Thursday, January 16, 2014

Better Days?




I gave up my cable subscription because the only time I actually miss live TV is during storm season.  Hulu fills the gap nicely and what it doesn't provide I get on net flix or the internet.  The catch--for $16 a month for your tv programming, is that you have to endure 30 second unskippable ads.   I keep seeing this "Better days" ad from "Oklahoma's oil and natural gas producers and royalty owners" over and over again.

I'm having a hard time figuring out what the hell they're doing it for.  My father has worked in the oilfield all my life.  I've figured out a few things in that time.  The big one, and the most obvious, is that it's a boom and bust driven industry.  It doesn't have to be, but it is. (If we weren't so overdependent on oil, that would make it less of a 'let's kill for it' commodity)   The second is that if they're doing anything good (they being the corporate folks) they want it to be public and out there.  The third is that if they're doing anything wrong they will minimize any press or dismiss it by saying they didn't know any better.

So what's the deal with this better days campaign?  Is it about fracking? Earthquakes keep making the news.  Are they trying to convince people that sending their children to work in the oilfields isn't a bad idea?  It's good money, but a lot of it is dirty dangerous work.  Especially if the company is more interested in profit than people, a la British Petroleum's gulf oil rig disaster a few years ago.   That was a corporate decision to do something stupid that result in 11 dead men and a devastated environment.   I'm all for energy independence.   Which is part of what they keep talking about--but why?

I wonder if it isn't to draw attention from another form of energy independence.  The diversification of energy sources.  Branching out from our gasoline engines and our coal burning power plants and harvesting the wind and the sun?

What do you guys think?   Does anyone know who these people are?  Is it a lobbying group or what?

Please comment on the blog if possible, I'd like to have this be more than a facebook discussion.


1 comment:

  1. Here is the Wikipedia entry about the OERB, which is the organization/agency/group that produced this ad
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OERB
    The ad, and many others they've produced, appear to be in line with their mission statement

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