CSUR small product list
Misleading information laziness or just downright fabrication is pet peeve. Not just in the professional sense either —although being a journalist you’re bombarded with bullshit on a regular basis.
This morning I received an email from the the Canadian Society for Unconventional Resources the people who promote the oil and gas industry’s efforts to get at hard to get deposits through things like fracking and oilsand mining/in situ. In it were links to their handy "educational" material including a pamphlet entitled "I Could Live Without Petroleum Products… Or Could I?" Sounds vaguely ominous doesn’t it?
Now there’s some truth here. There are a ton of products that contain petroleum. It’s often paraded by industry as a reason why they’re important. It reminds me of the Cenovus ad that comes on before movies that basically says: You’re screwed because we’re not going anywhere for "decades to come."
These messages should be viewed as a warning and an urgent call to get our collective shit together and find alternatives to produce goods that we need without the use of petroleum products. At the very least we need to reduce the number of products that rely on petroleum.
Fortunately we can easily just take about two-thirds of the items off CSUR’s list. Yes they’re either so lazy or so determined to mislead that being as lazy as I could possibly be and only looking at the first page of google results I found that only 23 of the 73 items listed are exclusively made with petroleum products.
Some are just dumb. Toys? Just all of them? Shoes? All of those? Deodorant furniture…. My favourite was electricity generation. If only there were alternative ways to create electricity!
So yes you need petroleum to create diesel fuel (I mean come on ) and some important items like syringes but this represents a failing rather than some accomplishment that we should celebrate or some fear-based campaign trying to keep us stuck to the teat of oil and gas.
If companies and trade organizations want to be taken seriously they should stop flooding us with infuriating half-truths and deceptions and start having real conversations about where we are and where we need to go.
Oh and Teflon is a brand name for one kind of non-stick pan. You can get different kinds CSUR. Really.
