Fossil Fuel FUD Is Targeting Your Children

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Baseload Capital is a Swedish organization that invests in and manages geothermal projects that generate clean energy. Its current portfolio includes projects in the United States, Taiwan, Japan, and Iceland.

Its chief marketing officer, Kristina Hagström Ilievska, has created a picture book for young children entitled Our Hidden Powers: The Big Switch. It features Fossi, a swirl of gray smoke who is shunned by his classmates. They accuse him of causing the climate crisis. which gets Fossi more than a little förbannad. If you don’t happen to speak Swedish, suffice it to say Fossi becomes a bit defensive.

He explains to his classmates that modern society has been made possible by burning fossil fuels and admonishes them to give him credit for the wonders that coal, oil, and methane have created.

“You wanted to travel, build, light up the world,” cries Fossi in frustration. “And I helped you! We fossil fuels gave you heat, cars, lights, and factories. And now you say it’s all my fault?” But then he wins them over when he offers to use his “wealth of experience” to help them plan a shift to cleaner energy sources and solve climate change. “In a way, I’m a hero too,” Fossi thinks to himself.

At the end of the book, Fossi becomes friends with characters representing solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and bio energy. DeSmog calls that “a helpful image for oil and gas companies that need younger generations on their side if they are to remain a socially accepted part of the economy.”

Advertising To Children

Some older readers may recall when tobacco companies used to hand out candy cigarettes to children to get them thinking about how great it would be to smoke. The infamous “Joe Camel” cartoon figure was specifically intended to promote the idea that smoking was cool. Some religions do much the same thing by indoctrinating impressionable young people before they can make rational, evaluative decisions for themselves.

Ilievska says her sympathetic depiction of Fossi is an attempt to explain the energy transition in a way her son could grasp. “Modern society has been built on fossil energy. That is simply the starting point. From there, the story is about change and the need to move forward, not about defending the status quo,” she told DeSmog in an interview. Nowhere does she mention that Baseload Capitol is partly owned by Chevron and Baker Hughes, a field services provider to the oil and gas industry.

Critics of the book say the fossil fuel industry has never been a true friend to clean energy or the planet, and has actively lobbied against policies designed to support renewables or regulate oil, gas, and coal production for decades.

“This book gets a lot right. But the idea that fossil fuels are the ‘new’ kid deserving of sympathy is almost laughable,” said Lindsey Gulden, a former climate and data scientist at ExxonMobil who was fired in 2020 after internally reporting an allegedly fraudulent overvaluation of the company’s assets in Texas and New Mexico. “Fossil fuel companies are working hard to keep their seat at the table and delay a robust energy transition.”

An Educational Story

Ilievska said the book was “an educational story, not a corporate product,” and there was no involvement from or any other investors. “We share the same end goal as many [climate campaigners], a fast transition away from fossil fuels, and we see better understanding as part of how we get there.”

But critics note the story of Fossi closely mirrors fossil fuel industry narratives by playing down the industry’s role in blocking climate action, portraying it as an enthusiastic player in the energy transition, and tackling its image as “the bad guys.”

“If this book was a truer metaphor, it would have been a school where the majority of the kids were called ‘Fossi’, and they had already been there for a very long time, maybe had become the teachers already, were sitting on the board … because it’s fossil fuels that are maintaining the status quo,” said Gustav Martner, creative director at Greenpeace Nordics. Martner previously worked in corporate advertising and marketing for 17 years.

“There is definitely a need to produce books for children about climate change, but it is troubling when you can so clearly read between the lines that the solution being offered is to stop blaming the fossil fuel industry,” he added.

Ilievska disagrees. “It doesn’t help anyone to point fingers. We know they did wrong, and they have their perspective of what we have done wrong, but we need to find that common ground to move on.” And yet, Baseload Capital CEO Alexander Helling has said that its message — including “showing how geothermal energy can use knowledge, technology, and experience from the fossil fuel sector” — is targeted at investors and policymakers as well as children.

In particular, many of the techniques developed by the oil and gas industry to access energy sources deep underground are being used today to advance geothermal projects, like the one happening in Germany, where Eavor is pioneering closed loop systems deep underground.

Part Of A Pattern

As awareness of the climate crisis has grown, the fossil industry has increasingly seen young audiences as crucial to its survival, internal marketing documents obtained by DeSmog suggest. In 2017, Norway’s Statoil — now called Equinor — realized that “an increasing number of people question Statoil’s corporate social responsibility, sustainability, innovation and attractiveness as an employer” and that “this is especially true amongst the younger generation.”

“Younger voices are taking more prominent space in the energy and climate debate, and people who we consider young today will be the decision-makers, thought-leaders and opinion formers of tomorrow,” the document says. “Hence, the need to be more relevant to the next generation was evident — simply because Statoil’s future will depend on The Young.”

In April 2025, DeSmog revealed that Equinor had sponsored pop-up science classrooms on a group of Scottish islands at the same time it sought approval to develop a nearby oilfield called Rosebank. It also created a video game called “Energy Town” aimed at UK schoolchildren. It aimed to “help build future talent pipelines and secure permission to operate at a time of sensitivity around fossil fuels, particularly in light of … the Rosebank development.”

Shell’s gas and coal subsidiary in Australia paid US$7 million to fund children’s educational programs at the Queensland Museum that fail to clearly identify fossil fuels as the primary cause of climate change, a DeSmog investigation published in December found.

“Fossi may have been the brainchild of a clean energy company that wants to see the back of him one day. But as scientists sound the climate crisis alarm more loudly than ever, the wider fossil fuel industry is still aiming its favored narratives at the generations that it needs on its side for its survival. They are also the generations that will feel the consequences of climate change the most,” DeSmog says.

Perhaps the major takeaway from all this is the full frontal assault on education being mounted by MAGAlomaniacs in the US and their sympathizers around the world. They want a population trained to obey, not think, and they are very close to achieving that goal. From politics to energy to AI, they want Stepford Citizens who dutifully accept what they are told and plan to get there by targeting children at an early age.