One of the more invidious preemptive strategies of the big players in particular industries is to fund “front” organizations supposedly charged with educating us about the messy side-effects caused by the very products its patrons churn out. It’s called being a “good corporate citizen.” So we have the drinkaware.ie website, which is developed by the McCarthyite-sounding Mature Enjoyment of Alcohol in Society Limited (MEAS). MEAS’s list of members encompasses all the major booze companies and lobby groups operating in Ireland. (One wonders how delighted MEAS’s members really would be if the Irish took them up on their advice and sipped–Mediterranean-style–two drinks over the course of the night.)

And, obviously, anti-smoking campaigns are often bankrolled by the major tobacco companies. Now oil companies are not only heartily embracing the green agenda, or at least telling us that they are (see BP’s Carbon Reduction spiel or Chrevron’s Will You Join Us? initiative), they are sponsoring meetings by groups who prophesy the extinction of the entire petroleum industry in the near future.

The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) held its sixth annual conference in Cork earlier this week. Among the conference’s sponsors were a handful of state agencies, some bio-energy outfits, National Toll Roads (the people who brought you the West Link Toll Plaza), and Maxol, Ireland’s largest independent oil distributor.

Crank that I am, I can’t help pondering whether it’s just the reward of being a “good corporate citizen” that prompts an oil company to sponsor a conference organised by a group warning that petrol will soon be, litre-for-litre, pricier than a bottle of Evian.