". . . starving would become the new black"

Anti-corporate pranksters have a successful field day at the Go Expo Energy event in Calgary:

At first, the speech just seemed odd.

"Without oil, at least four billion people would starve," one of the speakers earnestly told the crowd. "This spiral of trouble would make the oil infrastructure utterly useless.

"And starving would become the new black."

When the speaker started to talk about vivolium — a renewable energy source nobody in the room had ever heard of — the red flags started to go up.

But once the pair lit up two torch-like candles and urged the audience to do the same in memory of a dead Exxon oil worker, attendees and organizers realized they'd been had.

The pair were quickly ushered off the stage and out of the building by security guards.

I can easily believe that this sort of stunt could be pulled off at dozens of other events of this nature . . . in a boom market, it's much more likely that you'll have too many new players and new names appearing. How effective stunts like this are in advocating particular causes is tougher to figure out. It's likely inversely proportional to their frequency: if everyone is doing it, the media will quickly lose interest and fail to provide the free exposure that the gimmick is intended to garner.