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hatrack

(59,436 posts)
Fri Nov 20, 2020, 07:30 AM Nov 2020

Greentrolling May Not Actually Change Much, But Under The Circumstances It's At Least Understandable

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Greentrolling is catching on. Earlier this month, Shell tweeted a poll asking “What are you willing to change to help reduce emissions?” Every corner of Climate Twitter had something to say about it. “This you?” said climate activist Jamie Margolin, sharing a photograph of a 2016 Shell oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The Sunrise Movement tweeted, “omg cute!! we’re still gonna prosecute your execs for lying to the public about climate change for 30 years though!!!” Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York also chimed in. It was the first time that an oil company had “ever faced significant backlash for greenwashing on social media,” according to Heglar. For days afterward, Shell, Exxon, and Chevron stayed silent on Twitter.

For more than a century, the fossil fuel industry has been fine-tuning its propaganda machine. From 1986 to 2015, Big Oil spent more than $3.6 billion on ads to clean up its image. This often took the form of “greenwashing” — a type of spin that gives the appearance of environmental responsibility while destruction continues behind the scenes. You might not know that oil companies were still mainly in the oil business by reading their tweets. Abbey Dufoe, a digital content strategist at the Center for Climate Integrity, recently analyzed six months’ worth of Big Oil’s posts. Dufoe found that Exxon, BP, Shell, and Chevron were tweeting about drilling operations and gas stations about 8 percent of the time. The rest of their feeds told stories about renewables, carbon capture, the ostensible cleanness of natural gas, and so on.

People appear increasingly aware of these public relations tricks. Over the past decade, Americans’ support for oil production has dropped considerably. Oil companies are now one of the least-trusted industries. If public support craters, as some industry leaders worry it might, oil companies could be in trouble, with their share prices plummeting and employees quitting their jobs.

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Others make the case that Big Oil’s steps toward sustainability should be recognized — at least it’s something. This year, several oil companies announced pledges to work toward net-zero emissions (although when you read the fine print, some of those promises sound less impressive). Heglar is unsatisfied with their incremental steps, to put it mildly. “The whole entire world is on fire,” she said. “And they knew about this shit decades before the rest of us. So no, you should have been leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else. You could have stopped this whole entire crisis. And now you want to wait until we’re at the tipping point, and you want to talk to me about a f***ing hydrogen farm in China?”

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https://grist.org/energy/greentrolling-a-maniacal-plan-to-bring-down-big-oil/

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