Big, Bad Energy

Here's a great article from the LA Times about the flood of green advertising coming from Big Oil. This relates specifically to Chevron, but you could replace that with the name of any American oil company (okay, I mean Exxon-Mobil). Here's a taste:

Compared with what it spends producing oil and other environmentally catastrophic fuels in increasingly environmentally catastrophic ways -- scraping through tar sands, burrowing under mountains for oil shale and barreling into the depths of the ocean -- Chevron is spending minuscule amounts on clean alternatives.

The "human energy" ads are designed to get us to believe that when we fill up our tanks at a Chevron station, we're supporting clean energy, an assumption that might discourage us from advocating for new taxes on the oil industry or for cuts in its subsidies -- money that could be used for government investments in alternative energy.