Well now, Shell's getting it, too.

An "Arctic Ready" site of "Shell" is currently making the rounds on the Internet. It looks like it's by Shell, it's written in corporate rhetoric, and it has all of the features of a corporate attempt at social media (like a 'make your own postcard' section, and a game for kids).

Except, a closer look reveals something else: In the "game" for kids, you defend an oil rig from icebergs. On a page where "Shell" touts an arctic drilling platform, they explain:

On the slight chance that something does go wrong, Shell's spill cleanup plan is second to none. No one has yet fully determined how to clean up an oil spill in pack ice or broken ice—but that too is exactly the sort of challenge we love.

But best of all are the social media "postcards" that they created and that people are spreading around the web.

For example:

Or:

Or:

On a first look, they appear like something Shell put out, but an actual read would make you question if a company like Shell would have the gall to actually put out something like that.

Which gets you clicking. And so goes a canny awareness campaign like this. If successful activism takes more than just a message, now, these activists appear to most certainly have whatever that "extra something" is (which in this case, looks like astute and brilliant impersonation skills).

Check out what Shell's actual homepage looks like:

And the Arctic Ready homepage:

The real Shell site "help" page:

And the Arctic Ready "Shell" help page:

The entire thing is immaculately executed, and fairly hilarious, too. It's clearly some environmental group doing this, though the web registry only points to a privacy-proxy for a domain:

c/o ARCTICREADY.COM
P.O. Box 821650
Vancouver, WA 98682
US

Whoever it is, they're already fooling more than a few people, and are bound to upset the corporate PR brass at Shell. Something like this is bound to spread quickly, and fuel a little (misinformed) populist outrage along the way. So far, Shell's only issued this terse statement, hidden on their Alaska page:

Last week groups that oppose Shell’s plans in offshore Alaska posted a video that purports to show Shell employees at an event at the Seattle Space Needle. Shell did not host, nor participate in an event at the Space Needle and the video does not involve Shell or any of its employees. A fake press release claiming that Shell is considering legal action following the launch of the video was also distributed to the media. Most recently the group sponsored a contest on a website asking people to create fake advertisements which appear to be from Shell. The ads, and a contest to create more of the ads, are not associated with Shell. We continue to focus on a safe exploration season in 2012.

New York City has entire armies of so-called social media are marketing consultancies that likely can't yield results like this after years of trying everything in their playbooks. Maybe they could take a page from these guys', whoever they are.

UPDATE: It looks like it's the work of Greenpeace, in conjunction with activist group The Yes Men.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The event, at Harlem Stage, gave away free reusable water bottles to the media, and distributed press releases on individual flash drives rather than on paper. A high-definition slideshow of natural and city scenes played as the mayor spoke about the updates to the plan to make New York "the most environmentally sustainable 21^st-century city."

"The earth was not given to you by your parents," said Bloomberg, recalling an old proverb. "It was loaned to you by your children."

The clean heat campaign is a public/private initiative that will phase out low-grade heating oils, which contribute to air pollution, in city buildings. The mayor also hopes to install solar panels over landfills, and potentially on some city rooftops as well. He also announced that the city will use $40 million in federal stimulus funds to help property owners make energy-efficient upgrades.

PlaNYC was launched in 2007 to increase the city's long-term sustainability, and specifically aims to have one million trees growing in the city by 2017 and reduce carbon emissions 30% by 2030. The mayor must update the plan every four years.

Well, Santa Claus came early this year. In what may be the biggest Stephen Baldwin news since his appearence in Slap Shot 2: Breaking The Ice, the brother of truly famous Alec is taking other more-famous person Kevin Costner to court over a oil cleanup machine they both invested in, The Telegraph reports.

The suit is asking Costner for $3.3 million to make up for the presumed value of the shares Baldwin sold for just $500,000 before BP purchased the equiptment for the oil spill relief. That deal made $38 million in profit, and Stephen Baldwin belives he is owed a larger cut.

This bromance between the two middle-aged silver screen figures, once partners in this investment, seems to have profoundly soured. But who would have thought that Stephen Baldwin could prove so thoughtless when it came to science and technology? He did, after all, star in Bio-Dome.

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: A Social Network Cannot Kill Morgan Freeman

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

Last month, neighboring apartments were bought under a trio of limited liability corporation names at the new Centurion condo on West 56th Street, the first New York residential project for lordly architect I. M. Pei since his massively underappreciated Silver Towers. In city records, the buyer for all three is listed as Tunde Folawiyo, whose father, Wahab, was called an icon of Nigerian industry when he died last year. The deals add up to $10.1 million, which bought a total of five bedrooms and 3,530 square feet.

But the paper trail is murky. For all three apartments, Mr. Folawiyo’s name is crossed out with a thin line and replaced with the handwritten name of a New York attorney, who did not respond to messages by deadline. The broker who represented the corporation, Corcoran’s Linda Schlang, did not respond, either.

Her Web site shows rental listings for apartments that seem to be these three—two cost $11,000 per month, one $15,000.

Mr. Folawiyo has been described as a London School of Economics graduate who plays a major petroleum industry role in Nigeria—one of Africa’s largest oil producers but a corruption-addled country continually short of gasoline. Centurion sales director Michele Conte wouldn’t disclose specifics about the apartment deals, though she said her impression had been that the three condos were bought by a group.

Bigger apartment sales have closed in the building recently: According to records, Long Island pharmaceuticals executive Ronald Steinlauf paid $15,275,000 for several units four floors up. And yet Ms. Conte offered that the Centurion is only about half-sold, though she said no buyers who’ve signed contracts have tried to wiggle away: “Nobody. Not one person. And the only concession I made was a free storage room or something. One free storage room, that’s all. And we did it for a specific reason: To be nice.”

mabelson@observer.com

Of course, the Democrats are also (supposedly) the masters of the blown political save, experts at devising new and ever more elaborate means of snatching electoral defeat from the jaws of victory. So it's only fitting that now, just as energy assumes unprecedented prominence in a presidential campaign, they've gone and adopted a maddeningly incomprehensible message that threatens to forfeit the powerful emotional advantage they've enjoyed on the subject for decades.

The problem starts with the party's Congressional leadership, which first allowed their Republican counterparts to set the terms of the debate -- Drill! Drill! Drill! -- and then compounded this error by (a) dawdling in offering a plan of their own, and (b) finally settling on a plan that is transparently disingenuous and that -- amazingly -- actually reinforces the Republicans' message.

Making matters worse, the party's presidential nominee, who showed admirable courage on the issue of a gas tax holiday back in the primary season (for which he was rewarded by the voters), has opted mostly to defer to his Congressional colleagues this summer, parroting their counterproductive rhetoric and allowing John McCain to gain an edge on the issue that wouldn't have been imaginable a few months ago.

It should be stipulated the G.O.P.'s "Drill now!" mantra is, from a policy standpoint, every bit the same red herring as the gas tax holiday. It will be years before even a drop of oil is reaped from offshore drilling, and even that won't really matter in the context of a global market in which demand is nearing 100 million barrels per day. Sure, offshore drilling won't hurt gas prices -- in the same way that returning an empty Coke can for the nickel deposit won't hurt your effort to save up for a house. The decision on whether to allow offshore drilling is utterly inconsequential to the matter of lowering gas prices.

But policy details do not drive mass opinion. Most voters are too busy figuring out how to finance their next fill-up to concern themselves with the finer points of the global oil market. All they know is that gas is too damn expensive and that somebody had better do something about it. To their strategic credit, Republicans clearly grasp this reality, just as they understand the value of concise, superficially logical arguments repeated ad nauseam. Hence their relentless calls for offshore drilling. Voters may not buy it as a cure-all, but it sounds to most of them like an obvious step in the right direction. The G.O.P.'s message, clearly, has been sinking in.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, showed none of this clarity and intensity. Realistically, they had two politically intelligent courses from which to choose.

They could have taken a page from Obama's primary playbook, when he stood by his opposition to Hillary Clinton's superficially alluring cries for a gas tax holiday. Obama's response was clear and unwavering: The holiday was a worthless sham cooked up by pollsters and consultants and condemned by every reputable economist. Eventually, the public came around. Congressional Democrats could have opted to attack offshore drilling in the same way, bashing it -- over and over again, with G.O.P.-like ferocity -- as useless and fraudulent, until the message sank in.

Alternately, they could have simply taken the issue off the table by saying, in effect, "You want drilling? Go ahead. It won't do anything." With this approach, the Democrats would have been spared a politically taxing fight with the G.O.P. on what is mostly a symbolic matter. And with drilling off the table, the debate could then have moved to territory more suited to the Democrats. (To appease environmentalists within their ranks, they also could have made their support contingent on the approval of individual states, something that most coastal states won't do anyway.)

Instead, Congressional Democrats charted a third course. Sensing that public opinion was with the Republicans, and worried that their more conservative members were ready to sign on with the pro-drilling crowd, House and Senate leaders devised the bafflingly asinine "use it or lose it" message, arguing that oil companies are right now sitting on leases to 68 million acres of untapped land. They should be required to drill there before we even talk about offshore drilling, the Democrats cleared.

Not at all surprisingly, this message has utterly failed to resonate. Again, voters don't understand the finer points of how oil companies are run, but the Democrats' argument -- unlike the G.O.P.'s "Drill now!" slogan -- feels superficially false. Told that there are 68 million acres of untapped land, most voters assume there's a reason for this besides the conspiratorial explanation the Democrats are encouraging. (And they are right in assuming this: Much of that 68 million acres is either dry or too difficult (and thus not cost-effective) to drill. There's a reason why oil companies are drilling on 23 million other acres of federal land.) Listening to this gibberish will not prompt many voters to rethink their knee-jerk support for the G.O.P.'s much simpler and more logical message.

In fact, "use-it-or-lose-it" actually reinforces the G.O.P.'s message, since it encourages voters to view gas prices as an issue of supply, and not demand. If the Democrats are advocating drilling on 68 million acres of land as a helpful step to curb gas prices, aren't they essentially admitting that offshore drilling would also be helpful? "Use-it-or-lose-it" strips Democrats of any moral high ground they would otherwise have in attacking "Drill now!" In the end, the Republicans are the only ones most people can understand.

Obama has fallen into the same trap as his party's Capitol Hill leadership. He failed to mount a meaningful effort to turn the public against offshore drilling, a contrast to the bravery he showed in fighting the tax holiday. And he's taken to spouting the same use-it-or-lose-it-line, just as he's embraced the D.C. Democrats' calls to free up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve -- another empty gesture that reinforces the public's assumption that there is a supply-end solution to gas prices. Worst of all, he's even dusted off the party's old soak-the-rich platitudes, calling for a windfall profits tax on energy companies -- another move that would do nothing to lower prices (although it probably would discourage further exploration and development by the oil companies).

In the end, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid probably won't pay a price for this stupidity. Their House and Senate candidates still have enormous built-in advantages, and Democrats will almost certainly increase their numbers in both chambers significantly. But the presidential race is a different story. Obama is playing the Big Oil card that has worked so well in the past for his party, but it's McCain who's on the offensive on energy and gas prices.

“‘I want to drill here, I want to drill now,’” said Obama, channeling his opponent.

“I don’t know where he was standing. I mean think he was in a building somewhere.” He paused to chuckle with the crowd. “This plan,” he continued, “will not lower prices today -- it won’t lower prices in the next administration.”

“It’s not a real solution,” he added. “It’s a political answer.”

Then he extended his new anti-McCain offensive.

“And while Senator McCain’s plan won’t save you at the pump anytime soon, I have to say this, it sure has done a lot to raise campaign dollars. Senator McCain raised more than one million dollars from the oil industry just last month, just last month, most of which came after he announced his plan for offshore drilling to a room full of oil executives.”

This received a series of boos from the crowd. Instead, they cheered when Obama told them he would, as president, give them $1000 each to help alleviate the burden of expensive gas. The money, he said, would come from the oil companies’ windfall profits.