Greenpeace Activists Address Shell Oil Hoax (Warning: Gay)

(CNN) — A recent CNN.com op-ed asked “Was the Shell Oil hoax ethical?” We at Greenpeace, along with the activist group Yes Men, are behind the Shell Oil website ArcticReady.com, which we created to call attention to the company’s Arctic destruction. So we were intrigued by this question.

The writer, Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, said the spoof website did not announce itself as a parody and that omission could be called misrepresentation. And that could possibly be called unethical. But we revealed our role just hours after the site went up, and the site is so over-the-top — it has a kids’ game called “Angry Bergs” — that people realize very quickly that it is fake.

But mispresentation is Wolpe’s concern, which is why he should have addressed the ethics of Shell’s multibillion-dollar international hoax perpetrated on Earth itself. A hoax the company has failed to reveal to the public.

Royal Dutch Shell made $31 billion in profits last year, while its CEO took home $15 million in compensation during one of the worst economic crises in a century. The company’s lobbyists in Washington, London and other global capitals work to slow the development of clean technologies and renewable energy, preferring instead a status quo that benefits their shareholders and leaves the massive costs of climate change to the 99%.

Read here.