The Denialist PR Group Selling False Hope (ft. Natural Allies)
Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for all those with a morbid fascination with collapse, where we note the locations that significantly impacted species 947's destruction (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]). We discuss the physical, digital, and emotionally exhausting locations that contributed to humanity's untimely end on a tiny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).
Today, we are looking at Natural Allies, a gas industry PR group that tried to convince puny humans that the substances leading to irreparable damage to their atmosphere were not causing irreparable damage to their atmosphere. Founded by the Resource Monger, the Williams Companies, which specialized in the selling of death chemicals, as well as at least five other similar Resource Mongers called "companies" [kuhm·puh·neez], it poured millions of subsistence tokens into trying to change the minds of people within an empire known as the United States of America [yoo·nai·tuhd stayts uhv uh·meh·ruh·kuh].
If you have been on previous tours, you will be familiar with the story. Humans were governed by an economic system known as "capitalism" [ka·puh·tuh·li·zm], where those who held subsistence tokens were entitled to essential resources while everyone else died. Elderly oligarchs who had acquired vast numbers of tokens by selling these death chemicals did not want to dismantle their companies — either because they thought they would be dead before the atmosphere went kaput or merely because they liked being mean — and so they paid liars a fraction of the tokens they had hoarded to lie to everyone else that things were fine (see Kessler Robox's "little shit" paradox).
The particular death chemicals in contention here were called, by the propaganda of the time, "natural" gas, which more intelligent humans might call fossil fuels for being made of dead plants and animals from millions of years ago, including terrifying reptiles with tiny hands. This fossil fuel was a gaseous mixture of hydrocarbons — predominantly methane — that less intelligent beings might think to burn for cooking, heating, and electricity.
Humans, I am afraid to say, were those less intelligent beings, and when this happened, it ended up polluting everything, especially since the piping used to transport the liquified version of the gas would constantly leak, impacting the local region's wildlife, water, and also, far less importantly, its humans. Like other death chemicals or fossil fuels, it also went into the atmosphere, exacerbating the warming of the planet and causing the severe environmental degradation we are here to observe.
Natural Allies tried to convince people that this substance, the burning and transporting of which contributed to pollution and even some cancers among fragile humans, would not be that bad because it could be used instead of other substances that were even worse for the environment, such as coal. It was the type of argument that would make sense if you did not realize that renewables such as solar and wind had even fewer emissions and also if you had never received formal training in logic (see Ro'burt Gaer's Compendium of Civilizations That Aren't Quite With It).
Unlike other denialist "think" tanks we have covered, the target for these lies was different from your usual denialist audience. Natural Allies attempted to appeal to younger members of the population as well as people with darker skin pigments, the latter of which in the US were arbitrarily discriminated against. This denialist group attempted to do this by having young actors at the bottom of the United States racialized caste system appear in "ads" and speak these lies instead of those at the top of it (note: an ad was something companies paid tokens for, which would be played in between more enjoyable content, in an attempt to brainwash viewers into buying their products or messaging).
Natural Allies hoped that this manipulation would generate sympathy for their "methane is not too bad" argument. The end goal was to prevent cities from banning these fossil fuels inside homes (yes, humans had it in their homes) as well as to allow the companies behind this effort to lay more pipes so they could transport even more fossil fuels and accelerate the decline of the atmosphere.
For our temporal visitors, visitation is a mixed bag. Natural Allies was a front for Natural Allies Inc., itself a front for a conglomeration of companies. It unfortunately used a nondescript PO Box for its tax records and did not list its Texas-based address (probably somewhere around Houston) anywhere online. Natural Allies Executive Director Susan Waller had perhaps made the wise decision to hide its location from an increasingly angry public.
Susan Waller: The Girl Boss of the Wastelands
However, the organization did list a DC office in the Department of Labor’s annual Labor Organization report (You have to love bureaucracy)! The address, which was 555 13TH STREET NW WASHINGTON DC 20004, also called Columbia Square, was a 13-story office building that, according to something referred to as a "developer," was covered in a brilliant facade of "rose and light gray granite with windows of dual-pane gray glass." It was right off the Washington, DC Metro Center Station (the human’s primitive public transportation system) for ease of access. For those lucky enough to find a way inside, on top of interacting with individuals key to humanity’s downfall, you will also find a towering 13-story atrium "accented by 30-foot-high columns that support cantilevered offices overlooking the open space."
Keep in mind that all office buildings were quite concerned with privacy and security and would pay humans called "Security Guards [suh·kyur·uh·tee gaards] a meager amount of subsistence tokens to prevent unauthorized individuals from entering the building. Cloaking technology would be advised in these situations, as well as your handy dandy raygun.
Note — for the humans who have somehow bypassed our encryption protocols, take comfort in the fact that this is a joke from a normal human and not a retrospective on your species' imminent demise.
DO NOT use this information to stop this future because that would create a time paradox and go against your people's laws, as well as Medium's ToS, which I'm told are very important. I AM NOT encouraging you to take the law into your own hands, something I cannot do as an appendageless species.