Leafing through an old Atlantic magazine from 2007, I came across several ads addressing alternative energy, selling cars and trucks with better fuel economy, and so on. Here’s an example of one:
Wow! Even BP was preaching clean renewable energy and biofuels. Instead of BP meaning British Petroleum, featuring dirty old fossil fuels, it was supposed to become a mega-green energy producer, a friend to Planet Earth.
Well, a lot can change in roughly 20 years, and the magic of Google revealed this snippet about BP:
It's been almost 25 years since BP Plc attempted to rebrand itself as “Beyond Petroleum” and adopt a more environmentally friendly image. But with a recent swing away from green energy toward its fossil fuel roots, “Back to Petroleum” might be a more appropriate tag line.
Back to Petroleum: Gotta admire that honesty! Once again, it’s the age of “drill, baby, drill,” though let’s not forget that Saint Barack Obama bragged about how much he boosted U.S. oil and natural gas production.
When historians look back on this age, I wonder if they’ll label it “The Great Forgetting.” We’re forgetting about global warming. We’re forgetting about wars, genocides (Never again!), and their costs. We’re forgetting about distortions to the economy and blatant exploitation in our new gilded age of obscene wealth concentration.
It’s as if history doesn’t matter, which I suppose it doesn’t to those with the power to control the present and shape the future. So “beyond petroleum” is “back to petroleum,” with global warming becoming benign climate change, and even that euphemism is denied and rejected by some, as if rising temperatures around the world can simply be ignored or explained away.
The moral of the story: If you want to invest in “energy futures,” look to the past and drill, baby, drill. And forget the price to be paid.