The American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry trade group with a muscular lobbying arm, is back again with even more desperate efforts to fight off the pending "climate bill," or indeed, any changes that might reduce their profits or move us toward a better balance of fossil and renewable energy.
There are two big API campaigns, especially visible and frequent on television (at least in the Washington DC area, where presumably API hopes they'll infuence Congress). One series ominously proclaims "yet another unfortunate truth" about effects of the climate bill. It turns out, however, there are only two unfortunate truths ($4 gasoline and 2 million jobs lost), both of which actually are fundamentally untruths.
A second series offers different seemingly "average" people expressing various negative views about taxes on energy. Look carefully on the screen for the disclaimer statement that these people are "real people," not paid actors. Huh? You missed it? That's because it isn't there. Clearly, despite the slick Madison Avenue effort to make them look like home videos by using bad, echo-y sound and little framing corners visible onscreen, these are professional actors mouthing lines put in their mouths by API.
Both ad campaigns suffer from the same kinds of exaggerations and ridiculous assumptions:
- A small increase in taxes would bankrupt giant companies like Exxon.
- The government is purposely trying to ruin our economy by making energy expensive and scarce.
- Energy companies are the valiant defenders of economic growth; they are the consumer's best friend, and their only interest is keeping prices affordable.
- Four-dollar gas and the loss of 2 million jobs will be the result if anything about the current pro-petroleum energy system is altered. (But wait: Didn't we just have those problems, and didn't they arise out of the current system, which API wants to keep?)
- There is no such thing as climate change, and no need to be concerned about it.
- Only the short term matters; efforts to put our energy policy on a sounder long-term footing are unnecessary. (Corollary: Let's use up all the fossil fuels on earth before we even start to consider renewable and less-polluting alternatives.)
A separate API front, the Partnership for Energy (www.energypartners.org), proclaims on its website that "energy isn't a dirty word." No, it isn't. Energy is a huge and critical part of our economic well-being, just as API argues; it brings jobs and prosperity. But the same might have been said of our American car manufacturers at one time, and now, of the Big Three, only Ford - more imaginative, more long-term oriented, and better managed than the others - seems likely to survive. As Detroit once scoffed at foreign competition and remained complacent in the face of the growing challenge from alternative brands and models, Big Oil is now running the risk of becoming similarly behind the times, refusing to see changes that are inevitably coming until it is too late. There's a clue in the fact that they call themselves the American Petroleum Institute, rather than the American Energy Institute.
API's members are (or can be) fine companies that can make profits for their stockholders even while contributing to building the nation. But basically, they've gotten too big for their britches, and their current short-sighted approach to the nation's energy problems threatens to make "energy company" a dirty phrase.
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