Bad Taste In The Mouth From Greenwashing Campaign

“Corporations like Shell turn to advertising to make killing everyone seem actually kind of cool”, writes Darren Cullen, an artist and writer, in New Internationalist. This is a leading independent media organisation dedicated to socially conscious journalism and publishing.

“Make the Future is the latest in flimsy greenwash PR from an oil company pretending it can save the world from oil companies”, he continues about this “festival of unbelievable bullshit”, a four-day event organised by Shell in London next week. “The amount of money they’ve thrown at this thing is staggering.”

Shell’s propaganda might be paper-thin, he explains, but advertising doesn’t need to make sense to be effective. 

The plan, like most greenwashing marketing campaigns, is simply to clobber millennials over the head with the message that Shell is an ethical, environmentally-conscious company until enough of them start to believe it.

Together with other artists, the author designed anti-Shell posters, pin badges and t-shirts. Shell sent him a letter saying to stop selling the products.

Cullen says other oil companies aren’t better, “but Shell’s greenwashing campaign leaves a particularly bad taste in the mouth”. He mentions the company’s accelerating investment in destructive oil and gas extraction techniques such as shale oil, its history of human rights abuses, lobbying against climate legislation and climate change denialism.

An accelerated transition away from and abolition of the oil and gas industry is the only thing that gives human civilisation (alongside millions of other animal and plant species) a fighting chance of survival.

He is in favour of nationalising oil and gas companies to force them to invest heavily in a replacement zero-emission energy infrastructure based entirely on renewables, as well as manufacturing thousands of turbines and solar panels.