shell oil versus octavia-cortez and thunberg

Es­ti­mated reading time is 1 minute.

GLOBAL CON­GLOM­ERATE SHELL OIL (aka Shell Global and Royal Dutch Shell PLC), one of the gi­ants in the fossil-fuel in­dustry, had what was in­tended as a pub­licity move turned on them from var­ious sources. This in­cluded tweets from two promi­nent names in the green en­ergy movement.

An ar­ticle ti­tled “Shell’s cli­mate poll on Twitter back­fires spec­tac­u­larly” on The Guardian web­site opened with these lines:

“A cli­mate poll on Twitter posted by Shell has back­fired spec­tac­u­larly, with the oil com­pany ac­cused of gaslighting the public. The survey, posted on Tuesday morning, asked: What are you willing to change to help re­duce emis­sions?

Alexan­dria Ocasio-Cortez, the bane of all things re­gres­sive, tweeted, “I’m willing to hold you ac­count­able for lying about cli­mate change for 30 years when you se­cretly knew the en­tire time that fossil fuels emis­sions would de­stroy our planet.”

Greta Thun­berg chimed in with, “I don’t know about you, but I sure am willing to call-out-the-fossil-fuel-companies-for-knowingly-destroying-future-living-conditions -for-countless-generations-for profit-and-then-trying-to-distract-people-and-prevent-real-systemic-change-through-endless greenwash-campaigns.

(I should have tweeted back at them “Brava!” but I don’t use Twitter un­less it’s tied to a pe­ti­tion I signed.)

Both tweets were fol­lowed by the usual re­sponses of rabid rightwingers, in­cluding such doozies as:

•  “And this was a fossil fuel free tweet made from your or­gan­i­cally grown iPhone”
• 
8% de­vel­oped na­tions who achieved the status by burning Fossil fuels have no right to preach the rest that now they should not use fossil fuels as it is harmful to nature.”

Both points are correct.

Nei­ther point has any­thing to do with the orig­inal tweets.

(I should have tweeted back at them some­thing clever but . . .)

To read the ar­ticle in its en­tirety, click HERE.

 

Shell Oil: photo of Shell refineries in Texas.

FEA­TURED  IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page is of a Shell re­finery in Texas. The com­pany was ac­cused of “end­less green­wash” as Twitter users pointed out its con­tri­bu­tion to the cli­mate crisis. (The photo was taken by Gre­gory Bull for the As­so­ci­ated Press.)

 

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