energy that “U.S. natural gas and oil play a key role in supplying the world with cleaner, more reliable energy,” according to the initiative’s website.
“Cleaner?” Yup.
Launched Tuesday by the nation’s top fossil fuel interest group, the campaign will work to “dismantle policy threats” to the sector, the American Petroleum Institute (API) CEO, Mike Sommers, told CNN in an interview this week, pointing to green energy’s current minority role compared with fossil fuels. “Renewable sources have a role to play, but oil and natural gas will be needed for decades,” he said.
The campaign is not just a website — an eight-figure ad blitz will air on national TV as well as on digital media, seeking to convince both consumers and politicians that oil and gas are “vital to our energy future.”
Perhaps needless to say, the campaign has been met with anger and derision from environmentalists. For instance, Climate Power, an advocacy group founded by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club, slammed the initiative. “It’s no surprise that API is spending their money trying to hold back progress,” Alex Witt, Climate Power’s senior adviser on oil and gas, said in a statement. “Big oil and gas has bought the support of Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress, but they can’t buy American voters.”
And Caleb Heeringa, campaign director of Gas Leaks, a nonprofit attempting to counter pro-gas messaging, told The Guardian that the API’s claims ignore copious evidence that the world can — and must — begin to phase out fossil fuels.
“We aren’t saying we can turn off the spigot tomorrow,” he said. “But [the industry] is trying to expand the fossil fuel system, expand pipelines, expand fracking, and make more of our economy and our existence dependent on fossil fuels, even though clean energy is advancing at a rapid rate.”
Get ready for those ads.
