Deep Dive: Advertising – the battle to ban fossil fuel ads

Interviewees: 
Ben Parker, councilor for the city of Edinburgh
Matt Halliday, lecturer in the school of communications at the Auckland University of Technology
Peter Dietsch, philosophy professor at the University of Victoria in Canada
Naomi Oreskes, professor of history and of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University
 
Transcript:
Charli: Hey, Charli here, so to begin, I want to ask you something… 
Ad montage, SFX underneath
Do these things sound… dangerous to you?  
Like – a threat to public health? 
To many people, they sound pretty… normal.  
And that, according to Ben Parker, is the problem. 
Ben Parker: “… maybe you don’t notice them individually every time you walk past one but what actually, what does normal look like?” 
Taking a cheap flight, buying a big car, going on a cruise… 
Ben Parker: “That just simply isn’t compatible with what we need to be doing.” 
And so, Ben helped to get rid of them. 
Ben Parker: “… large SUVs, cheap flights for 20 quid…” 
The advertisements, that is.  
Yeah – you know those posters emblazoned on council buses and bus stops, on billboards and buildings – selling bargain flights, luxurious cars, cruise ship holidays? Across the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, they are no more. 
Ben Parker: “Well, actually, no, if you’re a fossil fuel company, the answer just is no, we don’t need your money.” 
Why? Because they are powered by fossil fuels. And that is dangerous.  
Naomi Oreskes: “These people are trying to confuse you. They want you to be a sucker. And so what I’m saying is, don’t fall for that. Just don’t fall for it.”  
Peter Dietsch: “I like to think that I’m not very sensitive to advertising, but I’m probably wrong. I mean, all kinds of studies show that even the people who think that they’re immune to the effects of advertising actually are influenced by these things…” 
Matt Halliday: “The people in advertising are very smart people, but what it is now, instead of denying that it’s happening, it’s let’s make the change as slow as we possibly can. Let’s try and keep stasis.” 
This is Living Planet. I’m Charli Shield. 
Ben Parker: „Yeah, so I’m Ben…“
Ben Parker is a councilor for the city of Edinburgh. In May 2024, a policy he helped spearhead was introduced by the city council.  
Ben Parker: “So, the policy that we brought forward prohibits the advertisement of adverts that promote high carbon products… things like for cruise holidays, cruise ships, airlines, airports, all forms of cars… there is a slight exemption, I think, in the policy for battery electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles, except in cases where they’re SUVs. So actually, if you are… Yeah, if you’re advertising an SUV that’s still not allowed, even if it’s even if it’s fully battery operated.”
No more ads for these things, or fossil fuels, or weapons allowed on council property in the city.  
Ben wasn’t always sure such a comprehensive ban would go through. But ultimately, he said, when the council came together to consider it, for a majority of them it was kind of a no-brainer. 
Ben Parker: “…the question that we were really posing was, does it make sense for us to be saying that we understand that there is a climate emergency, we’ve got all these programs of work going on to push the city to be more sustainable and support residents to make more sustainable choices. But then at the same time, we’ve got an advertising sponsorship policy, which is kind of a carte blanche or as it was at the time for fossil fuel companies, arms companies, all these different organizations that we don’t approve of in terms of their actions, which actually are actively working against the aims of the council. Does it make sense for us to be taking money from them? We said no.”
Not only did it not make sense for them to take money from companies pushing fossil fuels, Ben said, but it’s also a really important move to help residents imagine a different future. 
Ben Parker: All of these adverts is, you know, they become the backdrop of the city in a way…. And it’s that sort of thing where you maybe don’t notice them individually every time you walk past one, it’s what actually, you know, what does normal look like? And does normal look like, you know, large SUVs, cheap flights for 20 quid, or does normal look like advertisements for community projects, small businesses, all the rest of it?”
Ben says the council hasn’t lost lots of money since doing it and now wants to find ways to extend the policy even further to cover all advertising in the city.  
Edinburgh might be one of the most recent cities to ban outdoor advertising of this kind. But it’s not the first.  
Back in 2021, Amsterdam brought in a partial ban on fossil fuel advertising. Oil and gas companies, airlines and petrol-powered cars were no longer to be seen adorning the walls of subway stations or anywhere in the city center. Since then, at least 7 other Dutch towns and cities have followed suit with similar bans, and The Hague recently became the first city in the world to make it illegal to advertise fossil fuels and high-carbon products throughout the whole city.
Sheffield, Cambridge, Liverpool and Norwich in the UK all have similar ad bans. And some cities in Switzerland4 have even outlawed outdoor commercial advertising altogether. 
In 2022, France became the first country to ban fossil fuel advertising nationwide – ((a policy recommended by a 2020 citizens’ assembly on climate)). It was watered down from the initial proposal though and doesn’t cover the sponsorship of events or ads for ‘natural gas’, which is also a fossil fuel. 
And calls for more comprehensive, country-wide bans are getting louder. Places like Ireland, Belgium and Canada are weighing up their own ad bans.  
Could advertising in fact be a more crucial piece of the puzzle than we’d realized? 
Ben Parker: “…companies spend millions and millions of pounds on advertising. They don’t do that because they’ve got millions and millions of pounds to spare and they just feel like, you know, chucking it away. There’s definitely a reason for it.”
 
That reason is that advertising, done effectively, works.    
Meaning, that it: A. makes brands a whole lot of money.
And B. it helps keep public opinion on their side. That’s especially important for companies that don’t necessarily have something to sell in the shops, but still need popular support to stick around.
Advertising has come a long way since the 1930s, 40s and 50s. 
Matthew Halliday: “Advertising was very informational. It’s here is the thing, and this is where you can get it… “
That’s Matt Halliday. He teaches advertising and brand creativity in Aotearoa – New Zealand.  
Matthew Halliday: “I’m a lecturer in the school of communications at the Auckland University of Technology.” 
Here’s a couple of those old-school ads he was talking about – tv ads from the 1940s:  
Pretty straightforward, pretty repetitive. That’s what a lot of ads were like.  
Although I did find some really catchy ones from back then, too…  
Anyway… eventually marketers figured out that connecting with consumers on an emotional level was much more effective for many products. It makes it seem more relatable, more memorable. 
Matthew Halliday: If you think about the big brands that you’re seeing advertised today, your Nikes, your Cokes, your McDonald’s, Burger King’s, VW car brands, they aren’t necessarily making ads specifically about their product, they still do sometimes, but it’s more about an emotional connection.” 
Matt loves his teaching job. But he has… mixed feelings about advertising. 
Matthew Halliday: “It’s really interesting the dissonance there is between the love of what this job is as far as the creativity and coming up with ideas goes, and then most of it is to sell stuff that a lot of people don’t need. There’s that kind of consumerism dissonance.” 
We’ll dig into that a bit more in a second. But first, what makes a great ad nowadays? 
Matthew Halliday: “Really good ads, they connect a human truth to a brand. So good ads and the really creative ads will make you feel understood, or seen is probably a better way to put it. If you feel seen in a commercial, if there’s a resonance there for you with the brand itself, because the really big international brands have spent a lot of time and money crafting what their brand is, and then certain ads can kind of tap into that further and… kind of deepen that connection.” 
There are so many ads for so many things, advertisers have to be pretty clever to cut through the noise. Which brings us back to that conflict Matt mentioned.  
Matthew Halliday: “There’s that tension, right? Because the advertising industry is in a way peak capitalism. You’re trying to get people to buy more stuff, it’s about growth of GDP, selling more than you sold the year before, selling more than your competitor. And I think we’ve got to a point where most people are starting to realize that that is not sustainable for the planet.”
Not only is unchecked growth not sustainable, this kind of consumption might not even be desired by the consumer in the first place.  
A growing body of research shows that the amount of stuff, money and energy people need to be satisfied tends to max out at a moderate level8. And that those (income and energy) levels are actually dropping over time. 
That echoes an observation made by a famous Canadian American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, in the late 1950s.
Peter Dietsch: When we think back to an older and more general argument first made by people such as John Kenneth Galbraith, American economist 40, 50 years ago, what Galbraith said is that advertising generally creates what he called the dependence effect.
So, imagine you go about your life and you’re happy, most of your wants and needs are satisfied. But then someone comes along and shows you this ad all the time of people taking these flights to the Caribbean.  
The Caribbean is projected as having white beaches and beautiful people running around sipping nice drinks.  
So, all of a sudden, you want to go to the Caribbean. You didn’t want to go to the Caribbean before.
…once we create these wants, we’re actually, until they’re satisfied, we’re less happy than we were before. And interestingly, once we do then satisfy them, we’re not necessarily happier than we were before when we didn’t even have these wants. So advertising is kind of a strange animal from a welfare perspective. Galbraith said it’s a basically waste of resources because it doesn’t ultimately make us happier. It creates wants, Galbraith would have said unnecessary wants, and I tend to agree. And then we all of a sudden see that we need to satisfy these.”
Peter Dietsch is the guy who tends to agree. He’s a philosophy professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, where he works on questions of economic ethics and justice.  
So, are things like flights and cars “unnecessary wants”? Not always, of course. But – transport is the second biggest contributor to global emissions. The sector and the way we use it needs to change, and a good place to start is with advertising, Peter says. 
Peter Dietsch: “…then one might arguably say, well, people do need to get from A to B, right? And if there’s no public transport available, some of them might have to rely on a car. But that car doesn’t have to be a gas-guzzling SUV. could be, well, it could be a non -gas powered vehicle, but if it can’t, because those are still more expensive, at least upfront than others, then it could be a more fuel-efficient car, right?”
 
Reporting10 shows that carmakers, however, tend to spend much more on advertising their larger, more expensive car models, including the electric ones. Bigger cars of any kind require more materials, and even if the electric SUVs don‘t guzzle gas, they need more rare earth minerals for their bigger batteries and more steel, iron and plastic to make. 
Peter Dietsch: “Now, of course, this is deeply ingrained in capitalism. And this might be one of the reasons why there is so much pushback for a proposal such as this one to ban fossil fuel advertising. But again, from a social welfare perspective, I think it seems entirely plausible. We don’t need these ads. And once we don’t have them, we might realize that we don’t need some of the things that they suggest that we do need.”
And it is just the ads we’re talking about at this point, Peter adds. 
Peter Dietsch: “We’re not going to tell people not to take flights. We’re not going to tell people not to drive their car. But we’re just going to say, let’s ban the advertising.”
Health hazards of burning fossil fuels & tobacco comparison  
As many people working in this space point out, that is exactly what many governments around the world have already done. For tobacco.  
Recognizing how bad it is for human health and the massive cost that it has on society, about 155 countries around the world restrict the advertising, sponsorship and promotion of tobacco products. 
That hasn’t stopped people smoking of course, and more than 6 million people still die from tobacco use each year. It also hasn’t stopped tobacco companies from advertising wherever they can, and they still allocate tens of billions of dollars each year to luring in new, young customers and discouraging their old ones from quitting.
But smoking is much less common today and fewer people die – around half as many in the US compared to/as did in the 1990s. That’s, in part, thanks to banning tobacco ads. 
Peter Dietsch: “So today we’ve actually gone a lot further and banned smoking in some places, but, the first very intuitive thought was to say, well, let’s not encourage this harmful activity further by allowing advertising for it.”
But there’s something else that kills even more people than smoking tobacco.  
Air pollution.
Like smoking – burning fossil fuels, especially coal, petrol and diesel – causes particulate matter that pollutes the air. And every year, between 8 and 10 million people are estimated to die prematurely from the air pollution caused (just) by burning (these) fossil fuels. 
The harm caused by smoking tobacco is pretty obvious and direct – you inhale and exhale toxic fumes that multiply your risk of disease and premature death and that of the people near you. And although it’s a bit more indirect if we’re talking about air pollution from planes, cars and cruise ships – it does add up.  
Peter Dietsch: “In the case of fossil fuels, it’s a little more complicated because, you on your own, if you drive your car, you’re not going to get emissions, or if you take a flight or several flights, you’re not going to get emissions up enough to harm other people. It’s in the aggregate that we harm other people. It’s one, once many people take flights, many people take cars, that’s when there is environmental damage. And that’s why when we see as many deaths already today globally caused by climate change… in the aggregate the situation is relatively similar.”
And that’s not where the parallels between advertising, tobacco and fossil fuels end. 
For the first half of the 20th century, the tobacco industry saw incredible corporate success. Part of their marketing strategy involved getting celebrities, dentists, and doctors to promote their products. It was pushed as a remedy for sore throats and pesky coughs. As a means of maintaining an athletic physique.  
And it worked. Back then, smoking was widely seen as glamorous, healthy and healing. Such is the magic of advertising!  
But in the early 1960s, when the scientific link between smoking and disease was finally firmly established, that success looked like it might be over in a flash. Their solution? Aggressive, sneaky and deceitful advertising, peddling disinformation about their products to mislead policymakers and the public on the harmful health effects of tobacco.  
They funded flawed studies to confuse people. And to cast doubt on the scientific consensus. Smoking was plugged as a weight loss miracle, especially to women. Kid-friendly smoking cartoon characters, like Camel, were created to plant the seed of appeal in kids’ minds. And it continued to be endorsed by doctors and beautiful celebrities funded by tobacco companies. 
And this has all been despite the fact that, internally, since the 1950s, the tobacco industry has been well aware of the lethal harm of tobacco use. 
These are not unlike the tactics used by oil, coal and gas companies. Companies who have been acutely aware of the hurt their products cause since the 1970s. 
Naomi Oreskes: “The fossil fuel industry essentially adopted the tobacco industry strategy. Sometimes people refer to it as the tobacco playbook.”
Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history and of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. She’s an expert in disinformation. And the co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. 
Naomi Oreskes: “So it’s, in many ways, almost identical. In recent years, as the issue has changed, they’ve developed a few new original strategies as well. But the whole strategy of saying the science isn’t settled, we don’t really know, and anyway, it’s your responsibility, that comes straight out of tobacco.”
As with tobacco, scientists were voicing their concern about the threat of climate change and the role fossil fuels played decades/well before a scientific consensus was officially reached. Some of those scientists were employed by fossil fuel companies themselves – they wanted to understand the problem and how it would affect their industry.  
Naomi Oreskes: “ExxonMobil in particular had its own active research program in which their own scientists were doing research on the climate question. And in the 1970s and early 1980s, their own scientists told them that yes, this was a real problem, that what other academic and government scientists were saying about climate change was almost certainly true, and that if the world continued to use fossil fuels, this could have extremely serious consequences. Even we have at least one document where an ExxonMobil scientist says that it could potentially be catastrophic.”
That’s right, US-based oil and gas giant ExxonMobil had its own scientists conclude that continued fossil fuel use would be potentially catastrophic for the world. And how did they respond? 
Naomi Oreskes: “Right around the time that the scientific consensus emerges that climate change is actually happening, so not just a prediction about the future, but something that was already now underway, that begins in 1988 with the work of NASA climate modeler Jim Hansen and his team, pretty much as soon as that information gets public and Hansen testifies in Congress, it’s written up on the front page of the New York Times and many other media outlets cover the story, that’s when we see the fossil fuel industry shift in a pretty dramatic way.
Starting around 1989, 1990, 1991, we see the fossil fuel industry beginning to mobilize to fight the facts, to push back against the science, and to spread the message which they have been spreading ever since: that we don’t really know, the science is unsettled, there’s no consensus, and anyway, if there is a little bit of warming, it’s not that bad, and anyway, we can’t live without fossil fuels, and to try to…to abandon fossil fuels would wreck the global economy. In fact, wreck civilization as we know it.”
Marketing, advertisements, sponsorship deals and lobbying have been key to the industry’s multi-decade, multi-pronged, multi-billion-dollar disinformation campaign.  
From denying the existence of climate change and questioning the science, to scaremongering about the economic cost of ditching coal, oil and gas, to shifting the blame onto individuals, to now positioning themselves as trailblazers in the green transition, the fossil fuel industry’s public relations campaign has been highly adaptive and highly effective/remarkably distracting. 
Naomi Oreskes: “So, everyone’s heard of the notion of a carbon footprint. And it’s not a bad idea. I mean, as we’ve said, these people are clever. So, the notion, the idea of the carbon footprint was popularized by British Petroleum.”
In the early 2000s, BP hired a PR firm (Ogilvy & Mather), to help them put a different spin on the climate crisis. Enter: The carbon footprint calculator they unveiled in 2004. 
Naomi Oreskes: “And it was part of a strategy they used to shift attention to the consumer, to shift attention away from the supply side to the demand side, and to imply that this was somehow our fault as the consumer, because we were the ones who were doing all the driving, you know, flying planes, eating all this meat. And of course, it’s not false. I mean, a lot of disinformation works because it’s not a straight out lie, but it’s a kind of misdirection. It is true that the choices we make as individuals make a difference. And in a way, that’s good because it’s empowering, because it reminds us that we can make other choices!”
But… 
Naomi Oreskes: “But on the other hand, it’s also true that we live in a world that is structured by the fossil fuel industry, who fights tooth and nail to prevent us from having good alternatives, who have lobbied in Congress for decades to prevent the sort of policies that would support the transition to renewable energy. So, many of us don’t have good alternative choices, and that’s to a large extent because of the things that the fossil fuel industry has done.”
As outright climate change denialism has become a harder line to tow in public, many in the industry are trying a new tactic these days – one that’s more fitting with the times. 
Naomi Oreskes: “If you go to the websites or read the global outlets of any of these major companies, you would think that they were great environmental stewards, that they were in the forefront of renewable energy technology. And it’s a grotesque misrepresentation. We know that most of these companies invest tiny, tiny amounts, less than 3 % of their budget on renewable energy, algae, biofuel. We know that Exxon Mobil for years had advertisements about the significance of algae biofuel, even when privately they were saying in their own letters of memoranda, yeah there’s very little likelihood that this is going to work. It’s too expensive to make energy from biofuels, (it’s) hard to break the cells in plants.”
But – as Naomi found in her research – one key part of this messaging has stayed the same.  
Naomi Oreskes: “They’re not trying to prove that there’s no climate change. They’re just trying to raise doubt in people’s minds. Well, how do we know for sure? They create doubt by creating an argument and debate. But if you say to people, this is disinformation, they’re trying to con you. This is a con job. No one wants to be the sucker. No one wants to be at the losing end of a con. So I have found that that is the most effective way to address this is to name it for what it is and to explain to people: “these people are trying to confuse you. They want you to be a sucker. And so what I’m saying is, don’t fall for that. Just don’t fall for it.” 
And there are still seemingly plenty of opportunities to be a sucker. 
Today, major media outlets, including The Washington Post, Reuters, Politico, Axios, NPR, MSNBC and CNN still run fossil fuel ads, for the likes of Saudi Aramco, BP and ExxonMobil. These same companies, as well as Chevron, Shell and TotalEnergies are major sponsors of influencers on Instagram, Tiktok and Twitch, where they pay people to plug gas stations and fuel rewards cards.
Naomi’s research found that in the lead up to the 2018-2020 US midterm and presidential elections, “ExxonMobil spent more on political advertising on Facebook and Instagram than any other company in the world, apart from Facebook itself”. 
And if you’re not online and you don’t read the news, they’ll likely find you anyway – whether it’s at a museum, a gallery, a theatre, school or sports field near you.  
Major oil and gas companies spend around $5.6 billion sponsoring sports like football, motorsports, rugby union and golf across the globe. Chevron alone has 9 deals across baseball, basketball, football and soccer in the US. In the sports world, fossil fuels are truly ubiquitous. 
Chevron and Exxon, the world’s 3rd and 4th biggest polluters, have also invested heavily in arts and culture in the States – to the Smithsonian Institution, the Texas State History Museum, the John F Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, just to name a few.
Fossil fuel companies do have an enormous amount of money, money that many cultural institutions are often in dire need of to fund their projects. But financial backing is rarely for free, and the fossil fuel industry’s historical track record isn’t promising. 
Naomi Oreskes: “This is a company that we know has misrepresented the truth, fought scientific evidence for four decades. So, it seems to me the burden of proof is on them to really demonstrate that they’ve changed. And that means not just words, but action. And if we look at their action, what we see is, very, very meager investments in meaningful alternatives – and continued exploration for and development of new sources of oil and gas.”
Plus, researchers know that sponsorship is a really important part of building ‘social capital’ for companies – the social license companies need to continue existing. Here’s advertising and brand creativity lecturer Matt Halliday again. 
Matt Halliday: “The advertising and marketing industries have a role to play in building that social acceptance… what advertising does is it gives social license to… industries, the fossil fuel industry, in the case we’re talking about today, that they still have license to do what they’re doing.”
So, if advertising can be a vehicle to encourage overconsumption, spread disinformation and aid and abet the climate crisis, could it also be a force for meaningful climate action? 
Matthew Halliday: “Yes. So, advertising can be used to affect social change. We’ve seen examples through a couple of incredible anti-racism campaigns here in New Zealand. We’ve seen movements to revitalize the Māori language… but advertising, marketing, and media were all instrumental in that language revitalization. And it has become a part of the culture.”
Matt points to organizations such as ComsDeclare, Clean Creatives and Fossil Free Media, which are all aimed at campaigning for ad agencies to take fossil fuel companies off their books. 
But he does see a pretty big roadblock…  
Matthew Halliday: “Can advertising solve the climate crisis? No, because there’s no money in it. Advertising agencies are run on where the money is. Fossil fuel companies, they’ve still got money. Who’s paying for the campaign that changes the behavior? Who’s paying for the campaign that helps us adapt and transition to a zero-emission society? I don’t know.”
And perhaps that is exactly where governments come in – to fund these public health ad campaigns and regulate which companies can and cannot advertise their products.  
Many countries already have strict laws about fact-based advertising in place – which is in part why anti-greenwashing litigation is currently on the rise, targeting airlines, petrol stations and fashion brands for misleading claims about their ‘sustainable’ credentials.  
Back in Edinburgh… councilor Ben Parker says the council sees the fossil fuel ad ban as part of its responsibility to its residents.  
Ben Parker: “As we reflect on the changes that we’re going to need to see across society as a result of the impact of climate change and ecological collapse as well, like we are going to have to change our behaviors, we’re going to have to change attitudes and we’re going to need to, as a local authority and as governments, we’re going to need to support people through those changes. 
 So, this is not the be all and end all, but it is definitely part of the jigsaw. And it’s, we should also celebrate the little wins along the way. You know, sometimes the news is really depressing and sometimes it feels like we’re nowhere close to tackling this big scary thing that’s happening. And actually, I think, you know, we also have to hold onto the fact that little things like this, they are good news stories.”
This episode of Living Planet was produced by me, Charli Shield. It was edited and soundscaped by Neil King. Jürgen Kuhn was our sound engineer. If you liked this episode, we would love to know – give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts… or tell a friend! And remember you can always email us a voice note with your ideas and feedback to [email protected] – we’d love to hear from you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week.