Member-only story
Our Oil & Gas Company Has A New Message This Earth Day: It’s On You To Save The World
Stopping an existential crisis is the responsibility of you, the individual consumer.
After a challenging year of funding congressional bids for climate change deniers, covering up oil spills, and leaving all the office lights on while we worked from home, we at Oil & Gas Company are ready to celebrate Earth Day. This year, we’re launching a new Earth Day campaign — “It’s On You” — to do our part to slow climate change.
Stopping an existential crisis that could create thousands of refugees, exacerbate extreme weather events, and melt every glacier is the responsibility of you, the individual consumer.
We’ve already done so much. For example, we invented the carbon footprint back in the 1980s, after we uncovered troubling links between our industry and climate change. Since then, we’ve been soft-launching the “It’s On You” campaign.
Eccentrics like Greta Thunberg and the grandmothers in your local gardening club who care about their grandkids’ futures think we, a multinational corporation with connections to every power player in the world, should stop the climate crisis. But what could an egregious polluter with gobs of money do? Support a Green New Deal? Lower our carbon emissions? Ask our executive team to travel on commercial airplanes instead of private jets? Nonsense. That wouldn’t deliver enough value for our shareholders.
Recently, we released a new climate action plan (printed on 20% recycled paper and mailed to each of our 800,000 employees) because we know it’s no longer cool to carry on as one of the country’s largest polluters without pledging to take pretend action. As part of this climate action plan, we’re committing to “going green” by 2100. To start, we’re painting one of our buildings a grassy green. Way to go, us!
After we found a typo in the 76-page plan (we said we would paint a building gassy green, not grassy green), we reprinted it. Creating our climate action plan was better than taking any real action, so to celebrate we shredded all the paper, made a paper-macrame polar bear, and used it as a piñata for our leadership retreat.
