EnergyTown: When Fossil Fuel Giants Try to Control Climate Education

Recently, Norwegian oil giant Equinor released an online educational resource called EnergyTown. It’s a game aimed at young people, encouraging them to “balance” energy resources and build a thriving future community. It’s colourful. It’s fun. It’s easy to use in classrooms. It also happens to be made by a company with an 80% stake in Rosebank – the biggest undeveloped oil field in the North Sea, with enormous pollution and environmental damage potential.

Let’s be honest: when one of the richest, most polluting companies on the planet starts handing out climate education resources, alarm bells should be ringing.

This is greenwashing – and it’s working.

Greenwashing is the act of making something seem environmentally responsible when it’s not. It’s been around for decades, but lately, it’s become more sophisticated. Companies no longer just run vague “green” ads – they sponsor art galleries, school resources, and climate games. They know how powerful storytelling is, and they know young people care about the planet. They want to use this to control the narrative.

With EnergyTown, Equinor isn’t just promoting its brand – it’s pushing a vision of the energy transition where fossil fuels still have a place. It presents energy “balance” as the goal, but doesn’t name the reality: that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with climate justice. There’s no mention of how Rosebank will lock us into decades of emissions; no space for the voices of communities restricting extraction. Just a clean image of a company “supporting” a better future.

This matters because education is powerful. What we learn in school shapes how we see the world. When fossil fuel companies create educational tools, they’re not doing it to be helpful – they’re doing it to stay relevant, to protect their profits, and to shift the blame away from themselves. By positioning themselves as part of the solution, they avoid being held accountable for the problem. They tell us it’s about personal responsibility, innovation, and compromise. They tell us to “balance” clean energy with fossil fuels, as if burning the world a little more slowly is an acceptable plan.

By marketing themselves as climate leaders, they’re not just lying; they’re gaslighting us. They’re deliberately confusing the lines between harm and help to convince young people that they’re on our side, whilst they keep drilling, polluting and profiting.

We deserve better. Young people don’t need games made by oil companies. We need climate education that tells the truth about science, politics and injustice, in a way that’s integrated across all subjects and accessible to all young people. We need resources made by educators, activists and scientists; not polluters. If we want to build a livable world, it’s time we stopped letting fossil fuel companies write the syllabus.

EnergyTown might just be a game, but the climate crisis isn’t, and the people most responsible for it shouldn’t be in charge of teaching us how to fix it.

Want to help spread the word? Share our Instagram post on greenwashing and help us push for real climate education.