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exxon valdez
'All of Our Tricks Worked': Spoof ExxonMobil Ad Nails Just How Easy It's Been for Big Oil
"Do you have any idea how easy it is to get you off our backs with a little bullsh*t about your responsibilities to the planet?"
Jul 09, 2024
A new parody ExxonMobil advertisement released Tuesday by a group founded by Adam McKay—the Academy Award-winning writer and director of the blockbuster doomsday climate comedy Don't Look Up—mocks humanity for letting Big Oil get away with causing one of the biggest existential threats of all time.
"There's a world we all want to live in again. A world where the air is pure and crisp and clean and fills your lungs with joy. A world where you can drink water from any river or creek and your house will still be there tomorrow if it rains," the narrator of Yellow Dot Studio's latest parody video says in the two-minute clip. "Here at Exxon, we believe in that world, and we're working hard to make sure that our customers believe that we believe in that world."
"We understand the road has been bumpy, and we haven't always done the best we could," he says over footage of the Exxon Valdez disaster, in which more than 10 million gallons of crude oil were spilled in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.
Wow, this new Exxon ad is surprisingly candid. pic.twitter.com/FYEf2GNdGE
— Yellow Dot Studios (@weareyellowdot) July 9, 2024
The voice-over continues:
Sure, our own scientists accurately predicted climate change 60 years ago. But we didn't want you to know about it. That's why we spent billions on ads and media manipulation covering it up, then we rigged the government so leaders in both parties would do our bidding, and yes, we did everything in our power to block clean energy tech so we could keep force-feeding you oil via expanding global infrastructure, monstrous vehicles, and disposable plastics and chemicals that don't go away. Ever.
The video follows the recent conclusion of a bicameral Senate investigation into Big Oil's decades of spreading climate disinformation and obstructing a green transition—after which lawmakers called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate fossil fuel giants. There is also a nascent movement urging state and local prosecutors to go after the oil and gas industry for climate-related deaths.
"And yes, every now and then you squawk about how evil we are, but then we drop gas prices a nickel and you shut right back up," the narrator says. "Do you have any idea how easy it is to get you off our backs with a little bullshit about your responsibilities to the planet? About your carbon footprint? Pretending plastic recycling actually makes a difference?"
"You're letting us get away with it, you dumb bitches" he adds mockingly. "All of our tricks worked. The world is a burning, out-of-control charnel house. The last generation to die of old age has already been born, and you still let oil executives freely show their face in public."
"We're just one company but you're 7 billion people," the video concludes. "Get off your asses and do something, you fucking peasants!"
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The Katrina Oil Spill Disaster: A Harbinger for the Atlantic Coast?
When Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast 10 years ago, it set off a disaster of many parts -- and one of those parts was an oil spill catastrophe.
Aug 28, 2015
When Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast 10 years ago, it set off a disaster of many parts -- and one of those parts was an oil spill catastrophe.
In fact, Katrina turned out to be the worst U.S. oil spill disaster since the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska. The storm resulted in an estimated 8 million gallons of oil spilling onto the ground and into waterways from Louisiana to Alabama. Both of those incidents have since been surpassed by the 2010 BP spill in the Gulf, which affected some of the same areas as the Katrina spill.
The Katrina oil disaster offers important lessons for residents of the Atlantic Coast -- another hurricane-vulnerable region that may soon be opened to offshore drilling. Federal regulators are now considering whether to include an area 50 miles off the coast from Virginia to Georgia in the 2017-2022 Outer Continental Shelf drilling lease plan.
Katrina made its initial landfall in southeastern Louisiana in Plaquemines Parish, a center of the oil industry, as a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. The two single largest spills resulting from the storm occurred in Plaquemines: one involving storage tanks at the Bass Enterprises site in Cox Bay that dumped 3.78 million gallons of oil into the environment, and another from Chevron's Empire terminal in Buras that released 1.4 million gallons.
There were also spills in more populous parts of the state, including an incident involving a ruptured storage tank at the Murphy Oil refinery in St. Bernard Parish just east of New Orleans that spilled about 1 million gallons of oil, affecting as many as 10,000 homes in the surrounding neighborhoods.
In 2006, the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS), since reorganized into the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, issued a report on damage to oil and gas infrastructure resulting from Katrina as well as Hurricane Rita, which made landfall on Sept. 24, 2005 as a Category 3 storm along the Texas-Louisiana border. MMS found that together the two storms damaged a total of 457 pipelines, 101 of those major lines of 10 inches or more in diameter, and destroyed 113 offshore drilling platforms. A 2007 study for MMS reported that the storms also resulted in about 750,000 gallons of petroleum products spilling from offshore platforms, rigs and pipelines.
President George W. Bush's White House acknowledged the enormity of the Katrina oil disaster in the official administration report on the storm, "The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned":
Much more than any other hurricane, Katrina's wrath went far beyond wind and water damage. In fact, Hurricane Katrina caused at least ten oil spills, releasing the same quantity of oil as some of the worst oil spills in U.S. history.
In the years since Katrina, however, politicians friendly with the oil and gas industry have tried to erase the reality of the storm's impact on the Gulf's energy infrastructure and the resulting pollution. That effort to rewrite history intensified in 2008 after President Bush, a former Texas oilman, reversed decades of presidential policy by proposing to expand offshore drilling to new areas, including the Atlantic Coast.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, now running for the Republican nomination for president, told Fox News in the wake of Bush's drilling announcement, "That's one of the great unwritten success stories, after Katrina and Rita, these awful storms, no major spills." Around the same time, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, also currently running for the GOP presidential nomination, said that "not one drop of oil was spilled off of those rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico" when Katrina hit.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory -- who's now leading the charge for Atlantic oil and gas drilling as chair of the industry-managed Outer Continental Shelf Governors Coalition, despite strong opposition in coastal communities -- also weighed in during his unsuccessful 2008 gubernatorial run, claiming that "we didn't have one oil spill due to Katrina."
Minor storms, major spills
The claims of politicians aside, Hurricane Katrina showed that when major hurricanes hit oil-producing regions, they can cause major oil spills. But another lesson storm-prone Gulf Coast communities have learned over the years is that even minor hurricanes can lead to significant spills and pollution.
Consider Hurricane Isaac. On Aug. 28, 2012, the relatively mild Category 1 storm made landfall in southeastern Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi River. A year later, the Gulf Monitoring Consortium (GMC) -- an alliance of environmental advocacy groups launched to collect, share, and publish data on pollution in the region -- released a report examining Isaac's impacts.
"Despite the relatively unremarkable nature of the storm, GMC documented numerous examples of pollution from infrastructure failures at fossil fuel transport, storage, and refining facilities during and after the storm," the report stated. "These failures included inadequate levees which allowed contaminated water to spill into surrounding wetlands, waterways, and communities; insufficient storage capacity to handle stormwater and/or wastewater during predictable high-rain events; tanks and railroad tanker cars shifted or upset by the storm and floodwaters, and other weaknesses."
Among the spills related to Isaac that GMC documented:
* The Marathon refinery in Garyville, Louisiana, dumped 12.6 million gallons of untreated stormwater runoff from its process areas into Lake Maurepas.
* Oil wastewater overflowed the collection system at the Phillips 66 refinery in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, which is located on the Mississippi River.
* Though the Valero refinery in St. Charles Parish shut down before the storm, it still experienced a spill of 47 gallons of slop oil, including 7.8 pounds of cancer-causing benzene.
* Satellite images and flyovers taken after the storm documented an oil slick from a closed Chevron offshore well as well as oil leaks at other offshore sites and from oil production and storage facilities.
"In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Isaac, it became crystal clear that companies are not taking the action necessary to safeguard their facilities," Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network, a GMC member, said at the time.
Besides causing acute oil-spill crises, hurricanes can also lead to chronic leaks -- a lesson learned from the ongoing Taylor Energy oil leak a few miles off the Louisiana coast.
When Hurricane Ivan moved through the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 3 storm in September 2004, it triggered an undersea landslide that toppled an oil platform formerly operated by Taylor Energy. The New Orleans-based company has attempted to halt the leak, but it continues 11 years later.
SkyTruth, an environmental watchdog group based in West Virginia, has used satellite images and pollution reports to estimate that between 300,000 and 1.4 million gallons of oil have spilled into the Gulf from the Taylor Energy site, and the leak shows no signs of tapering off. Federal officials have said they think it will continue for another century until the reservoir is empty.
SkyTruth President John Amos, a geologist, has called the Taylor leak "a dirty little secret in plain sight."
Oil and land loss
Polluting spills are not the only hazards created when the oil industry and hurricanes mix: The combination also drives coastal land loss, making inland communities more vulnerable to storm damage.
One of the reasons Hurricane Katrina was so destructive, causing damages estimated at $108 billion, was that the flooding and storm surges it brought were made worse by the loss of protective coastal wetlands to open waters. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost nearly 1,900 square miles of coastal lands -- an area about the size of Delaware. The state's land continues to disappear into the Gulf of Mexico at a rapid pace, with an area about the size of a football field lost every hour.
Louisiana is losing land so rapidly in large part because of oil and gas industry activity: the tens of thousands of wells drilled and thousands of miles of pipelines laid and canals carved into coastal wetlands (see U.S. Geological Survey photo of the Louisiana coast above). Every cut made in the wetlands allows the Gulf's saltwater to intrude, which in turn kills soil-anchoring plants and trees, allowing more land to slip away.
The oil and gas industry itself has acknowledged causing 36 percent of all wetlands loss in southeastern Louisiana, with other estimates putting that figure as high as 59 percent. However, the industry is fighting local governments' efforts to make it pay for restoration, which could leave taxpayers to foot the bill.
Also contributing to land loss are levees, which starve coastal lands of fresh sediment and natural land subsidence. In addition, rising seas are becoming an increasingly important factor in coastal land loss -- especially under an energy policy that encourages burning oil and gas. At the same time, the global warming exacerbated by burning fossil fuels is contributing to more intense hurricanes.
The area of the Atlantic Coast from Virginia to Georgia where drilling has been proposed is already extremely vulnerable to hurricanes and sea-level rise. North Carolina is among the most hurricane-prone states in the nation, having experienced 46 hurricanes in the period from 1851 to 2004 -- the fourth-most after Florida, Texas and Louisiana. In that same period South Carolina was hit by 31 hurricanes, Georgia by 20 and Virginia by 12.
Meanwhile, scientists have identified a "hotspot" of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic Coast from North Carolina's Outer Banks to Massachusetts, where seas are rising three to four times as fast as they are globally. Norfolk, Virginia already experiences street flooding during ordinary high tides. Recent studies have found that North Carolina's Outer Banks face a sea-level rise of nearly 5.5 inches over the next 30 years, while an earlier study found the ocean off the state's coast would rise 39 inches in the next century. And in South Carolina's Lowcountry, up to five feet of sea level rise are expected by 2100, while Charleston is already experiencing more frequent flooding.
Atlantic Coast communities face a perilous future from a warming climate, rising seas and more destructive hurricanes. Adding oil to the mix will heighten the dangers they face, as Hurricane Katrina showed.
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Diary of a Disaster: 6 Months in the Gulf
What it’s like to respond to an environmental and democratic crisis—and where we go from here.
Jan 12, 2011
America awoke the morning of April 21 to learn that BP's well, the Deepwater Horizon, had blown out in the Gulf of Mexico and was on fire. Eleven men were dead. BP began dumping dispersants (toxic chemicals that sink oil) into the Gulf and lies into the media.
I had left Alaska on February 10 for another round of national talks on the democracy crisis and how we can take back our government... from the corporations. My phone went berserk with media requests. Lisa Marie, my assistant and friend, asked when I was going down to the Gulf. "I'm not," I said. She knew better.
For both of us, it was deja vu. During the Exxon Valdez oil spill 21 years earlier in Alaska, Lisa Marie had worked with traumatized children and families. She worked for several years as a board member and volunteer for the Cordova Family Resource Center. With my doctorate in marine pollution, I became a spokesperson for the commercial fishing industry, testifying in the state legislature and Congress for stronger spill prevention measures and working to ban dispersants, and then starting the Copper River Watershed Project to help the community recover from long-term socioeconomic impacts. Lisa Marie knew I needed time to process my own memories that surged afresh with BP's blowout, the inept government-industry response, and the lies.
It took me a week to come out of my foxhole. I thought about all the mistakes our community had made after the Exxon-Valdez spill, of all that we'd learned during our decades of fighting. All of the communities in the Gulf will make the same mistakes, I thought glumly... unless someone warns them. Suddenly I realized that someone was me.
On May 3, Lisa Marie and I flew to New Orleans. She had a return ticket; I did not. Before the flight, a black limousine took me to a studio in Denver for an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!; a black limousine picked us up in New Orleans for an interview with Anderson Cooper on AC 360. The pace didn't slow down for five months.
From May through early October, I drove back and forth across the Gulf, giving community talks and workshops that evolved with the needs:
May
Shared Exxon Valdez stories and encouraged people to come up with a Plan B-how they could help themselves instead of waiting for BP or the federal government to make them whole as Exxon had promised, but failed, to do in Alaska.
In the town of Jean Lafitte, one Cajun fisherman stopped me mid-talk and begged, "Miss Riki, c-a-a-a-a-lm down!" A week later, my southern hosts had figured out how to "handle" me: "Miss Riki, she's high-strung. You gotta sit 'er down and feed 'er!" That worked.
June
Ordinary folks across the Gulf are turning to covert operations, grabbing cameras to document and report oil sightings and dispersant use in coastal seas.
Encouraged people to take air and water quality samples to document the damage from the spill and the threat to human health (the federal agencies' sampling programs found nothing to support the outbreak of respiratory illnesses and skin "rashes" that residents were experiencing). We amassed documentation of "disappeared" evidence.
A security guard in Florida hid behind bushes to take photos of BP-contracted Waste Management employees dumping wildlife carcasses in a dumpster. She sent the photos from her cell phone. "You can see the bush in the picture!" says Lisa Marie.
July
Encouraged people to take blood samples to link their illnesses with the high levels of oil and dispersants they were finding in their air and water. They tested outdoor swimming pools, rain, bayous, and beach sand.
August
Following massive use of oil dispersants in heavily populated coastal areas, dealt with extremely sick (and now dying) people. (The federal government and BP still deny this occurred, though federal investigators now have documentation. I believe the spraying was done to keep up appearances that the oil was "gone"-conveniently in time for mid-term elections.) Found medical doctors to properly diagnose and treat people as doctors in the Gulf were diagnosing anything but chemical illnesses. Encouraged those challenging re-opening of commercial fisheries, as they were still finding lots of evidence of oil and dispersants.
In Bayou La Batre, Alabama, two state officials tried to convince an audience of fishermen that it was okay to fish in coastal waters. Finally, one exasperated fellow boomed into the microphone, "I am a coon ass, not a dumb ass!"
September and October
Same as August.
In Louisiana, folks are calling the renamed Mineral Management Services, an agency captured by the oil industry it is charged with regulating, "Bummer"-for Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE). It fits. BP and the Coast Guard call the oil that still washes ashore "algae." It's not. The new joke in Louisiana is to go to BP stations and ask them to fill up and check the "algae."
In mid-October, I resumed the national tour that was interrupted in April, finally finding my way home on December 6 after being gone for 290 days! Cordovans showered me with thank-yous, hugs, and "'atta girls." It felt great.
Now
Now I'm back in the Gulf. There's a lot on my list, from continuing the work of banning dispersants to finding a university that will partner with community organizations to conduct a 20-year study on the health impacts of the spill on Gulf residents.
The story isn't over. Indeed, this story has the potential to unite Americans in a serious commitment to transition off fossil fuels , starting with a permanent ban on deepwater offshore drilling. It's also an opportunity to confront the dangerous expansion of corporate power -for the people I've met here, watching the government protect BP instead of them has been more instructive than anything I could tell them.
It's not too late to make sure the outcome of this spill is not, as it was twenty years ago, a return to "oil business as usual."
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