12-04-07 by dugan
"Hoaxers Target Big Oil." That’s an irresistible headline in OilWatchdog’s plush consumer-financed corporate headquarters. The story in the sober British Guardian newspaper was straight-faced, about a fake promise appearing on an expert fake of an oil industry-financed consortium’s website:
"Environmental campaigners today appeared to have opened up a new
front in the battle against Big Oil over climate change when they
established a bogus website and sent out a press release committing BP,
Shell and others to a 90% cut in carbon outputs by 2050 with no strings
attached.
"The internet portal looked identical to the one run by
the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a consortium of 33 prominent
corporations and organisations, except that the news section of the
mocked-up copy included a news release proclaiming "major businesses
announce commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions by 90%"."
Way deep in the Guardian story was a surmise that The ‘Yes Men’ were behind it. To me, that seemed right on target. It’s absolutely their MO.
Never heard of them? That may be because they’re British, but they’re funny enough to turn Michael Moore green with envy. I first ran across them in "The Yes Men: Cutting the Corporate Crap" a 1999 documentary of their satiric appearances as accidentally invited speakers at World Trade Organization meetings. (Rent it from Netflix, since you can bet that Blockbuster won’t carry it.)
But first, take a look at their fake Halliburton website. Read the executive "Survivaball" hoax. Some of the rest of it is "real" Halliburton stuff picked up from the company’s site. Some of the links are dead. But persistence pays. Scroll down on the left side to "Oil Issues (practical) for the truest statement Halliburton never made about its business model. It’s the model of faking a fake.
In any case, I turned out to be wrong, and that’s a good thing.
The Yes Men website explicitly invites imitators to pick up the cause of fakery and satire, and a group called Rising Tide has acknowledged the latest prank, according to Wired magazine online. The fake was good enough to briefly get picked up by mainstream news organizations including the Dallas Morning News, though the "Climate Action Partnership" website has been taken down.
Bottom line: The world needs all the free satire it can get when Chevron, for instance, can spend $15 million to make one greenwash ad insisting that it’s not a "corporate titan."