Stuffed up

One of the most prominent characteristics of early childhood is the little angels’ tendency to do the exact opposite of what they are told to do.

Mum says to not walk on the street? Of course you’ll make a point of walking on the street just to see what happens. Which is mum pulling you on the pavement and delivering a five-minute lecture because self-preservation is important, i.e. because if you don’t develop it you die before you get a chance to do so many interesting things. Repeat daily.

Dad says to not pick up that rock from the park alley because it’s dirty? First and urgent order of business is to pick up that rock to see what happens. Which is dad intervening with a wet wipe. Dad’s done it before and he will do it for as long as necessary. Until Kid learns to wash her rocks before getting down to examining them. True stories.

Most of us outgrow this tendency. But never entirely. To this day, I do not read bestsellers. I wait for a few years until the noise dies down and then I might read one or a couple. But not while everyone is talking about them. The more you talk to me about something, the more you advertise it, the less I want to have anything to do with it. I call it self-preservation.

It seems this tendency is quite widespread or at least more widespread than I’d expected, what with all those climate activists who seem to be crawling out of every crack and flowing out of every water tap. Apparently, they are still not the majority. And the majority is beginning to get fed up with the climate narrative. At least in some places.

Look at this lead of an FT article from last week: “Sir Keir Starmer is facing calls from some senior allies to rebrand the Labour party’s proposed flagship “green prosperity plan” to put more focus on its impact on the UK economy in terms of job creation opportunities and less on climate change.”

That’s the guy who said he will ban new oil and gas licensing for the North Sea of Labour wins the next election. The threat prompted a quick reaction from Scotland, where thousands of people are still employed in the offshore oil and gas business, not least because the many thousands of jobs in wind have somehow failed to materialise.

But that’s not all because now some in Labour itself are turning against the green fixation of people like Starmer. Per one senior Labour MP, “Voters care more about jobs than green stuff, it was always a mistake to call it the green prosperity plan.”

Really? No, really? You might dismiss that quote with a chuckle but in a world where people use the phrase “carbon pollution” in all seriousness, such demonstrations of mental lucidity are becoming rarer and, because of that, more valuable and worthy of appreciation.

In fact, voters care a lot more about jobs, electricity bills, and food prices than “green stuff” and may I just say how much I love this term? In further fact, I suspect many of them do not care one bit about green stuff because they have a lot more pressing problems such as all of the above.

Yet admitting this would be akin to wearing an “I heart Putin” T-shirt, so people don’t admit it. But they are increasingly admitting climate change is not among their top concerns. And that’s a very good thing. It’s a sign that hope is in order and not a moment too soon as regulators take aim at greenwashing in advertising.

I’m not a fan of the advertising industry and make no secret of it. Yet there are things that are too much, even for me. Things like this just-in decision by the UK’s advertising regulator, which banned three ads by oil companies. For greenwashing.

Apparently, Shell, Repsol, and Petronas wanted to promote some low-carbon projects but the Advertising Standards Authority clipped their wings because they were audacious enough to not mention in those ads how catastrophic for the planet their core business was.

The ASA argument goes as follows: you want to advertise your green-stuff business but if you want to do that you need to come clean about your long history of oil and gas, which are horrible for the planet and nobody who’d watch your ad would know about it unless you mention in specifically in the ads.

Because, you know, nobody’s heard of Shell before and nobody knows what Repsol does for a living, and many probably think Petronas makes camping gear or something. No, seriously, that’s what the ASA actually said, only not as politely as I just did.

Per the FT:

“Large-scale oil and gas investment and extraction comprised the vast majority of [Shell’s] business model in 2022 and would continue to do so in the near future”, yet the ads in question gave the opposite impression, the regulator said.

Repsol, meanwhile, “had a substantial oil and gas exploration strategy”, and the biofuels and synthetic fuels it had promoted in ads this year amounted to “a fraction of [its] business activities when compared to [its] substantial, ongoing, and expanding fossil fuel production”, the ASA said.

Similarly, the public would not understand the “extent of Petronas’ continuing significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions given the presentation and claims” in a 2022 ad, the regulator added.”

So it’s settled then. Either spill your dirty hydrocarbon guts in every ad you make for a wind farm or don’t bother making ads at all. Kind of Big Tobacco stuff, with the horrific pictures of smokers’ lungs on the packaging. It totally worked, too. I know at least a thousand people who stopped smoking because of those pictures. Yep. Thousands.

The information context today, in places like the UK the U.S., and Europe, at least, reminds me a lot of the way geese are raised for foie gras, although tortured would be a much more accurate word. And no, I haven’t tried foie gras and don’t plan to, thanks. I like my animals healthy.

Anyway, geese raised for foie gras are force fed through a tube until they develop fatty liver disease. Similarly, people raised for the net-zero world are being force fed with climate change propaganda until they develop fatty brain disease, which manifests as climate activism and lying on roads to block traffic. Possibly topless because… I really don’t know why they do it.

The climate change “food” is everywhere you turn for news but you already knew that. The bad news is that few notice it because it sneaked into the news stream so insidiously they ingested it without noticing and now they’re hooked, as in, “the science is settled”. The good news is that insidious or not, food, jobs, and electricity bills remain more important for most people.

These are, in fact, so important for people, they are now developing bill anxiety. That’s right. Brits are having anxiety attacks when they see their electricity bills. Clearly, no one opens their electricity or gas bill with a bottle of champagne close by but anxiety, even unconfirmed by a professional? That sounds bad.

Per The Independent: “One 44-year-old bill-payer from London told the consumer group: “The energy bills … just generally they are a nightmare. Like the kilowatts per hour, whatever they’re measuring, it’s just like, ‘Wow, oh my god, where do they come up with all this stuff?’ So yes, I find it a nightmare.”

“Whatever they’re measuring”, by the way, is part of the problem. It’s a big part of why the climate propaganda has been so successful. If you don’t even know what your meter measures and “where they come up with all this stuff”, you’re ripe for the plucking by your non-friendly neigbourhood climate activist gang.

They’ll tell you it’s all Big Oil’s fault and to beat them you need to support more wind and solar, and get an EV or we’re all going to die. And you’ll believe them. Until the next bill comes and the next one, and the one after it, and then maybe, just maybe, you would start wondering if what activists, the news, and the government tell you is actually true.

There’s always hope and that hope is based on the fact that most of us will always care more about our bills than our emissions.