How Oily Is Big Oil’s Latest PR Campaign?

Jim Hightower's Lowdown

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If you’re concerned about fossil fuels and climate change, consider an energy source that, according to its backers, will make everyday living “comfortable and healthier.”

What is this miraculous substance? Oil.

Huh? Yes, that filthy scourge of our planet and health, is being ballyhooed as our globe’s energy and environmental salvation! By whom? Of course: The American Petroleum Institute, the powerhouse lobbying front for ExxonMobil and other petro-profiteers. API recently bragged that it will pour tens of millions of dollars into a PR Blitz during this year’s presidential election to demonize clean energy sources and demand that government promote more fossil fuel production.

API’s campaign slogan is “Lights On Energy” – but the luminosity of its media message is mighty dim. Start with the fact that Big Oil has zero public credibility, having routinely gouged us on prices for years and knowingly lied to us for decades about not causing climate change.

Second, the demand by oil barons that government “quit intruding into the free market” by encouraging alternative energy is a whiney embarrassment. Hello – for more than a century, oil corporations have gorged on billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer handouts – and they are in line to keep getting $2.5 billion a year in corporate welfare for the next decade! (Didn’t their mommas ever teach them not to talk with their mouths full?)

Also pathetic is their partisan wail that President Biden is restricting their production and profits. Hello again: US oil production reached a record high last year, Big Oil’s profits are soaring, and they’re now jacking up our gas prices again. Meanwhile, 2023 was the hottest year our globe ever recorded.

Let’s reflect the heat back on these greedheads. For facts and action items, go to fossilfree4health.org.