Reuters, New York Times Top List of Fossil Fuel Industry’s Media Enablers

Reuters and other outlets whose in-house ad agencies are striking commercial deals with fossil fuel companies are trusted not only by the public, but by politicians and other key decision-makers. According to communications agency BCW’s annual survey of media brands in Europe, Politico, Reuters, the Financial Times and the Economist top the list of most influential media for EU decision-makers. All four are also some of the fossil fuel industry’s favorite partners for advertising and events.

And these partnerships haven’t just been happening in the leadup to COP28. Over the past three years, FT Commercial, the in-house ad studio of the Financial Times, has created dedicated web pages for fossil majors, including Equinor and Aramco, along with native content and videos, all of it focused on promoting oil and gas as a key component of the energy transition. An “FT Live” event focused on the energy transition featured speakers from BP, Chevron, Eni, and Essar.

The Economist’s in-house studio created a content hub around electrified transport for BP, which was also a platinum sponsor of its 2020 Sustainability Week event, while Petronas and Chevron sponsored the magazine’s “Future of Energy Week” event in 2022.

“They wouldn’t be spending vast sums of money on these campaigns if they didn’t have a payoff and it’s well documented that for decades the fossil fuel industry has leveraged and weaponized and innovated the media technology of the day to its advantage,” said University of Miami professor Geoffrey Supran, who co-authored the 2017 advertorial study with Naomi Oreskes. “It’s sometimes treated as an historical phenomenon, but in reality we’re living today with the digital descendants of the editorial campaigns pioneered by the fossil fuel industry — the old strategy is very much alive and well.”

Politico runs a high volume of sponsored content for the fossil fuel industry. Over the past three years, the publication has run native ads more than 50 times for the American Petroleum Institute, the most powerful fossil fuel lobby in the U.S. Politico has also repeatedly run newsletters sponsored by BP and Chevron – the latter of which also sponsors its annual “Women Rule” summit – and run 37 email campaigns for ExxonMobil. Shell has sponsored every one of Politico’s “Energy Vision” summits since 2017.

According to data from Media Radar, The New York Times took in more than $20 million in advertising revenue from fossil fuel companies from October 2020 to October 2023, twice what any other outlet earned from the industry. That number is due largely to the paper’s relationship with Saudi Aramco, which spent $13 million on ad space during this time period via a combination of print, mobile, and video ads as well as sponsored newsletters. That revenue does not include fees for creative services that were paid to the Times’ internal T Brand Studio. New York Times spokesperson Alexis Mortenson said that T Brand Studio does create custom content in print, video, and digital (including podcasts) for fossil fuel advertisers, ​​and “we allow dark social posts if we’re creating this content.” “Dark social posts” are unpublished social posts promoted as ads to a specific audience, and do not appear on a brand’s timeline.

Of all the outlets we reviewed, only one company, Reuters, offers fossil-fuel advertisers every possible avenue to reach its audience, including custom events. It’s a notable shift for an outlet that has always counted “freedom from bias” as a core value — a pillar of the Trust Principles Reuters adopted to protect its independence during World War Two.

Reuters also partnered with Chevron, the “Diamond” sponsor of both its flagship “Reuters Impact” climate event in London in September 2023, and an upcoming “Global Energy Transition Summit” in New York in 2024. Reuters Events also stages fossil fuel industry trade shows explicitly aimed at maximizing production of oil and and gas, and creates digital events and webinars for vendors in the fossil-fuel supply chain looking to connect with oil and gas companies. In a media kit for “content opportunities in the upstream industry,” Reuters Events offers to produce webinars, white papers and live event interviews for those hoping to get in front of its “unrivalled audience reach of decision makers in the oil & gas industry.” |Read more https://www.desmog.com/2023/12/05/reuters-new-york-times-top-list-of-fossil-fuel-industrys-media-enablers/| desmog.com/2023/12/05/reuters-…

#cdnpoli #misinformation #lies #FossilFuel #content #promotion #MediaSources
#PublicTrust #advertisements #oil #gas

Cap on greenhouse gas emissions singles out Alberta, Premier Smith says

Ottawa’s proposed cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the oilpatch punishes Alberta’s main industry and the province will take the measures to court, Premier Danielle Smith said Thursday.

“With this pronouncement, (Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau and his eco-extremist Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault are risking hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in Alberta’s economy,” she said from Dubai, where she’s attending the COP28 climate meetings.

“They’re devaluing the retirement investments of millions of Canadians and threatening the jobs of hundreds of thousands of Albertans.”

Steve’s note:

She wouldn’t want to see our retirement fund devalued. It will mean there’s less for her to steal when she goes ahead with her Alberta Pension Plan.

University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach said most emissions still come from fossil fuel consumption, not production, and a gradually increasing, universally applied carbon tax remains the most efficient tool.

Greenhouse gas emissions in Canada from 1990 to 2021, by province (in million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent)*

He suggested Ottawa is on relatively firm Constitutional grounds. Although Alberta may argue the cap is a backdoor attempt to manage oil and gas, the Supreme Court has ruled previously that the federal government has the right to manage toxic emissions.

“The smart betting money is on the side of the federal government,” he said.

The Canadian Energy Regulator says Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions increased 19 per cent between 2005 and 2020, the only Canadian jurisdiction where such releases have grown. More than half of Alberta’s emissions come from oil and gas production.

|Read more https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/national-news/cap-on-greenhouse-gas-emissions-singles-out-alberta-premier-smith-says-7939704| vancouverisawesome.com/nationa…

• Greenhouse gas emissions chart was borrowed from this link. https://www.statista.com/statistics/481142/greenhouse-gas-emissions-in-canada-by-province/

##abpoli #cdnpoli #ghg #emissions #CER #CarbonTax #AndrewLeach #constitution

N.B. minister’s comments on homeless state of emergency lack compassion: mayor

The mayor of a New Brunswick municipality that declared a state of emergency due to unprecedented levels of homelessness — and a recent death of an unhoused person — says he was taken aback by dismissive comments on the matter from a provincial minister.

New Brunswick’s minister of public safety, Kris Austin, said Tuesday that the state of emergency declared by the municipality of St. Stephen is frivolous and disappointing. “People die all the time in car accidents. We don’t (call) a state of emergency over vehicles on the road,” he said.

Austin’s comments, St. Stephen Mayor Allan MacEachern said, lack compassion and downplay the seriousness of the situation in the small community.

“I don’t like his choice of words. I don’t appreciate that. There’s no compassion there,” MacEachern said in an interview Wednesday.

The state of emergency declaration accuses the provincial government of failing to provide housing and social services to the area, where 70 people are homeless in a community of about 4,150. It says “a resident of a public space” died last week, “a situation which will only become more likely” as winter sets in.

St. Stephen RCMP Sgt. Scott MacKenzie confirmed police responded to a 41-year-old man in need of medical attention in St. Stephen around 3 a.m. on Dec. 2. The man was transported to hospital, where he died several hours later. MacKenzie would not say if the man was experiencing homelessness. |Read more https://globalnews.ca/news/10151887/st-stephen-homelessness-mayor-state-of-emergency/| globalnews.ca/news/10151887/st…

#nbpoli #homelessness #death #St Stephen #KrisAustin #callousness #NoCompassion #Emergency

We followed an old-growth detective into the forest to fact-check B.C.’s suspicious claims about the age of trees

This July, reporter Sarah Cox got a bird’s-eye view of some of the reasons why B.C.’s deep-snow caribou populations are dwindling.

A reporting trip — following an old-growth detective into the shrinking bounds of a disappearing inland temperate rainforest — led her down a path that was perhaps crossed earlier by migrating caribou, bears or deer.

After navigating the maze of logging roads in Nagle Creek Valley, 150 kilometres north of Revelstoke, B.C., Sarah and Eddie Petryshen found themselves hiking deeper into the globally rare rainforest to ground-truth the age of trees. https://thenarwhal.us15.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d4ccbf5717196773d100e7ecd&id=943e90cd03&e=545de27860

According to BC Timber Sales, the provincial agency responsible for planning and auctioning off logging cutblocks, the cedar and hemlock trees in the forest are between 224 and 336 years old. Forests older than 400 years are automatically off-limits to logging: classified as ancient, they meet B.C.’s criteria for old-growth logging deferrals.

Petryshen, who works with the conservation group Wildsight, wanted to verify the age of the trees himself. Sarah watched him use a diameter measuring tape to gauge the age of ancient cedar trees in one of the planned cutblocks.

His findings? The trees were well over 400 years old — meaning groves of old-growth trees are on the chopping block https://thenarwhal.us15.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d4ccbf5717196773d100e7ecd&id=106cdf95c6&e=545de27860, despite the province’s promise to protect ancient forests and biodiversity.

“This is a red-listed ecosystem right at imminent threat of ecosystem collapse,” he told Sarah. “The longer we wait to act, the closer we get to that collapse.”

As Sarah’s in-depth feature suggests, sometimes you just have to be on the ground to get the full picture. |Read more https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-rainforest-old-growth-detectives/ | thenarwhal.ca/bc-rainforest-ol…

#bcpoli #environment #OldGrowth #logging #rainforest #cedar #hemlock #ancient #off-limits

Generative AI, deepfakes will ‘pollute’ election campaigns, CSE warns

Canada’s cybersecurity watchdog is warning fake images and videos created by artificial intelligence (AI) will “very likely” be used to try to undermine voters’ faith in democracy in upcoming election campaigns.

In a new report published Wednesday, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) stated AI-created deepfakes – computer-generated images and videos that show events that did not take place – “will almost certainly become more difficult to detect, making it harder for Canadians to trust online information about politicians or elections.”

“Despite the potential creative benefits of generative AI, its ability to pollute the information ecosystem with disinformation threatens democratic processes worldwide,” the agency wrote.

“So to be clear, we assess the cyber threat activity is more likely to happen during Canada’s next federal election than it was in the past,” CSE chief Caroline Xavier said.

“AI-generated deepfakes can create a video of something that never happened and put words into politicians’ mouths that they never said,” Xavier said, speaking at a press conference in Ottawa.

She added that social botnets (networks of accounts that spread items on social media) “enhanced by AI can artificially amplify disinformation that’s already out there to fan the flames of political discord and push people to more extreme positions.”

While the technology isn’t widely used yet, the report states the CSE expects use to increase in the next two years. |Read more https://globalnews.ca/news/10151522/cse-report-artificial-intelligence-election-threats/ | globalnews.ca/news/10151522/cs…

#cdnpoli #election#DeepFake #democracy #disinformation #CSE #extreme #AI