ENVIRONMENT

The Denialist PR Group Selling False Hope (ft. Natural Allies)

If something kills you more slowly, it's better!

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for all those with a morbid fascination with collapse, where we note the locations that significantly impacted species 947's destruction (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]). We discuss the physical, digital, and emotionally exhausting locations that contributed to humanity's untimely end on a tiny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

Today, we are looking at Natural Allies, a gas industry PR group that tried to convince puny humans that the substances leading to irreparable damage to their atmosphere were not causing irreparable damage to their atmosphere. Founded by the Resource Monger, the Williams Companies, which specialized in the selling of death chemicals, as well as at least five other similar Resource Mongers called "companies" [kuhm·puh·neez], it poured millions of subsistence tokens into trying to change the minds of people within an empire known as the United States of America [yoo·nai·tuhd stayts uhv uh·meh·ruh·kuh].

If you have been on previous tours, you will be familiar with the story. Humans were governed by an economic system known as "capitalism" [ka·puh·tuh·li·zm], where those who held subsistence tokens were entitled to essential resources while everyone else died. Elderly oligarchs who had acquired vast numbers of tokens by selling these death chemicals did not want to dismantle their companies — either because they thought they would be dead before the atmosphere went kaput or merely because they liked being mean — and so they paid liars a fraction of the tokens they had hoarded to lie to everyone else that things were fine (see Kessler Robox's "little shit" paradox).

The particular death chemicals in contention here were called, by the propaganda of the time, "natural" gas, which more intelligent humans might call fossil fuels for being made of dead plants and animals from millions of years ago, including terrifying reptiles with tiny hands. This fossil fuel was a gaseous mixture of hydrocarbons — predominantly methane — that less intelligent beings might…