Climate warning

OPEC’s perfect wedding: Till climate disaster do us part

Image of Markus Lutteman
Markus Lutteman

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Image of OPEC

OPEC

Climate warning
First, I smile. This has to be satire. Fossil-fuel humour at its finest.
Then my smile fades.
This is actually for real.
OPEC has apparently decided that petroleum products are essential ingredients to a perfect wedding. Not additions, but the very foundation.
At a time when the world is experiencing record heat, deadly floods, collapsing glaciers and rapidly rising climate risks, the organisation representing some of the planet’s biggest oil producers is spending its energy romanticising our dependence on the very product driving the crisis.
Why? Because its business plan depends on it.
OPEC member countries exported almost 20 million barrels of crude oil every day in 2025. And OPEC has no intention of imagining a future in which oil rapidly disappears. Its 2026 outlook projects global oil demand rising to 124 million barrels a day by 2050 — and calls for $17.7 trillion in oil investment between now and then.
And that helps explain commercials like this one. OPEC isn't just selling oil. It's selling a story about oil.
That its products are inevitable. That they make our lives happier. And, above all, that there is no need to hurry away from them.
Yes, petroleum is everywhere in modern society. That is precisely the problem.
Nobody serious is suggesting that we can eliminate every petrochemical product tomorrow. But the scientific challenge before us is to end our dependence on burning fossil fuels as rapidly as possible — not dress that dependence up in wedding clothes and sell it back to us as something beautiful.
The world will breach 1.5°C of warming in just a few years. Every additional fraction of a degree means more destruction, more lives lost and a greater risk of irreversible tipping points.
That is the marriage we should be worried about: OPEC’s apparently undying commitment to fossil fuels and a dangerously warming planet.
And unlike the couple in this commercial, there is absolutely no reason for the rest of us to say “I do.”
Watch the commercial at your own risk.
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