Shell using Fortnite, TikTok, etc. to convince kids fossil fuels are cool
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
It was the build up to the AFL grand final and there was a presenter on a football field with kids kicking footballs in the background.
Anyway, he introduces the segment and it turns out it's a paid promotion for Shell. The show then cuts to a 2 minute promotional video for Shell fuel.
Once the promo ends, he tells the kids that whoever kicks a goal gets a $1000 petrol voucher, as he waves a stack of these petrol vouchers in front of the camera.
I don't get easily offended, but I've honestly never seen anything more disgusting in my entire life.
The US government runs a prominent advertising campaign on the theme "if you let your baby sleep with you, you are a bad mother".
I mean, infants are typically warmer than adults and they wriggle around a lot - it's hard enough to sleep next to them, much less within suffocation distance.
This part of the reply to my SO's question about this. Later he explained that it's mainly drunk/high people who suffocate their children like that.
You only need a sufficiently wide bed and separate covers for the parents - that's it.
That's a lot of people!
> You only need a sufficiently wide bed and separate covers for the parents
Why even take the risk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37796452
> they got into a weird position between a very very drowsy mum and some cushions and we didn't notice.
> parent is not sober and essentially knocked out unconscious.
Parent of newborn sleep deprivation is extreme.
Try watching some documentaries about Tiananmen Square or Uyghurs. I am curious if this statement will still hold.
But, the fact that I have a problem with this relativization of everything does not mean I think problems people do not consider "the most disgusting" should not be tackled.
Look at my country for example. Corruption in local government affects me more that what is going on in China. I can also fight it more that what is going on in China. And, in the end, I care about it more in the "daily on my mind" sense of the word. That does not mean I should label it as being objectively worse or "most disgusting ever".
Let's be real here, if you object to youth directed marketing you should have been up in arms loooooong before now. Fact is targeting kids has been basic corporate strategy 101 for decades.
Tobacco in media. Coke/Pepsi. Cool cars, women, selling kids on "the Police are the good guys". In fact, your opinions about what is appropriate to shoehorn into children's formative years tends to say volumes more about what you are about than about anything else.
That being said, I agree the gas vouchers telegraph a blatant desperation move.
Pick a lane ;).
That's a pretty bold statement to make. I don't know what kind of isolated world you live in if you think that a Shell ad is the most disgusting thing you ever saw in your life, but I can give you a hundred examples off the top of my head.
One example that might be related to this subject are working conditions in a lithium mine and the purification process. If people knew the price we pay to drive EVs I'm convinced they would stick with oil. Just because it all happens in China and it doesn't affect us directly, doesn't mean it's any less disgusting.
I am also getting seriously tired of this constant need for censorship which is a contradiction in an open-market economy. You should compete, not sabotage. Instead of looking for ways to ban Shell ads on TV, why doesn't the EV industry offer vouchers too?
As for your comment about EVs, I don't necessarily disagree. My main outrage is that they used children to sell oil.
As for your comment on competition, how can you expect to compete against big oil without regulation, possibly the biggest most powerful industry in the world? The problem is that there is nothing better than oil for what it does, which extends to the other problem that open markets don't care about externalities or planetary boundaries. Which is where people need to come in and put restrictions.
I'm curious, but would you have been against the breaking up of Standard Oil back in the day?
On the contrary, oil is what's primarily funding the invasion of Ukraine. Think of all the people being killed as a result of that conflict. Or for the civil wars that oil ends up creating i.e. Sudan.
I think ultimately the point is that the 3rd world always loses in the end. They're the ones who suffer most from the ambitions of Western nations, irrespective of their intentions.
I'm not quite sure I get your counter-point to competition. We already heavily regulate the oil industry and subsidise EVs. We tax fossil fuels, we tax ICE cars, we favour EVs in city centres and we even brought in a law to completely ban purchasing new ICE vehicles by year X. If your product is so great, it shouldn't need government intervention to promote it; and Musk's Tesla company is a great example of that.
My original comment addressed the illusion that most Westerns live in and downvoting just proves that. Service-based economies seem to be removed from reality and don't understand the "disgusting" things that have to take place in order for them to function. Like someone said in another thread, if you're really concerned about morals then you will probably have to throw your entire PC out the window.
EDIT: > I'm curious, but would you have been against the breaking up of Standard Oil back in the day?
Sorry I am not aware of that so can't comment.
Don’t ask the West. Ask India that had the choice to leapfrog fossil fuels and be energy independent, at higher cost.
People don’t care about our opinions. They want the cheapest options.
The only way to transition out of fossils for energy, is to make the alternatives cheaper and easily accessible. US transitioned from coal to gas within 10 years when the economics became favorable.
We are subsidizing fossil fuels by deferring their actual real cost to the future. We can and should stop doing that.
If not climate change, then there'll be other instances like this where what's good for the individual (country) is bad for the world.
You can require an implementation and oversight of a carbon tax as part of a trade deal.
We’ve literally enforced a thousand different rules on the world as a collective species. Stop pretending this one is different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_minimum_corporate_tax_r...
A couple of years ago, this was touted as impossible - "who can impose this global tax you dream of?" was said back then as well. Why should it be impossible for countries to come together like this, with agreements to implement tariffs against countries outside the agreement?
So more tax on food and energy to the poor. Great idea how to start a riot.
And do it in a way that the poor people do not revolt and topple the governments because of the crazy high prices in goods.
The valid debate is how fast can we go towards this direction(aka how much should we ask people to pay to fund the transition). And there is no single right answer for this.
Renewable energy is also cost effective compared to fossil fuels in many cases and has been for years. This also excludes the massive externalities of fossil fuels.
True, making it cheaper is the best way, which should involve not subsidising fossil fuels and subsidising renewables.
Alas, none of this has anything to do with fossil fuel companies advertising to children, not sure if your a contrarian or a shill but your take is totally off topic.
Then there are all the externalities that are not part of the cost of fossil fuel costs today, start charging for the pollution and make the real costs explicit. The next thing, stop subsidizing road construction and maintenance for car drivers, and make only car owners pay the costs of all the roads, people would again see more explicitly how much more expensive cars are, which would get people to shift to other options (the vast majority of which are not EVs and won’t be for a long time). People might opt to bike for anything shorter than a 3 mile errand, deeming the car to be too expensive, or use the local bus or transit system…
Point being, these fossil fuels are supported directly by our governments and many of the primary users of those fuels are also supported by our governments (some more than others like here in the US).
If you want to argue we should levy a trillion dollar tax on fossil fuels that's fine but let's at least be direct about it instead of the somewhat misleading statement that it's a subsidy, like it's some giant pile of cash the state is handing to the oil companies. It's not even that it's giving tax breaks (that would be an explicit subsidy), it's that these taxes didn't exist at all.
You're essentially arguing not being taxed to oblivion as being directly supported by the government.
We should probably just end all of those "subsidies" and loopholes in general.
Sorry for misunderstanding and missing what you were quoting. My overall point still kind of stands though, a lot of these "the government is subsidizing the oil industry trillions of dollars" is usually talking about these implicit costs that aren't taxed like they'd like.
The USA is still the biggest polluter, even with 1/5 the population of China.
Also, making the technology viable and proving it so is the only solution.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271748/the-largest-emitt...
Sure, if you're talking per capita, US people emit more carbon dioxide but with your "even with 1/5th" and "the biggest polluter" it suggests you're thinking total not per capita.
They produce and install more solar panels then every other country combined.
I guess having companies build out maps and use their assets was going to be a side effect of having user created content.
Company sponsored games aren’t new (80d had 7up-spot and cool-aid man). One of this years biggest movies is a doll brand. However I don’t think they’re fooling anyone.
The kicker at the end of the presentation: Sponsored by Exxon Mobile.
Both BP and Shell are likely aware of this and are now trying to target public transport advertisement and online communities, where they think they will probably win over Gen Z.
However, what I mean is degrowth, Greta type gen z people seem to be somewhat rare.
Tbh I don't have any research or polling data on hand, but I seem to remember gen Z being FAR more conscious of the environment (climate change and plastics pollution), their own health (drinking/smoking) and global social issues.
I can't believe this exists, it's almost funny. Maybe they can do Depend Adult Undergarments branded content next.
I doubt that the sentiment is universally shared, though. There are still large groups in denial about climate change, even though heat record after heat record is broken.
It's not really strange that people don't get that argument though right? Since the heat records are only a few 100 years old at most.
If "climate change is real and a problem, because weather heat records" is supposed to be a logical narrative then I can totally understand that people don't follow that logic and just tune out.
I trust the science about global warming, but the logic in those papers is very very far from "climate change is real and a problem, because weather heat records".
Anyways, it’s not like those that “tune out” when you point out heat records are being broken every year would listen if you gave them truly scientific arguments.
The only difference now is that people are more aware of it.
It is why Santa is dressed in red. Why people buy diamond engagement rings. Why cigarettes were readily available for literally decades after they were already known to be harmful. And why American gun control laws have never matured despite all the evidence that proves the status quo isn’t viable.
Tbh I don't think this has anything to do with marketing. Guns are just a part of our culture regardless of whether we want them to be or not. If we were capable of changing this we'd be capable of doing a hell of a lot of other things, too, instead of sitting on our hands and loudly babbling about individual freedoms as a form of politics.
Guns literally are part of the founding od America. We got the second Amendment precisely because England tried to do things like take guns and quarter soldiers. Guns are and always have been part of American culture. I would also research the history of gun control the U.S, it may surprise you.
Guns are the founding part of basically every country, because in the end “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”.
You got the second amendment for the same reason the French got paragraph 35 of the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1793: «Quand le gouvernement viole les droits du peuple, l’insurrection est, pour le peuple et pour chaque portion du peuple, le plus sacré des droits et le plus indispensable des devoirs.», because when their newly founded state relied on people's insurrection to exist, they made sure that they wrote their fundamental texts in a way that guarantees it. Then the political structure of the US made the constitution very stable compared to the French ones.
The second amendment's history was then co-opted by the NRA in their marketing campaign, but this has little to do with what the second amendment is really about, that “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”. And the current gun culture is in fact mostly “conservative culture in the Reagan era and after”.
Reagan put the first gun restriction laws of California in place because of the Black Panthers. I wasn't defending him.
"Owning slaves is just a part of our culture regardless of whether we want it to be or not."
And I know what you're thinking: "comparing owning guns to owning human beings is wrong". Yes, but saying that something is "our culture" and can't be changes is just plain silly. Especially when it comes to guns.
However, the constitution does have the 3/5 clause which is 100% about slavery
Anyway, the constitution was written to specifically enable slavery, so your point is moot.
This was true for the confederate south.... Denying this doesn't seem to get us anywhere.
Anyway, my point was not that this can't be changed, that's what you brought to the conversation.
If gun culture was so fundamental to peoples beliefs then the NRA wouldn’t need to spend as much on lobbying as they do. The entire reason that culture hasn’t changed in the last hundred years is because of marketing, not in spite of it.
Sure but you haven't shown how advertising drives specifically gun culture. Someone's eighteenth gun? Sure, but that's a rounding error in terms of gun ownership.
> if gun culture was so fundamental to peoples beliefs then the NRA wouldn’t need to spend as much on lobbying as they do.
You're conflating marketing a product to a market and bribing politicians to not restrict the sale of guns. There isn't any overlap.
I disagree. In the case of gun ownership, lobbying creates the market, and the more generalised marketing helps to grow it. They're two tines of the same pitchfork.
Lobbying is, after all, just highly focused marketing at specific demographics (politicians) and in often underhanded ways.
If we're discussing the market, there's several billion other tines you missed.
Culture is driven by marketing.
Amending the constitution is legit really hard.
The constitution is vague, so it’s upto interpretation. And Supreme Court judges aren’t elected.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-claus-that-refreshes/
It probably helped cement that as the standard image of the character, but that was becoming the default look anyway.
Yeah it existed before, but it wasn’t the standard representation. And now it absolutely is.
Green movement has spent the last 50 years opposing nuclear power, otherwise we would have decarbonised at least 90% already (like France has).
After all, nuclear power was brand new. And the pollution and death if one goes bad...
Fossil fuel companies opposing it I can understand: it’s a straightforward, strategic move.
For green proponents, I think it was an own goal, likely driven by a mix of fear and failing to realize that people would not readily temper their demand for energy and the holistic solution needs to include humanity harnessing substantial amounts of energy. Ruling out nuclear directly (in a single step) means decades of people creating gigatons more emissions from burning fossil fuels.
I can tell someone is going ask you for your "solution."
You know what the solution is, reader? Either support pro-nuclear policies until something better comes along, or shut up about climate change. In my experience, every single person who views climate change as an impending catastrophe responds with "but what if" when asked about nuclear. This is a widespread form of insanity. If we are headed for catastrophe, or extinction according to some, then the purely hypothetical world-ending events related to nuclear reactors shouldn't be any more of a problem. Personally, I'll take 100 Chernobyl-like events over extinction and a dying planet. Think that's crazy? Do the math.
according to wikipedia it cut the required farmland to feed a population in four. obviously it's hard to argue with more food for more people, but it clearly made urbanisation and overpopulation that much easier. quite a brilliant invention of engineering, but is it actually a good thing for a population to grow at that rate?
Renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels in many cases.
No one thinks fossil fuels were not essential in getting us to where we are.
At 1pm when sun is shining. For the rest of the time you need to run backup ... on fossil fuels. This is the main reason why Germany is unlikely to decarbonize in a near future.
They announced to the staff one day that they landed a deal with Shell to produce videos about their science investment initiatives. I was disturbed by this and had chats with various decision makers. I was told that it would have a positive impact and celebrate the good investments, which would encourage Shell to do more good things! I wish I wrote down details, it was ridiculous. But they went ahead and did it. Shell never exerted any control over other content and all the news/editorial people were smart and committed, but this left a bad taste in my mouth about the company for the rest of my time there.
Not bananas compared to previous popularity it had. For reference, CS:GO (or is it CS 2 now?) has 1,2 mil online at the moment.
Quite a statement tbh. I thought it’s all Minecraft and Roblox?
And even then “only care about” are very strong words
Minecraft now is not the same game as it was 10 years aGO
https://www.spellingmistakescostlives.com/single-post/hell-i... (embeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z64LV-BSwDs)
>One of the most polluted areas on the planet, the Niger Delta has a life expectancy of just 41 years due to decades of Shell oil spills & constant gas flaring.
That's a single data point, that contributes less than environmental factors, skyrocketing populace, low instances of vaccination and healthcare.
> The top three leading causes of death in Niger in 2017 were malaria, diarrheal diseases and lower respiratory infections. Comparatively, in the United States, the leading causes of death are heart disease, cancer and accidents.
> https://borgenproject.org/10-facts-about-life-expectancy-in-...
There are /numerous/ reports that state what this project states with much more clarity and decades of numerical data gathering.
Spills and gas flaring don't even make it to the top 10 life expectancy issues of the Niger Delta.
Shell Stations US
or
Shell Station Sus
Yep, pretty sus alright. I'm sure a lot of the target audience is laughing about this.
Big oil never had to advertise the "benefits" of fuel, people just bought it. This slowly starts to change. And oil companies are crapping their pants, because in some countries a significant amount of cars on the roads will be EVs within a few years.
In Europe some corporations already switched to a 100% EV company car policy. All new leases need to be electric only, and within 3 years they will have >90% EVs in their passenger car fleet.
Have I got news for you... Check out the latest ClimateTown video https://youtu.be/_pNRuafoyZ4 for just a few examples, but there's lots more and it's been happening for decades.
If you’re going to get upset about anything in games, get upset about loot boxes. Promoting gambling to children should be illegal. That’s psychologically damaging.
We're still in the phase of climate change denial though.
All is fair in love and war.
Give the ownership of oil rights to other people / companies and they'd have done the same stuff, specially after the first waves of development. Attributing all the positives of cheap energy on humanity to oil companies and their employees seems like attributing the joy of music to the record labels.
I don't think you can write a comment that says the book is a nuanced take and in the same breath say you're not apologising for them.
Of course the CEO of shell's nuanced take is "they let us do it", when they spent an absolute fortune ensuring that they would be allowed to continue.
I've read the book, and it's not a nuanced take, at all. It sells a picture of "well you said you wanted it, so we just gave you what you want", and sweeps under the rug all of the other parts. For example, the research that these companies did almost 50 years ago that they made absolutely no effort to avoid the consequences of, instead burying them.
There was nothing stopping the CEO of shell divesting in the early 2000's other than greed and growth, and the only reason he wrote a book about it is because it sells.
So if you think quality of life = cool ,
then it's true that fossil fuels = cool.
Don't let any private jet flying tech CEO or yacht enthusiast actor tell you otherwise. They want to brainwash you to have the exclusive on fossil fuels consumption much like they want to brainwash you to pay the maximum amount of taxes while they structure their affairs through trusts in Puerto Rico, Curacao or St. Kitts and Nevis.
Keep that foot on the pedal, they have much more to lose than we have, for once that's an advantage, if they are really so scared of climate change they'd move to Tibet or the Rockies.
It's suspicious how many in this thread are pointing out that fossil fuels are an essential component of society reaching the point it has. We know, that's not a revelation.
It is not the point.
I think you're spending a bit too much time in the conspiracy rabbit hole. Kim Kardashian's carbon footprint is about equivalent of 50 americans. She also has almost 350 million followers on Instagram. If she manages to get 1% of her following to reduce their footprint by 1% for a year, she undoes more than she emits in a year.
That doesn't mean they're not hypocrites, but have some context. What's actually needed is a change in consumption across the board, and a change in attitude towards impact. The only way that happens is through regulation and education.
It should be the person who has a footprint of 200x the avg. person to make cuts to their CO2 emissions because they are the low hanging fruit as far as quality of life is concerned, not the avg. person.
It's a fairly easy concept, like taxation, you take from those who have, not from those who don't have anything...oops my bad it's the country of the MAGA tax breaks and tax writeoffs on new and used private jets, while Flint doesn't have clean water since forever.
perhaps this is just my bubble, but I don't think I've ever met a person in real life who tries to defend oil companies
With this said, I am also happy to have a car and to use it from time to time to drive. It requires fuel and fuel is made by oil companies (directly or indirectly).
I am not sure this is "supporting" them, but I sure do not want them to close overnight (we have in France from time to time the apocalyptic version of fuel not being distributed - thanks to our unions who prepare us for Mad Max style futur if oil was to suddenly vanish :))
> one of the many entities directly responsible for destroying our planet
Do any of you believe this narative?
Honest question: isn't the destruction of the planet due to the 8 billion people that have to be fed, clothed, housed, entertained? Aren't fossil fuels directly responsible for the industrial revolution and people not starving anymore?
I get that "Big Oil" might have delayed some reforms, but isn't the elephant in the room the 8 billion people that still need to be fed, clothed, housed, and entertained?
Imagine how much progress would have been made had Shell et al. not buried research for decades showing the harms of fossil fuels and aggressively lobbied against alternative forms of energy.
This is like saying its not Comcast's fault that your neighborhood still only has 50mbps after decades and millions in grants because people still need Internet access.
The US and its companies are not the only ones on this earth, so unless you're going to claim some sort of conspiracy that prevented global progress, I'm not buying it.
That's a huge understatement. They have actively sabotaged green initiatives all along. They have stopped green policies, and green policies is and has always been the ONLY way forward, you can't put shit like this on individuals.
When I've lived in Russia, I've donated to Green Peace and WWF, because they helps a lot to save Nature Reserves, oppose predatory laws which allows to exploit Protected Areas without any ecological control, they sued factories which dump industrial waste into soil and water without any treatment, etc.
Now I'm living in Europe and I don't want to give money to Green Peace, because their agenda is not about nature reserves and industrial waste treatment, but, first, anti-nuclear-plant and then anti-travel, antu-car-ownership, etc.
All of these things are indeed stupid imo, typical EU green party style navel gazing. The one I kind of agree with is anti-car-ownership, but it’s an extremely poor treatment of the symptom, where the decease is poor (and in many cases irreversible) city planning and public services. Excessive car ownership in urban areas is a solved problem in many parts of the world (where a car is less convenient than alternatives for personal travel for small families/households). It’s not rocket science.
But it's unpopular and expensive. Here in the UK, we have the minister for transport [0] jumping on the bandwagon of "walkable cities are a ploy for the government to control which shops you go to". In France, there were literal riots when fuel taxes were set to be raised.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/mark-harper-government...
It becomes middle ages again: you live all you life in one city, you eat only local food ("we don't need oranges all year around" from other comment in this thread), you wash with cold water (to conserve energy), you wear thick, warm clothes even indoor at winter (same). Yes, you have antibiotics and, may be, good dentist, if you could afford it. Thank you.
I'm joking about middle ages, but as they say every joke contains some part of joke...
I've relocated to the Netherlands half a year ago, and I'm living in Amstelveen, it is Amsterdam's satellite town.
It is "well known" that the Netherlands is very car-less-friendly country.
But no, it is not in reality. Especially if you could not ride bicycle, as my wife. There is 2 shops with limited selection of basic food in walking distance from our apartments (and it is apartments in multi-store building, not some cottage in the middle of the fields), and it's it. You need something other? You need to take tram, which costs at leas 1.8 euro one way (2.9 euro to the Amsterdam itself) and maybe shop you need will be near the one of the stops of this tram (if you are lucky). You need IKEA, really big supermarket, something like this? Good luck to get there without taxi.
It is very frustrating. I didn't own car previously, but I'm thinking about it now.
Yes, uranium is theoretically finite, but only now known reserves is enough for something like 100'000 years on current level of power production of whole planet (not current power production of existing nuclear power plants, but total power production as-if it is made only by nuclear plants). And it is not all reserves for sure, and in 100'000 years, I hope, fusion power plants will be reality
With regard to space needed: imagine if every existing building had roof top solar panels. We’d get quite far. I think we have the space for a few wind turbines to get us the final few kWh.
What do you think we should do with nuclear waste?
And how do you feel about giving every country in the world access to technology that also lets them develop nuclear weapons? Or should a select group of countries be environmentally conscious and the rest use fossil fuels? Renewables can be given to every country without risk.
This article has some interesting insights with regards to nuclear vs renewable energy: https://energypost.eu/renewable-energy-versus-nuclear-dispel...
Jason Crawford has a really good analysis of this sentiment, trying to understand why people think this, on his Roots of Progress blog: https://rootsofprogress.org/the-spiritual-benefits-of-materi...
Couldn’t the oil companies have included environmental responsibility in their work and not just have focused on profits?
As of today I'll argue that no true reform has been done, externalities of burning fossil fuel are absolutely not taken into account.
And it's been delayed by something like half a century ? (cf https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64241994)
Is the understatement of the century. They knew about global warming from internal research close to a decade before public science was able to gather enough data to raise alarm bells. Over that decade big oil spent time not researching greener alternatives or options for improving things but rather prepared for the globe spanning disinformation campaign you've so lightly referred to as delaying some reforms.
Big oil is a major reason for why 8 billion people are being fed, clothed, and entertained unsustainably. We don't need oranges avaliable year round. We don't need North Sea salmon in pacific Islands. We especially don't need to import so much most is thrown out as waste.
There is a lot wrong with the world right now, and population management needs to be part of the conversation but we are not yet at a point where the volume of people is simply unsustainable. We are unlikely to reach that point as well, since population growth seems to slow naturally as populations hit carrying capacity.
YouTube channel Climate Town has a very good summary of history of early climate chance action, The Time America Almost Stopped Climate Change
This sentence fragment greatly understates the impact they have had. It is clear that you consider it to be a narrative and are deliberately deflecting attention elsewhere. Both are valid statements, it is not a binary situation. It is not one over the other, and deliberately polarising situations does not help anyone. It only serves to further hinder the situation.
extremely disappointing
Sure, spreading oil propaganda and trying to influence policies despite very well knowing of the negative consequences is bad, maybe even evil behavior. But making it sound like Shell singlehandedly destroyed the planet is just ignorant. Without us, the consumers, and our desire for the products made from that oil and gas, Shell would not have pumped a single barrel out of the ground or sunk an oiltanker somewhere in the process. The convince of having a car, consuming cheap electricity, getting plastic toys from China delivered across the globe the next day and spending your holiday at the other end of the world is what destroyed the planet.
And any attempts to move away from that paradigm are heavily lobbied against by entities like Shell. It's hard to change habits, even harder to get an entire culture to change, and harder still when the change is being actively countered.
Its literally causing expensive electricity now and blocking cheap electricity.