Episode 69

The noise from oil trolls, oil bots and Big Oil astroturfing has become deafening. Their aim is to overwhelm the climate movement - and thoroughly confuse the public - by posting vast amounts of misleading information and spreading crazy conspiracy theories as well as general nonsense, in very large volumes. They are a naked attempt at pushing Big Oil's agenda of perpetuating fossil fuels irrespective of the very high risk they pose to society's very survival. The Angry Clean Energy on what they are; what to do about them in an environment where Big Oil's obscene 2022 "profits" will likely power them into hysteria mode; and how this is consistent with Big Oil recently dropping any pretense about their goal of stalling - and then reversing - the energy transition.   

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

I have two themes I want to cover today, and they are very much related. The first is that big oil have announced absolutely obscene profits for last year, 2022. The second one is that I am delighted to share that apparently I've become somebody as far as the other side is concerned. Now, a caveat, I think I've become somebody, at least based on the number of oil trolls and assorted oil industry apologists somewhat recently turning up in force on my social media timelines on Twitter and LinkedIn, but elsewhere as well. There is some good news in both of these themes. It very much feels like the end of an era , the oil era that is now, that might seem counterintuitive, but all the signs are there and I will come back to that later in this podcast. Let's start with big oil profits. Here are the numbers for six companies total. The French made $36.2 billion and these were record net profits. Ecuador made $28.4 billion and these two were record net profits. Shell made $40 billion. These two were record net profits. Exxon made a whopping $56 billion, and these two were record net profits. Chevron made $35.5 billion and in its case two , they were record net profits. And finally, BP made $27.7 billion and these two were record net profits. That's a total of $223.8 billion in net profits for just these six companies, or as someone calculated, that's $110 million in profits per year every year since Christ was born. Now you might say well done them, but you shouldn't because these were fake profits and I'll come back to that later in the podcast too. I wanted to talk about the oil trolls first, to make everyone's life simpler, I asked chat g p T to explain these oil trolls for me and it replied, and I'm quoting. Oil trolls are individuals or organizations who spread false information or disinformation about the oil industry or related subjects in order to manipulate public opinion or influence policy decisions. These strolls may operate online through social media forums or other platforms and may use tactics such as post misleading information, spreading conspiracy theories or amplifying divisive narratives. The goal of oil trolls is often to protect the interests of the oil industry or to discredit its opponents. End of quote . Then I asked Chad g p t to explain big oil astroturfing, which is a related concept, and it replied, quote , big oil astroturfing refers to the practice of oil companies or their representatives creating fake grassroots support to influence public opinion or policy decisions in their favor. This can involve creating front groups or fake social media accounts that purport to represent ordinary citizens who support the oil industry while hiding their true association with the industry. The goal of big oil astroturfing is to create the appearance of widespread public support for oil industry interests and to counter public opposition to those interests by creating a false image of consensus. These companies hope to influence government policies and regulations and to sway public opinion in their favor. End of quote . Hmm . So much to unpack there . Welcome to episode 69 of the very angry, this Time clean energy guy with me, Assad Razu . I am so happy that you're here. Thank you . Okay, let's go back to the oil trolls. If you go to my Twitter or my LinkedIn profile and you look for yourself, what you'll see is that they are all over them. Then just for fun, go to the Twitter accounts of other loud voices in climate and clean energy, and guess what? You'll find them there as well in big numbers from my research, some most likely a minority are real people, most, however, seem to be coordinated sophisticated campaigns of related accounts that repeat standard lines, and I've spent a few evenings researching this, and what I found is that these bots have lots in common. First, many seem to have joined Twitter recently, and that's as recently as this month. Second, there's an incredibly high correlation between these bots and making America great again, many are not surprisingly enthusiastic fans. They're also apparent patriarchs and they believe in the Constitution as if everyone around the world is supposed to know what they're talking about. They're also very often pro-life, except of course they can't even see the irony in that particular position that's being pro-life, yet at the same time trying to wipe all of humanity off the face of the earth. They're also pro guns . They're entertainingly revolution freedom fighters as well. And interestingly, many are against help for Ukraine, for example. They are righteous bots rebelling against the climate scam, the United Nations controlling the world. Of course, those of us in league with the World Economic Forum, whatever that means, I could go on, but you get the picture. Third, they have funny names, things like Death swap one or Traveling Agro or BAA 7 3 6 1 7 4 2 7 or M U K or neural guesswork or AJ K 5 3 9 360 46 . And in the case of those that I was able to verify are actual human beings with some agency and I've checked over a hundred accounts, 90% seem to be from the US with a minor dose from the UK and then a tiny, tiny dose from Australia, and you wouldn't be surprised. Yes, they are overwhelmingly white men . Now, their observations, if you want to call them that are all over the place. They range from the insults. Things like your brain is dead to memes and misleading snapshots of the energy transition, and I'll give you a few examples. One of my favorites is that we don't have enough minerals for the energy transition. Now that has been very thoroughly debunked by study after study, and ironically, if you actually went a hundred percent clean energy, 92% of all mines would be gone and 42% of all shipping tonnage would also be gone. So not only do we have enough minerals for the energy transition going a hundred percent clean energy actually safeguards the environment to a much larger extent than the wanton destruction that fossil fuels are causing. Remember, we already know where to get the lithium, for example, for 10 billion full electric vehicles . Some of their other favorite techniques are to pick and choose short timeframes, and of course if you pick a timeframe, you can always document a assertion, and then if you graph it and you color it and you send it around, you can make a lot of noise. Other observations are, for example, that c O two is not pollution and is needed by trees to make oxygen. And then that argument goes that we've tricked everybody to think that c O two is pollution and that actually resonates with some because of the semantics that are being used smartly. I might add carbon dioxide of course is not technically an air pollutant, however, it's the concentration of c o two in the atmosphere which has been driven by the fossil fuel industry, which is the problem and the principle driver behind climate change. But you can see how some hidden force is trying to dilute the conversation to obfuscate the facts and to spin them. Another favorite is how the entire energy transition is some kind of conspiracy aimed at not allowing the third world to benefit from inexpensive energy. And note that these people are, I think the only people left that still use terminology like third world, but moving right along, they're of course ignoring the fact that coal, oil and gas have already left more than 2 billion people behind, and that these 2 billion people's only hope to actual energy is decentralized clean energy. Then there is the pro plastic bots closely related to the oil trolls since plastic is 99% oil. And there their main argument is that it's not the manufacturers that are responsible, it's us, the consumers. Now, of course, that would true if the manufacturers weren't manufacturing poison to begin with. Surely if you're manufacturing poison, you shouldn't be selling it freely and without a recycling infrastructure that comes with it and without product liability that goes with it as well. Now, after these types of arguments, you have the one word answers , let's say nonsense or climate scam or climate grift with sometimes doctor charts and memes, these war rooms of bots because that's what they are, have clearly been set up to spout a barrage of nonsense against health, against climate action, against clean energy. And that community of oil trolls links nicely with big oil astroturfing in a show of mutual support between the two. Now, here is the astroturfing playbook. Remember, astroturfing is about groups that look like grassroots movements, but most certainly are not. So how do you go about that? First, you set up a group with an appealing name like Texans for natural gas or woman for natural gas. Oh yeah, these exist and here are a selected few others, Californians for energy independence, Oregonians for Sound fuel policy, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the American Coalition for Ocean Protection concerned mineral owners of California, not their all Americans. So first you set up one of these groups then because you're lazy, you borrow stock photos from the internet and on top you borrow the names of real people from the internet, and then you concoct fake quotes for these people. And once you've done that, you advertise the hell out of this. And how do I know that? You will see that this is actually very well documented, and I will leave some links to some fantastic research done on this topic in the show notes. Now then after you do that and you've advertised you trick towns and legislators mostly in the United States, actually almost exclusively in the United States into voting down climate legislation. And how do you do that? You inundate legislators with talking points and then you make it seem as if this is coming from some sort of a vox popule so that they are tricked into thinking that this is the voice of the people when that could not be less true. Now, interestingly, all this is relatively new. In other words, you know, oil trolls were there a year or two or five years ago even. But their enthusiasm and the level of their activity have picked up enormously really in the last six months, maybe 12. And what does that tell me? It tells me first that they're getting increasingly desperate. They're also cowards. Why? Because if they are real people, they're not using their real names. And if they're bots, then the manipulators behind them are the cowards. And then the other thing that I picked up is that their strategy is one of shock and oh , because what they're effectively trying to do is they're trying to discourage people from expressing themselves on social media through abuse and through the sheer volume of crap that's generated. When you say something sensible or you report a fact, if that fact doesn't fit the narrative of big oil, then they are all over you. But the one thing not to do is to be discouraged, and that's not very difficult. You just have to ask yourself the question who pays them and why? And that's when we need to get back to big oil and to their profits. If you remember, as I said earlier on this podcast, just six oil companies made 223.8 billion in 2022. So we're not even counting the big state owned ones like Saudi Aramco. But I would guess that collectively the oil and gas industry must have made over $500 billion in profits in 2022 or even more. Now, these are the very same companies like ExxonMobil, for example, which steadfastly refuse to acknowledge any responsibility, let alone admit to their wrongdoing in delaying action for 40 years, to the extent that they've given us a humongous bill to pay, but also to the extent that we should be looking for them to pay reparations. Now, I guarantee you, they know that they're populated with very smart people and these very smart people know that they're at risk. But I'll tell you something else that they know. They also know that their profits are fake. Why are they fake? Just look at ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil added through the oil and gas that it sells 630 million tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere last year. That's as much as all of Canada, for example. Now, if you offset Exxon's profits of $56 billion by a climate destruction charge of a hundred dollars times each ton of greenhouse gas that they and their products have created, you actually get to an economic loss and a loss for all of us of $13 billion. And the math is simple. Take 690 million tons of emissions, multiply that by a hundred dollars as a carbon price, deduct that from 56 billion of profits, and you get $13 billion of loss, not just loss to ExxonMobil, as I said, but a loss to all of us. And if you do the very same math to the profits of Shell, Chevron, BP or total, you are going to get to the same conclusion. As a matter of fact, if you do the same math for any oil and gas company, you will get to the same conclusion. These are loss making companies. They've been loss making for decades, but their profit and loss statements have hidden that loss. They have not allowed the public to see it. That hidden loss, however, which turned magically into profits have allowed these companies to perpetuate their deception because they have been supported by banks and the capital markets and lawyers and consultants, all of whom have been paid from these fake profits to do more damage than we would have had had. We actually reflected their impact correctly in their financial statements. But something very interesting happened the last few weeks. The super interesting thing that happened the last few weeks is that now that they've made all that money, they decided to drop the pretense. The good news is that you can now see their true colors. If you had made the mistake of giving them any benefit of the doubt over the past two decades or so, they weren't very subtle about dropping the pretense. They just came out and said it. They have been pretending over the last few years that they were embarked and supportive of the energy transition. They announced net zero pledges, they advertised their clean energy efforts continuously everywhere you can turn. But Shell first came out of the blocks and told investors that they plan to slow their investment in renewables and instead invest heavily in natural gas. Now, many of you know that natural gas is dirtier than coal. And what was Shell's excuse? Shell's excuse was between the lines that renewables were not as profitable, implying their investors should be very happy about them not actually doing much at all on the energy transition. Now, of course, renewables aren't as profitable as oil and gas. Oil and gas is more profitable because it is sold without shell having to pay for the wanton destruction of lives, of health, of livelihoods and of the planet. And then after Shell, BP announced that they also would expand their investments in fossil fuels, of course, using their war profiteering profits, while at the same time they were going to cut their climate targets. Now that led ExxonMobil to be very, very jealous, and they decided they could not miss this party. And they then announced that they're gonna spend $25 billion on oil and gas developments this year alone and another $50 billion on dividends and share buybacks. Now, Exxon is also the very same company that's been spending hundreds of millions of dollars advertising its investments in algae biofuels. And that was its primary tool to pretend it cared about addressing climate change and about the energy transition. But guess what? Exxon also announced that it was killing the whole program. No more algae biofuels as far as they're concerned. And I remember those Exxon advertisements starkly 'cause they kept appearing on my LinkedIn profile and I kept complaining to LinkedIn asking them to get them off my timeline. So they were everywhere. What you might ask might the oil executives be thinking, and frankly it's not that hard to guess, and their behavior now gives it away in clear. First, they know the writing is on the wall for their businesses. Second, they also know that their futures will be defined and bogged down by climate litigation. Third, they also know that they probably won't be around in 2030 and definitely not in 2050. And so it's impossible to avoid the blunt truth, which is basically that they don't give a. What they're going to do is they're going to fight any litigation tooth and nail while continuing to focus on maximizing extraction, maximizing their pretend profits and maximizing, most importantly their take home pay. And what's driving all that is the fact that the real problems simply won't be on their watch. And they know that they'll keep doing what they're doing until they no longer can get away with it. But the sad truth is that at the moment, they continue to get away with it. And what is it? Well, it's the oldest trick in big oils. Books privatize the profits and take them home while socializing the costs of their activities, primarily pollution, environmental destruction, a plastic pandemic, a climate change crisis, all of which are paid for by society and not by them. I think you could probably see that I was particularly angry this episode. Sorry about that. But what comes with that anger is even more determination to persist. So I will continue to do on social media on this podcast in books exactly what I'm doing, which is acting on climate as I do with my day job. And speaking of my book, by the way, I released a book called Saving the Planet Without the in December Worldwide. If you like the podcast, you will really enjoy the book and you can buy it wherever you buy your books. I would say this, however, to close, we've got to be very careful with these oil trolls, bots and big oil astroturfing. It needs to be called out, but at the same time, it's completely pointless to engage in a debate with a bot. And so what is it that we are supposed to do about it? I think the most effective thing to do is to basically continue to act on climate in the ways that are shown to be most effective. And these are relatively straightforward at work. Three or four people are a climate movement. Try to affect your employer from within whatever industry you work in. Every single sector of the economy is affected and every single sector needs to transition to zero carbon. You can simply start at your cafeteria, for example, or if you work for a law firm or an insurance company at vetting clients , clients destroying the world probably should not go through the new client approval process, for example. Then of course, find NGOs that are making a huge difference and back them . In my case, I am a trustee of Client Earth, which uses the law as a lever to affect climate action at scale. I'm also a trustee of Singapore based EB impact, which is focused on delivering training and programs to Asia Pacific's underserved communities with the goal of generating positive sustainable development impact from the bottom up. I recently agreed to become an ambassador for the National Oceanography Center as well, and that allows me to dedicate sometime to the oceans. The oceans are essential to human survival, yet they're being destroyed by climate change, by overfishing, by a plastic pandemic, by oil spills, by sewage discharges. And I could go on, but the point is that anyone can find three NGOs to be associated with in any way that they can afford and contribute to acting on climate that way. Then other than at work and by supporting an N G O , the other thing we can do is we can protest. We have to protest. Now, protest takes different forms in different countries, but I think every climate activist and everyone that caress can find a way to express themselves via a protest within their communities or their countries or their regions. These protests must be peaceful, but they can be very powerful. And then finally, communicate. Communicate on social media. Communicate within your social circles, communicate via podcasts, communicate via books. If you can communicate in any manner that you can think of, each one of us can find something that works for them to act on climate within their own means and within their own circumstances. I've outlined some of what I'm doing to act on climate and in saving the planet without the, you'll see that I've also spent a good part of the book trying to help people navigate through the fog of ineffective climate actions that we are being sold via the oil trolls, the astroturfing, and a lot of their predecessors in terms of big oil propaganda techniques. In order to stay focused on actions that matter, we need to make sure that oil trolls and big oil astroturfing doesn't distract us from acting on climate. And on that note, thank

Speaker 2: 32:39

You so much for listening to this episode, 69 of the Angry Clean Energy guy with me, ESAD Zu , and have a wonderful couple of weeks.