How capital mobilises Russophobia against conservation

I recently saw a sponsored advertisement on Facebook from a group called Consumer Energy Alliance. It was an ad that was designed to be structured like a meme, as many ads on Facebook are, in order to draw one’s attention in the news feed. On the one side it had a happy flag-emblazoned map of Canada saying ‘Eh’ and on the other side it had a flag map of Russia with a caption of ‘Nyet’. The fine print beneath the meme was describing why Canadian oil was valuable to American consumers, saying why Minnesotans need the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline which is slated to run underneath the Mississippi headwaters, and threatening us that if we didn’t support Line 3, we would run the risk of America becoming dependent on those damn dirty Russkies and their damn dirty oil. The subtext of the ad was clear: good liberal Minnesotans, like all good liberal Americans, ought to support Canadian tar sands pipelines running through our drinking water. Otherwise, we’re siding with Eevul Pootin, his reactionary war machine and his filthy semi-Asiatic hordes.

Now, it’s important to be aware of what Consumer Energy Alliance is. The name might ring as being suggestive of a consumer protection watchdog, and indeed, if you visit the website, the group does portray itself as a concerned citizens’ group. However, they are essentially a sockpuppet of the energy industry. Their staff consists almost entirely of employees of the corporate PR firm HBW Resources. And they were founded by the chair of the North Carolina state GOP, Michael Whatley, with ties to the Alberta tar sands industry. Their principal modus operandi is essentially to work as an astroturf concern-trolling group against environmental and conservationist concerns. Their talking points are explicitly designed to appeal to left-leaning and liberal voters: by portraying the energy industry as diverse and equitable, friendly to families and small businesses, concerned about local communities and vulnerable jobs.

And here’s the thing: ads like this show how they clearly understand that liberals react to global news and gæopolitics. Even if, being Trump supporters, the grifters at CEA clearly know that Russiagate is a sham, they also understand that hate is a powerful emotion and can be cynically leveraged. They understand that the manufactured anti-Russia messaging can key into the stronger emotions in the average MSNBC-watcher’s lizard-brain, in ways that concern for things like indigenous communities and clean drinking water at home simply can’t. And CEA would not pay Mark Zuckerberg money to run this sponsored message, if they didn’t think it would be effective.

So here we have it, folks. We have energy industry operatives trying to fool us into running heavy risks of contaminating our own drinking water with a tar sands pipeline. And they’re using the Russiagate madness and the careful acceleration of anti-Russia messaging in order to sell Line 3 to liberals in the Twin Cities. That is, firstly, good enough reason to be vigilant and follow the money, particularly when ads like this show up in your social media news feed. Secondly, that’s good enough reason to throw out the anti-Russia narrative in its entirety.

There’s an old dictum: Think globally, act locally. The big problem we face now is that even local actors are being gobbled up by global concerns, and we tend to see big, far-off problems of gæopolitics as somehow more relevant to our lives than the stuff that comes out of our tap every day, that we drink and bathe and wash our hands in. (I’m as guilty of this as anyone else, by the way – possibly more so.) And the global actors – the neoconservatives, the multinational conglomerates – are constantly learning new ways to stifle and stymie local actions that, if they ever gained significant enough traction, might threaten them. And both Russia and China continue to be convenient boogeymen which these bad corporate actors can trot out, either to bolster their own moral credibility when defending ‘democracy’ or ‘religious freedom’, or else to scare people on either side of the political aisle into giving them what they want – our natural resources, our clean water and air, our health and safety, which they can sell away to line their own pockets.

Don’t let them do it. Don’t let these corporate fat cats and their sockpuppets cynically use hatred of Putin to manipulate you into mortgaging the Mississippi headwaters to the oil industry. Putin isn’t your enemy anyway! The Russians can’t sap and impurify all our precious bodily fluids, but Canadian and American energy conglomerates will certainly try to befoul our drinking water… using the Russians as an excuse.