Protesting Exxon-Mobil

I got up early this morning to be a protestor at the Exxon-Mobil shareholders' meeting in Dallas. We had about 40-50 people show up to protest, contacted through Expose Exxon and other activists groups. (I get e-alerts from so many different environmental groups I'm not sure which one first reminded me of the shareholders meetiing, but I think it was the Union of Concerned Scientists.)

I didn't think to bring my camera, just my placard, so no pics. Since you can't capture the essence of Exxon's deceit with just one sign, I had messages on both sides.

The first, re Exxon's recent ads smearing Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," namely the one that calls CO2 "life."

It said: "We call CO2 'global warming' and Exxon 'the hot air behind warming.'"

The flip said said "ExxonMobil hides the truth under a thick lying oil slick."

At my newspaper office, our printers all have 11x17 paper capacity to print galley pages for proofreading, etc., so I didn't even have to go through the work of using magic markers or whatever to make the sign sides. I just oriented 11x17 pages horizontally, with nice 200-point lettering, and tiled two of them on top of each other, then stabled and taped them down to a sheet of cardboard.

If only one shareholder of enough shares listened to the message, we accomplished something. Or, if one cab driver or pedestrian in the area was inspired to become more politically active, we accomplished something.

That said, there's one shareholder I was warned about who actually comes up and tries to talk you out of what you know is factual information, and who comes from at the far edge of Exxon's stance, even.

Anyway, I hadn't been at a protest for more than a year, so I was feeling a bit of withdrawal, and it was good to be there just for that reason.