Emails Show Museum Closed Green Energy Exhibit After Complaints From Fossil Fuel Industry

It’s hard not to notice the influence of the oil and coal industries at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck. Inside the Continental Resources-sponsored Inspiration Gallery you can learn about coal reclamation, touch the Bakken shale, and guess which everyday products are made of petroleum. You can buy oil-themed chocolate at the gift store. Fossil fuel companies are some of the largest donors to this museum, which reopened in 2014 after a $52 million expansion and renovation.

That’s why a traveling Smithsonian exhibit called Green Revolution that talked about climate change and renewable energy seemed like an odd fit. In fact, it was closed just four months after it opened, and just over a week after a series of complaints from the oil and coal industry groups that helped the museum expand.

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According to an open records request made by Inside Energy, no one from the coal or oil and gas industries asked explicitly for the exhibit to be taken down. But in an email dated Monday, February 29, the North Dakota Petroleum Council – which has given over $200,000 to the museum – said the placement of the exhibit, right across from the North Dakota Petroleum Council Gallery, seemed “inappropriate.”



inappropriate, my ass:
http://insideenergy.org/2016/04/10/emails-show-museum-closed-green-energy-exhibit-after-complaints-from-fossil-fuel-industry/