While Australia's national oil and gas outreach, Brightr which is part of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, runs ads about the benefits of gas as a heating and cooking fuel the Canadian Energy Centre has attacked Netflix film Bigfoot Family.

 

The CEC says it "unfairly and inaccurately portrays one of Canada's most important industries", despite the plot being set in Alaska. 

 

CEC CEO Tom Olsen believes the animated Netflix film "villainizes energy workers". 

 

In the film, Bigfoot and his son protect an Alaskan wildlife reserve from being blown up to access oil reserves. 

 

The CEC was founded at the end of 2019 by the province's United Conservative Party to push back against what it sees as an anti-oil and gas agenda within various media. 

 

Oil and gas is still so central to Alberta that drink prices at bars in oil capital Calgary fall when the oil price does. 

 

The film has not been well- or widely-reviewed and involves now-famous Bigfoot going missing. 

 

"His shy but tech-savvy teen son must take on an evil CEO to save his family and a wildlife preserve," Netflix precis of its kids film says

 

"The film claims an oil company intends to use a bomb to blow apart a mountain landscape within a wildlife preserve, then flood a pristine valley with oil. All while lying about it," Olsen said in a statement to Canada's CBC News. 

 

He said a parent had alerted him about the film, released in February. 

 

"We have promoted Indigenous opportunity provided by the energy sector, environmental gains by industry and consistently release peer-reviewed research pieces on the reality of fossil fuels in Canada and around the world," he said.

 

While the CEC, which describes itself as a ‘war room', decries the ludicrous notion of blowing up a mountain to access oil the French-language film is only retreading recent history. 

 

As pointed out by Canadian media, in the 1950s Project Cauldron began. Run by the US Richfield Oil Corporation it was described as "experiment in the peaceful use of nuclear energy as an aid in producing oil from the McMurray oil sands buried too deeply to permit economic extraction of oil by mining methods". It was eventually cancelled in 1962. 

 

The CEC has a budget of C$12 million, down from C$31 million before the oil price crash. 

 

Energy News can't recall any recent example of Australia's petroleum association attacking children's films, but we did dig up an old Andrew Bolt column that suggested Finding Nemo's pernicious influence on promoting vegetarianism in children. 

 

"How harmless is it for children to be taught a morality that is so impractical or shallow that it soon becomes a game of pretend?" he wrote back in 2003. 

 

Also, the US nuclear industry has long blamed the Simpson's and their fictional town's damaged nuclear power station for anti-nuclear sentiment.