Big Oil, still trying to cast doubt on global warming, turned to the oil-friendly and Exxon-funded American Enterprise Institute in January to buy a "report" disputing the UN’s decisive global warming study.
Big oil should choose its friends carefully, because sometimes the people hired to make them look green and compassionate realize they’ve been played for fools, and go public. Shell hired a dozen big thinkers to examine corporte practices after Nigeria executed Shell critic and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995. A decade later, Simon Longstaff, one of Shell’s dozen and the director of Australia’s St. James Ethical Centre, told how he saw the company "turn it into a PR exercise as soon as we had finished," Then, in 2006, adman John Kenney talked about how betrayed he felt after working on BP’s green-tinted "Beyond Petroleum" ad vampaign. In a New York Times commentary Kenney describes his sunny belief that the project was more than advertising. But he concludes: Looking at it now, “beyond petroleum” is just advertising. It’s become mere marketing — perhaps it always was — instead of a genuine attempt to engage the public in the debate or a corporate rallying cry to change the paradigm. … They didn’t go beyond petroleum. They are petroleum.