Coal Seam Gas miners are trying a different tactic. They are stooping to new lows by offering sponsored posts to environmental bloggers.
 |
| Typical CSG field |
I suspected that something was up when I received this email the other day;
From: Tessa Dhanaraj
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2013 [3:16] PM
To: gxxxxxofgavin@gmail.com
Subject: Project Query for The Greening of GavinHi Gavin!
I recently came across The Greening of Gavin and am interested in working with you to create a post about natural gas. If you’re interested, please let me know your rates for a sponsored post! Thank you.
Kind Regards,
Tessa Dhanaraj
dgm more performance more returnGround Floor, 33-35 Saunders StPyrmont, NSW 2009
Well it turns out that this is the Coal Seam Gas mining companies way of spreading mis-information. So as a service to all eco/green/simple living bloggers, I post the PR company email, just in case you fall for the rouse.
“A blog I read regularly posted a “sponsored” post yesterday about “natural gas”. It wasn’t in her usual writing style, and I strongly suspect she was set up.
LPG, LNG, CSG – I don’t blame you if you are totally confused. That’s what the mining companies are relying on. A quick pea shuffle and they will be allowed to extract a quick, large profit and leave a fracked countryside. There is a very, very well funded PR campaign of misinformation going on to rename coal seam gas as ”natural gas from coal seams”, shortened to “natural gas”, and at the same time to convince the voting, protesting, blockading public that natural gas is clean and green and in short supply. I suspect this is part of the next stage in the campaign – sponsored posts on blogs that people who could be expected to care about the quality of our food producing land, and our environment, read. It’s cynical, ugly, and how big budget advertising messes with democracy.”
VULGAR! Vile tactics used by a terrible industry. Thanks for the heads up.
I agree Jessie, and no problem. x
Yesterday Tony Abbott was interviewed about ‘Australia on fire’, on the Belgium news.
“It has nothing to do with climate changing”, he said.
So Gavin, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong….
(Is he getting paid to be blind?)
Hi John. Not that this post was about climate change in particular, but if Tony said it, it must be true ;-). I am not a fan of our current Prime Minister.
Gav
I guess when companies are desperate they will try anything. I also think they must think that the Australian Public are pretty stupid and would for fall for their latest scheme. Well done Gavin on letting us know about their latest piece of stupidity.
Hi Gavin, I’ve seen this kind of thing too. 2 or 3 weeks before the election, APPEA (Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association) placed ads in the ‘West Australian’ Newspaper, asking readers to support natural gas (‘from all sources’) as Australia’s ‘bright future’, against certain ‘people who don’t care about Australia’s future’. There was very little info in the ad, apart from a website readers were urged to visit. I smelled a rat, and decided to check it out. The website was a petition page, designed to look very similar to ones used by Get Up and other social/environmental reform groups. Readers were urged to sign up to protect Australia’s future. Nowhere on this page was ‘Coal Seam Gas’ mentioned, nor in the ‘letter’ which would be sent to politicians once the reader clicked to sign. Clicking through several links finally found a mention of ‘gas from coal seams and other sources’, and further clicking, scrolling, clicking again finally found the first use of the word ‘Fracking’ (under a link right down the bottom entitled ‘Mythbusting’). I only found it because I knew what I was looking for. This, to me, is a deliberate attempt to lie, misinform, and manipulate people into supporting something they more than likely do not agree with. I haven’t seen these ads since the election. I can only presume APPEA doesn’t feel it needs to bother wasting money on manipulating the public anymore, as the Coalition Govt will either do it for them, or just push ahead with Fracking no matter what the public wants.
Bother, I just tried to leave a comment and it just disappeared, didn’t even ask me to login to my google account.
Long story short: Sickening, truly sickening. Thanks for the alert Gavin.
News flash Gav, natural gas from all sources is the same thing (methane), and the “real” natural gas of which you speak (by which I think you mean “conventional gas” – methane sourced from sandstone reservoirs) is much more likely to be produced by hydraulic fracturing than methane produced from Queensland coal seams. Also if you live in Queensland – hope you don’t catch any buses, cook a bbq, or with gas. Most of this and 20% of your electricity comes from coal seams in the state.