How the fossil fuel industry's new pitch is more like an epitaph than a life lesson

Extract from The Guardian

New fossil fuel advocacy group launched to celebrate an industry that’s driving dangerous climate change

Old oil fields around Azerbaijan. Most of these towers are left over from soviet-era oil mining, dating back to the late 1800s. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Graham Readfearn

Wednesday 17 August 2016 17.08 AEST 

Bright and glistening with all the glory of youth and promise, her eyes glance upwards. A jet crosses a cloudless sky.
A field of wheat sways in the breeze. She opens her arms in a wide embrace, open to the horizon.
“This moment we’re in didn’t just happen,” muses the narrator as an uplifting orchestral score builds. “We didn’t just arrive here by luck.”
The scenes in the new online commercial are cut fast.
Metronomic oil derricks pump at dusk. A dawn runner burns city streets. Sausages sizzle. Coffee bubbles. A ballet dancer stretches. A devoted new dad kisses a newborn’s head (there’s always a rent-a-baby).
Then, once we’re feeling all that collective love for humanity that we’re all known for, we finally get to the punchline.
“Using oil and natural gas to build cities, connect populations and achieve a goal at the heart of the efforts of men and women. The ability to provide.”
Yep. It’s a new advert for fossil fuels and it tugs on our hopes and aspiration with all the subtlety of a dog tearing at your trouser leg.

New campaign video from fossil fuel advocacy group Fueling U.S Forward

This slick effort comes from a just-launched “non-profit” group called Fueling US Forward, reportedly financially backed by the oil billionaire Koch brothers.
So no conflict then.
The group’s president, long-time fossil fuel industry figure Charlie Drevna, says he wants the group to remind people “out in the real world” how fundamental fossil fuel energy is to their lives.
Of course, not mentioned are the widespread global impacts of climate change from the increasing risks of bushfires to rising sea levels, extreme heat and the acidification of the oceans.
The Koch brothers have been pumping millions of dollars into organisations that spread doubt about the causes of climate change while fighting attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s true that since the start of the industrial revolution, the vast majority of the world’s energy has come from digging up and burning long dead plants and animals.
While it was good for a while (forgetting the oil spills, polluted waterways, smog, acid rain and whatnot), scientists have been warning for decades that if we don’t break that nasty habit, then the impacts will be wide, expensive and, for some, unliveable.
But the Fueling US Forward campaign is just the latest in a desperate bid for moral superiority from the fossil fuel industry.
In 2015, the peak mining lobby group launched its “Little Black Rock” campaign to tell us about the “endless possibilities” of coal.
But the campaign appeared to backfire. Polling suggested public support for coal dropped during a campaign that was mercilessly mocked.

Comedy group A Rational Fear released its own version of the coal industry’s “Little Black Rock” advertisement

In February 2014, major coal company Peabody Energy launched its “Advanced Energy for Life” campaign to convince the public and politicians that coal was the only way to bring poorer countries out of poverty.
Australian politicians, from the current and former prime ministers down, have embraced the coal industry’s talking point.
But Peabody’s current financial state is analogous to its “energy poverty” argument and the wider plea from the fossil fuel industry to keep on burning. Bankrupt.
According to figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and reported in the Financial Times, the world’s 20 biggest economies are shifting away from fossil fuels. In the last five years, the share of electricity coming from renewables has jumped 70 per cent.
It’s fine for the fossil fuel industry to remind us of all the great things coal, oil and gas helped the world to achieve.
But campaigns like Fueling U.S Forward, with all their stock images and cynical baby-kissing should be seen as the lament of a dying industry.
They’re an epitaph, not a life lesson.