Eight-Figure Big Oil Ad Buy Will Feature Tractors, Football And The Gaza War - Gosh, I'm Getting All Teary-Eyed

The American oil lobby has launched an eight-figure media campaign this week promoting the idea that fossil fuels are “vital” to global energy security, alarming climate experts. “US natural gas and oil play a key role in supplying the world with cleaner, more reliable energy,” the new initiative’s website says.

The campaign comes amid record fossil fuel extraction in the US, and as the industry is attempting to capitalize on the war in Gaza to escalate production even further, climate advocates say. Launched Tuesday by the nation’s top fossil fuel interest group, the Lights on Energy 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. The ad blitz – which uses images of farm vehicles, footballers under floodlights and concert goers holding phones lit up – comes after US oil production reached a record high in 2023, which was also the hottest year ever recorded.

“We’re already moving in the wrong direction on fossil fuels,” said Timmons Roberts, professor of environment and sociology at Brown University. “They want to push us further.” Roberts said the new ad blitz is rife with the kinds of “discourses of climate delay” that the fossil fuel industry commonly uses to thwart climate action, as documented in a 2020 study he co-authored on the topic. A video ad posted on Tuesday, for instance, says “demand for energy is growing and so is the need for American oil and natural gas”, positioning the sector as essential to continued human flourishing – a form of discourse Roberts and his co-authors call an “appeal to wellbeing”.

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The ad blitz states that gas use led to a drop in CO2 emissions, but fails to mention the attendant rise in emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more planet-heating than carbon dioxide in the short term, Heeringa said. It also refers to the “reliability” of gas-powered energy, “despite significant gas system failures” during weather emergencies such as 2022’s winter storm Elliott and 2021’s winter storm Uri. The campaign comes amid industry claims that Israel’s war in Gaza will threaten energy security by inhibiting the flow of oil out of the region.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/10/oil-ads-lights-on-energy