This week’s piece was written by Nason Maani and originally published on his Substack, Money Power Health where he unpacks the ways in which money, power, and ideas impact our daily lives. We wanted to spotlight Maani’s work because he does such an effective job of laying out the elements of the commercial determinants framework. This piece specifically highlights the pernicious nature of industry’s messaging.
For those of who you may not be aware, this is Coalie. He is the new mascot of the “American Energy Dominance Agenda”, according to the US interior secretary, and it's pretty clear which interests he represents. You may be thinking this type of cartoon mascot is a cynical way of drumming up predictable anger, a meme made for “rage-baiting”, and perhaps distraction from less high-profile but potentially more environmentally or socially important policy moves, such as the walking back of efforts to protect miners from black lung. You may be right, and there is something to that perhaps, but I thought it was worth reflecting on how common this type of mascot is in fossil fuel and corporate rhetoric more broadly. What interests me here is not Coalie as a provocation aimed at us, but Coalie as part of a long-standing strategy aimed elsewhere, particularly at children. So before we dig into the meaning of Coalie, let’s look at some past examples and see what we can glean from them, including where this type of tactic perhaps originated from.
Before Coalie, there was “Petro Pete”, a cartoon character with a hard hat fronting a whole series of books and education materials produced for children and schools by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board or OERB, funded voluntarily by oil and natural gas producers. This is part of the OERBs “homeroom materials”, which they call “tools to help teach Oklahoma’s students the importance of oil and natural gas in their lives.” You can find plenty of stock images of homework produced in classrooms based around Petro Pete. The books run from kindergarten up and deal with issues like the day Petro Pete wakes up to find that there are no fossil fuels, and so he has no light, no toothbrush, no way to get to school and so on. In other words, from the earliest years, embedding the idea that a world without fossil fuels is not merely inconvenient but impossible, and that those who raise questions about extraction are naive or irresponsible. I think these examples are both chilling and a reminder of the lengths such companies will go to socialise, early and deliberately, particular ways of thinking that can blunt qualities that many of us associate with childhood, like curiosity, fairness, and moral concern, when those qualities might otherwise lead to questioning or resistance. That is why if you have seen me give an online presentation from my office, you may have spotted my copy of “Petro Pete’s big bad dream”, which sits on my shelf as a reminder and teaching aid.
Before Petro Pete there was the “Truax”. When Dr Seusses story about the Lorax, a magical creature who “speaks for the trees” in a story of environmental conservation, hit the shelves, the timber industry was so incensed they created a kids book in response featuring the Truax, intended to frame the Lorax (in the book they refer to it as the “Guardbark”) as naive and hopelessly misguided about the important role loggers play, and helping kids understand the necessity of harvesting timber both to preserve forests and help biodiversity.
The way the Truax seeks to explain away the Guardbark’s concerns about issues like biodiversity loss is quite telling, and cunning in how it brushes these aside in the minds of children. To quote the Truax text:
“Would anyone mind if we lost, say, a tick
That carried a germ that made Cuddlebears sick?
Or what about something that’s really quite nice
Like the Yellow-Striped Minnow that lives in Lake Zice?
How far will we go? How much will we pay?—
To keep a few minnows from dying away?”
How does this read to you? To me, this is not simply a defence of logging, but an early lesson that environmental concern itself is indulgent, sentimental, or irrational.
Hopefully now you are starting to see Coalie in a new light. Perhaps it isn’t meant for us at all. Past examples show such characters and approaches can be a powerful messenger for other audiences than ourselves, facilitated by education systems and teachers. Along similar lines, there is the Eddie Eagle gun safety program for kids run by the US National Rifle Association (NRA) fronted by a cartoon eagle. Our recent research led by Dr May van Schalkwyk found it served to embed firearms as a normal part of everyday household life, and placed the emphasis for avoiding accidental gun deaths on children rather than product safety parameters. The gambling and alcohol industries are sponsoring education programmes in UK schools with clear similarities in terms of normalising their products, placing emphasis on childrens individual responsibility to navigate such risks, and focusing on issues such as dealing with peer pressure or understanding odds but not, strangely enough, industry marketing.
Thankfully there has been growing pressure on this kind of practice in some cases, in part due to amazing community advocates such as Irish Community Action on Alcohol Network (ICAAN), part of Alcohol Forum Ireland, who spotlighted this issue leading to the Irish government advising against such materials being presented to children. An ongoing campaign in the UK supported by a range of signatories is seeking similar goals.
“Coalie” is certainly a departure from other examples to the extent that the “OSM” on his cute little uniform stands for the US Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, which is the government regulator for coal mining. It’s not quite the department of health being fronted by a cartoon cigarette, but it’s not that far off, and begs the question of what sort of story it tells children about the role of such regulators. When regulators themselves become part of the narrative apparatus, the line between oversight and advocacy becomes difficult for any audience to see, let alone a child. To quote a OSMRE spokesperson from the Guardian article reporting on Coalie: “[Coalie] draws attention to solutions by showing how regulation, reclamation, and responsible stewardship are actively improving real-world conditions, while supporting a reliable and secure energy future for the nation.”
Does that sound somewhat like those other examples? It does to me.
I appreciate this reads like quite a pessimistic post, and to some degree that is inevitable because discovering that kindergarten and primary school aged children are targets for this stuff should cause us deep concern, and lets face it, this is but a drop in pessimistic news we are surrounded by just now.
However, as is the case with corporate initiatives focused on employee morale or green-washing, there is another way to look at this. Greenwashing happens because public opinion still has the power to constrain corporate behaviour. These campaigns exist because legitimacy is fragile. Characters like Coalie are there because yes, children represent future markets and loyal customers, but also because if the next generation turn against these people and practices, if they become less “normal” in the eyes of children today, that spells the end of the line for these businesses as currently constructed.
Children and young people are a battlefield for these companies, a key stakeholder in the money, power, health nexus, because in them rests a hope of turning things around, and when you look at some of the youth-led advocacy efforts (I have learnt a great deal from Biteback and their counter marketing efforts for example), one can perhaps see why. Work by Unicef has produced a range of tools to help young people advocate for change in and I can think of nothing that would annoy the makers of the Truax or Petro Pete more than teachers and schools bringing this sort of corporate cartoon mascot tactic to children’s attention, sharing some advocacy tools with them, and asking the children what we should do about it. Maybe this post could help with lesson or activity planning, as an invitation for children to notice, question, and decide what they think is being asked of them.
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