His name is ‘Fossi’. He’s depicted as a swirl of grey smoke. And he’s liable to lose his temper whenever his classmates blame him for the climate crisis.

Fossi is the protagonist of Our Hidden Powers: The Big Switch, a children’s book launched last week by Swedish clean energy operator Baseload Capital. The company invests in and manages geothermal projects in the United States, Taiwan, Japan, and Iceland that use the Earth’s heat to generate electricity.

Tentatively stepping into a classroom as a new pupil, Fossi is rejected by his peers, who each represent a different form of clean energy. No one wants to sit next to the smelly, smokey fuel that has caused the planet to heat up and “become sick”.

“You wanted to travel, build, light up the world,” cries Fossi in frustration. “And I helped you! We fossil fuels gave you heat, cars, lights, and factories. And now you say it’s all my fault?”

Fossi gradually wins the admiration of his classmates, however, when he offers to use his “wealth of experience” to help them plan a shift to cleaner energy sources and solve climate change.

“In a way, I’m a hero too,” Fossi thinks to himself at the end of the story.

To the book’s author, Baseload Capital’s chief marketing officer Kristina Hagström Ilievska, her sympathetic depiction of Fossi is an attempt to explain the energy transition in a way her son could grasp. “Modern society has been built on fossil energy. That is simply the starting point. From there, the story is about change and the need to move forward, not about defending the status quo,” Ilievska told DeSmog.

But some readers question why the final scene shows Fossi joining hands and becoming friends with characters representing solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and bio energy — a helpful image for oil and gas companies that need younger generations on their side if they are to remain a socially accepted part of the economy.

In reality, critics say, the fossil fuel industry has never been a true friend to clean energy or the planet, actively lobbying against policies designed to support renewables or regulate oil, gas and coal production for decades.

“This book gets a lot right. But the idea that fossil fuels are the ‘new’ kid deserving of sympathy is almost laughable,” said Lindsey Gulden, a former climate and data scientist at U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil who was fired in 2020 after internally reporting an allegedly fraudulent overvaluation of the company’s assets in Texas and New Mexico. “Fossil fuel companies are working hard to keep their seat at the table and delay a robust energy transition.”

Entrenched power relations dominated by “vested interests” that “control and benefit from existing technologies” are a key barrier to the energy transition, concluded the U.N. climate body Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2023.

Neither the book nor the press release mentions that Baseload Capital is part-owned by oil and gas producer Chevron and fossil fuel services provider Baker Hughes. These partnerships are listed on Baseload Capital’s website.

Chevron and Baker Hughes have promoted their investments in Baseload Capital as examples of their commitment to clean energy and reducing their climate impact, despite the vast majority of their businesses still being based on fossil fuels.

Chevron plans to increase oil and gas production up to three percent each year until 2030, the company announced on its investor day in November.

Ilievska said the book was “an educational story, not a corporate product,” and there was no involvement from Chevron, Baker Hughes, or any other investors. “We share the same end goal as many [climate campaigners], a fast transition away from fossil fuels, and we see better understanding as part of how we get there,” said Ilievska.

But campaigners and industry experts warned that the story of ‘Fossi’ appears to closely mirror fossil fuel industry narratives by playing down the industry’s role in blocking climate action, portraying it as an enthusiastic player in the energy transition, and tackling its image as “the bad guys” — in the words of a leaked advertising briefing from British oil giant BP, unearthed by Drilled.

“I want to be part of the solution and make a difference,” says Fossi at one stage.

“If this book was a truer metaphor, it would have been a school where the majority of the kids were called ‘Fossi’, and they had already been there for a very long time, maybe had become the teachers already, were sitting on the board … because it’s fossil fuels that are maintaining the status quo,” said Gustav Martner, creative director at Greenpeace Nordics, who previously worked in corporate advertising and marketing for 17 years.

“There is definitely a need to produce books for children about climate change, but it is troubling when you can so clearly read between the lines that the solution being offered is to stop blaming the fossil fuel industry,” Martner added.

“It doesn’t help anyone to point fingers,” Ilievska said. “We know they did wrong, and they have their perspective of what we have done wrong, but we need to find that common ground to move on.”

Baseload Capital CEO Alexander Helling said in the book’s press release that its message — including “showing how geothermal energy can use knowledge, technology, and experience from the fossil fuel sector” — is targeted at investors and policymakers as well as children.

Ilievska said the company believed that by partnering with oil and gas companies, Baseload Capital could “bring [the fossil fuel industry] with us” and help speed up the growth of geothermal energy, thanks to their drilling expertise and financial muscle.

Our Hidden Powers: The Big Switch is the second book Baseload Capital has released with publishing house Mondial, which also sells titles by well-known cultural figures and journalists in Sweden.

The first, in 2023, taught children about the potential of geothermal energy as a clean and renewable fuel. The book did not include the character ‘Fossi’.

Chevron and Baker Hughes did not respond to a DeSmog request for comment.

‘Non-traditional Allies’

The fossil fuel industry has a long history of targeting children and young people with its messaging.

The American Petroleum Institute, America’s largest oil and gas lobby group, sponsored STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workshops with girl scouts in 2017, which it viewed as “nontraditional local allies”, according to internal documents made public by a U.S. congressional investigation in 2024 and analysed by DeSmog. BP invested millions in STEM programmes throughout the 2010s to “protect BP’s reputation”, the same batch of documents shows — programmes that still continue today.

As awareness of the climate crisis has grown, the fossil industry has increasingly seen these audiences as crucial to its survival, internal marketing documents obtained by DeSmog suggest.

In 2017, Norwegian state-owned oil company Equinor —  then known as Statoil — and its advertising agency TRY noted that “an increasing number of people question Statoil’s corporate social responsibility, sustainability, innovation and attractiveness as an employer” and that “this is especially true amongst the younger generation.”

“Younger voices are taking more prominent space in the energy and climate debate, and people who we consider young today will be the decision-makers, thought-leaders and opinion formers of tomorrow,” the document says. “Hence, the need to be more relevant to the next generation was evident — simply because Statoil’s future will depend on The Young.”

In April 2025, DeSmog revealed that Equinor had sponsored pop-up science classrooms on a group of Scottish islands at the same time as it sought approval to develop a nearby oilfield called Rosebank.

Equinor also created a video game called “Energy Town” targeted at UK school children. “Energy Town” aimed to “help build future talent pipelines and secure permission to operate at a time of sensitivity around fossil fuels, particularly in light of … the Rosebank development,” according to a web page made by the game’s designers, first reported on by Norwegian outlet E24.

Shell’s gas and coal subsidiary in Australia paid US$7 million to fund children’s educational programs at the Queensland Museum that fail to clearly identify fossil fuels as the primary cause of climate change, a DeSmog investigation published in December found.

The industry has also turned to social media influencers to connect with younger generations.

Influencers posted hundreds of times for oil and gas companies around the world between 2017 and 2023, DeSmog found. One influencer partnership with oil giant Shell made people in their 20s “31 percent more likely to believe” that the oil company is “committed to cleaner fuels”, according to a case study written by its PR agency Edelman.

Brazil’s state-controlled oil company Petrobras hired “a squad of influencers whose language is aimed at Generation Z,” it said in a press release announcing its “Just Energy Transition” campaign in June 2025. The squad included nature content creator Mylly Biologando, who made videos about visits to a Petrobras algae-fuel lab for her 500,000 followers.

‘Fossi’ may have been the brainchild of a clean energy company that wants to see the back of him one day. But as scientists sound the climate crisis alarm more loudly than ever, the wider fossil fuel industry is still aiming its favoured narratives at the generations that it needs on its side for its survival. They are also the generations that will feel the consequences of climate change the most.