"The NPR member station has partnered with the oil giant for a series riddled with industry talking points."
"One might not associate “public media” with “carrying water for the oil and gas industry,” but it’s 2022, and anything can happen. On Wednesday, Houston Public Radio, which encompasses the city’s NPR affiliate as well as its public broadcasting network, unveiled a series it produced with oil giant Chevron on the energy transition—and, if the first episode is any indication, it’s going to be filled with nothing but fossil fuel propaganda.
The 10-part series, ironically called CounterACT, will explore how “the energy sector is working towards a lower carbon future,” as well as “ways the energy sector can address the climate crisis.” The phrase “lower carbon” is a mostly bullshit term made up by the fossil fuel industry, meant to distract from their continued pollution as well as the fact that we need to reach a zero carbon future, and soon. The industry has applied this phrase to many of the problematic “solutions” it’s currently pushing, like blue hydrogen and carbon capture, that both continue to rely on fossil fuels and do not reliably eliminate emissions. (Last year, oil major Occidental announced it would produce “carbon-neutral oil,” which is just oil with a lot of offsets attached—technically lower-carbon than a regular barrel of oil, but not exactly what’s going to fix the climate crisis.)
The first episode of the CounterACT series, posted Wednesday morning, is an interview with three talking heads—including Chevron’s director of “New Energies”—that focuses on Houston’s reputation as the “energy capital of the world” and the ways in which the region could be primed to contribute to the energy transition. While the video begins with an acknowledgement that the science on climate change “is something that has been settled for quite a long time,” there is no mention of how the oil and gas that Chevron produces directly contributes to climate change. Nor is there any reference to how leading scientists and energy research institutes have said that new fossil fuel exploration needs to be completely phased out this year, and emissions to peak by 2025, in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."
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