In my 25 year experience, the western oil and gas industry is on the balance very responsible when it comes to health, safety and environmental protection. I would much rather have Shell explore the Arctic than say Lukoil.

However, Greenpeace and other environmental activists are good part of the reason why western oil and gas companies are so concerned about the environment. In places where Greenpeace has low influence/support/visibility, things like this are pretty common:

http://www.tropix.co.uk/region_files/azerbajn_03.htm

I have dealt with enough pointy haired bosses in my work to realise that without effective activism, health, safety and environment would often be improperly compromised wrt cost, schedule and throughput.

In the west, corporate brands make easy targets, but since the companies want to protect their brands it is quite effective at making things better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires

Good point about Greenpeace keeping the oil companies on their toes. Sad though that it has to be this way.

To me drilling for oil - is almost money for nothing. I'm baffled that these companies aren't behaving more responsibly.

You might want to learn about the high costs of exploration and building rigs and wells and all the innovation that has been occurring for decades to extract greater percentages of more kinds of oil out of more kinds of places. Something like gold diggers in the 1800's might have been a lot closer to "almost money for nothing." Maybe even oil back then. But any resource that was easy enough to get for almost nothing has already been used.

BP's deepwater disaster indicates that not enough is being done to protect the environment, it hasn't stopped risky drilling. That should never happen again. Some of those profits could be turned over into environmental preventative protection. These companies smack of pure greed to me.

Some tech stocks profit margins: AAPL: ~30%, MSFT: ~30%, GOOG: ~25%. 3-4 times higher than Exxon. Do those companies all make money for nothing too?

Also here: http://ycharts.com/companies/XOM/profit_margin

Note that it was closer to 5% in Q2 2009.

I'm not rich - I drive because I want/need to, not because it's cheap. Sometimes I drive for fun, to get out of town for a bit, and I don't have the most fuel efficient vehicle, so that could be considered wasteful. If gas cost $5,$6,$10/gallon where I live (Chicago) I would still drive. Someone working minimum wage, students, kids, and retirees, increased fuel cost could prevent them from driving altogether.

Apparently there was a shift in European law, that now forces companies to tidy up after they've finished. Brought about after pressure from Greenpeace for Shell trying to ditch the Brent Spar in an underwater trough.

Quite how you'd do this with anything deep sea is beyond me. Worth a watch though.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Oil companies continue to exert immense influence over governments because of the taxes they pay and the contributions they make to politicians and their parties. That's meant to be "countered" with mundane jokes on fake twitter profiles and memes on reddit? Forgive me for being cynical. If anything it's a great situation for oil companies. It gives people the illusion they're actually doing something when really it means nothing and the status quo remains.

Citizen and consumer activism keeps the bastards (more) honest. One thousand motivated and angry citizens with a plan can act as a very good counterweight to hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing (and lobbying). Really!

Mundane jokes seem trivial, occupation of capped oil wells in the North Sea seem like a bit of a jape. But the effect of these and all the (cute) Greenpeace donation collectors is consciousness-raising and creation of citizens and consumers who ask hard questions, and that scares the politicians no end. It scares Big Oil too and keeps them (more) honest.

The status quo that you speak of is vastly different to that during the 80's and totally alien to the status quo in the 50's, at least in the rich West. Perhaps you've not really noticed the change. I've worked on and off in the oil and gas industry since the 80's and I see a vast, vast change both in the public's attitude, and also in the mentality within the companies themselves.

That, and not any conspiracy theory, explains everything.

But: there is a school of thought that without broad community support, all the hard work won't add up to much.

They might be partly right, I pay more for "green power" than my neighbours do for "glowing-in-the-dark power", and don't own a car despite how much easier it'd make my life. I guess someone's marketing worked on me...

There are people working on alternative energy. They get less subsidy money from the government than the oil industry, which is plenty profitable on their own. You can re-read that sentence if you didn't believe it the first time.

It takes all kinds. Science and PR to protect the science. The political can be very connected to the scientific when the industry threatened with displacement is very politically active.

I'm not going to weigh in on the moral aspects of this incident, as I don't particularly care. I'm far more interested in the mechanics of how this was pulled off, as it has huge implications for corporations, activists, and even political candidates. I could easily see some Obama supporter pulling something similar and creating a firestorm around the Romney campaign.

Love it or hate it, these tactics are here to stay. It will be incumbent upon entities with interests in online perceptions to guard themselves against these kinds of attacks and, should the pros outweigh the cons, engage in them as well.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiWlvBro9eI

Here's an earlier analysis:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/06/15/how-green...

I could easily see some Obama supporter pulling something similar and creating a firestorm around the Romney campaign.

Political campaigns already use similar tactics to create/shape news.

In the larger sense, lampooning ads is as old as advertising. They are pretty obviously not "real." Not sure why this is news.

I feel like the internet is becoming an increasingly dangerous place, and subtly so.

How come the combination of internet and activism is suddenly "dangerous", and not the pervasive and misleading propaganda we've been subjected to for generations?

Shell can no longer drown out the opposition with millions of dollars and now it's a problem?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/13/corporates...

http://www.care2.com/causes/shell-tries-to-greenwash-frackin...

Shell had responded to the challenge that the accepted definition of the phrase "sustainable development" was "development which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

Is that definition highly controversial now?

In any event, that certainly does not constitute a massive propaganda campaign against the public.

Well it depends how much they spent on it no? I'd guess that Shell spends vastly more on putting it's point of view across than Greenpeace is able to.

It's perfectly legal to mislead, confuse, shade, distort, bamboozle, trick, and distract. And you can lie outright if the lie is small. Or if it qualifies as puffery, which basically the kind of lie we have come to expect from people selling stuff.

For example, Shell can say "We care about the environment" and show pictures of frolicking wildlife. They aren't obligated to say, "but we care about profits more" and show some pictures of oil spills.

My favorite example is Airborne, a purported cold preventative that does precisely nothing. They lied in their advertisements for years and made fistfuls of money. After more than a decade somebody finally sued them, and eventually the FTC beat them down as well. The result is that they had to give some of their ill-gotten gains back, and now lie by implication rather than by direct false statements.

But that only happened because a) they were provably wrong, and b) they had enough money for class action lawyers to decide it was worth years of effort to take a whack at their money pinata. As long as your lie isn't provably costing money and provably false, you're basically golden.

I tried googling for some example campaigns, but I couldn't find any examples. I would assume it would almost be impossible to do so in the age of the Internet, reddit, facebook, and twitter. Do you have any examples of Shell drowning out environmentalist groups like Greenpeace?

For the record, this was also a top google result about a 2011 advertised claim being thrown out as misleading. http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2011/10/19/shell-ads-banned-ov... Not that it says much, I'm sure I can find instances of every multibillion dollar company lying (as well as Greenpeace and PETA).

It's about as honest a debate as a soviet election where all other political parties are banned.

Photochopped some ads, hosted them, put up a website, made a fake twitter account. Made fun of a company's brand by pointing out the downplayed environmental cost.

Yes, very different.

The dangers of the mob are very real though, as many people's lives have been ruined (or nearly ruined) through some misinformation that goes viral.

On the brighter side, there's quite a few exposés that we now witness that would have never seen the light of day otherwise (or would have been relegated to B-theaters, flea markets, and mail-order catalogs).

What we need is a more efficient legal process for online statements that cross the line into defamation, and better collaborative filtering (the whole point of sites like reddit is that the truth should out).

I am sorry but a LOT of the big, influential NGOs are very guilty of that and of abusing polemic and demagogy. They seem to think their generally just causes/ideals justify almost all means. Sometimes they are more clever to play their cards right like in this case, sometimes they do a really terrible job and it backfires like when they attacked Apple over the completely made-up energy consumption of a shared hosting facility. But either way they are and always have been consciously using rhetoric means to manipulate people or to at least be heard. This is nothing new - haven't you ever been stopped by them in the streets when they are trying to sign you up for monthly donations? The tactics they are using there are nothing short of slimy car salesmen and ripe with psychological mind-frakks. This is nothing the internet allowed to happen, it has always been there. But the "good old days" when mostly techs were using the web and when the general signal-to-noise-ratio was better are over.

They constantly try and damage companies, which has a very real flow-on effect on peoples livelihoods. Usually their campaigns are built on a base of lies and usually over something the target company has very little control over anyway.

The damage they do to legitimate environmental concerns with their jack-assery is untold. In truth they are just a corporate machine built to collect more donations.

I go out and pick up rubbish, help monitor local wildlife and generally try and help out. This afternoon I told off a pair of kids trying to destroy a tree for kicks and made sure they didn't come back.

The only people I meet from Greenpeace are very unpleasant and a Greenpeace shirt never appears at local cleanups and volunteer days.

No, not really. This is what charges of criminal impersonation are for.

Shell hope this will all just blow over. Litagation will not help it blow over.

You can bet Shell's legal team is already going over this in detail, and their response is not going to involve a bunch of retweet whoring on twitter.

We must destroy the village to save it? ;)

a.) Someone fakes a YC startup b.) Shell fakes Greenpeace

We will remember this moment as the fake wars.

Disinformation warfare.

As long as people live in a world where you have to turn on an engine to do ANYTHING - and participate in an economy that depends on and encourages over consumption, oil companies will continue to thrive. Humans will continue to burn shit to live the dream and humanity will carry on its march towards extinction.

Someone needs to find a way to convince people that using an automobile (or multiple automobiles) as a replacement for their legs is the real problem.

It's not like we buy gas because we love Shell. It's because we don't really have a choice.

A reasonable person should be able to tell the roast from the real deal - the original website was at the very edge of it, the Twitter account is right off the cliff.

So basically what you're saying is, impersonating people is wrong, but it's ok when we don't like the person/group being impersonated.

Do you have principles, or is your morality purely based on convenience?

Just like how its legal to shoot terrorists, but not Americans. All morality is based on drawing tribal lines, and BP isn't in my tribe.

http://imgur.com/OHq5z

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