Ads against humanity
Banning ads of harmful products is inexpensive and effective, that’s why cities are doing it.
Spare a thought for the marketing executives of fossil fuel companies. Earlier this month, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres referred to their bosses as “the Godfathers of climate chaos” and urged “every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies”. One would hope they had seen it coming. Did they realise that by using the tobacco industry playbook they would eventually end up, like tobacco ads, an unpleasant relic of the past?
We are not there yet, but the direction is clear—fossil fuel companies are losing their ability to portray themselves as positive actors in the energy transition. Tired of the inaction of national governments, cities are stepping up and banning advertisements for harmful products, including fossil fuels’ deceitful greenwash.
What’s a harmful product?
One of the main challenges of introducing an advertisement ban on harmful products is that we lack a clear definition of the term—or so fossil fuel PR want us to believe. With tobacco advertising bans, the target was simple: smoking and tobacco products, from which there was mounting evidence of detrimental health effects. Such a direct link was harder to establish for fossil fuels at first, not because the cause of climate change wasn’t clear, but because the issue is much more complex and our economies much more intertwined with it.
The scientific consensus is unequivocal: human activities, via the emission of greenhouse gases, causes warming (see latest IPCC report), but it took years to single out which activities are most to blame. Meanwhile, the PR departments of the fossil fuel majors and businesses that produce other harmful products engaged in a perverse real-life application of the Sorites paradox: if each activity is only responsible for a small fraction of the overall warming, individual actors should not be to blame. We now know that this logic is flawed, and that fossil fuels, and the activities that burn a disproportionately large amount of them are indeed harmful to the planet and to us all. Other than the extraction of fossil fuels, these harmful products include SUVs (who were responsible for 20% of the growth in energy-related emissions in 2023), cruise ships (who, only in Europe, emitted more sulphur dioxide than a billion cars in 2022), and civil aviation (which accounts for 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions, but has contributed around 4% to global warming to date and is ostensibly the most emission-intensive activity an individual can engage in).
Cities leading the way
In 2021, Amsterdam became the first city in the world to announce a ban on outdoor advertising for fossil fuels and aviation, but since then many others have followed its example, often including SUVs, cruise ships, and (not without controversy) meat in the ban. Most recently, Edinburgh stopped allowing ads from the fossil fuel industry on city-owned assets such as bus shelters, digital screens and billboards, as these were inconsistent with its net zero targets. The move is the latest of many similar policies introduced by other UK local governments (Sheffield, Bristol, and many others), but the trend is global: the excellent website World Without Fossil Fuels compiles a great tracker that shows cities taking action, from Australia to South Africa.
Why banning ads of harmful products works
The principle behind not allowing the advertisement of certain harmful products is that it will influence the way they are perceived, rather than immediately reducing their use. Warning messages on tobacco products were crucial not so much in helping people quit smoking, but in eroding tobacco’s social licence to operate.
Warning labels could be powerful tools for shifting the perception of fossil fuels too, a recent study highlighted. The tendency of the fossil fuel industry to run relentlessly deceitful campaigns—a euphemism for incessant lies—is hardly a well-kept secret, so warning labels for harmful fossil-intensive products may well be something worth considering.
Encouragingly, there are cases in which the effects of advertisement bans are immediately tangible, rather than simply affecting brand perception: a 2022 study found that London’s 2019 ban on junk-food advertising was estimated to have prevented approximately 95,000 cases of obesity and saved over £200 million (approximately USD 250 million) for the UK National Health Service.
Cities who are taking climate action have taken it upon themselves to stop the promotion of high-carbon activities to their residents. Not only is this logically sound, it is also not expensive as, such as in the case of London where these are still allowed, fossil fuel and aviation ads account for a small fraction of a city’s advertising revenue.
Advertisement is not inherently bad. There are great examples of creative ad campaigns that encourage sustainable transport choices or, more simply, that promote local businesses and festivals while generally improving the streetscene. However, these are still the exception rather than the rule—which is why Secretary-General Guterres' words resonate with so many.
💡 From the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy
Earlier this year, the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, which we produce in collaboration with the University of Toronto Press, published a paper from Dr Simon Mair, University of York, highlighting the role advertising plays in promoting the cultural predominance of capitalism and how cities can think differently about it. You can read the paper in full here.
📚 What we are reading
: The Years by Annie Erneaux. Perhaps I’m late to the party given that Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, but if you are like me and haven’t yet read her, I’d go as far as saying if you only read one book this year, read this one. The Years is a narrative of the period from 1941 to 2006 told through snippets of memory, family photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. A mix of autofiction and sociology, The Years traces magnificently how attitudes towards consumption and women’s sexual freedoms evolve following the Second World War.
: Brett Christophers’ The Price is Wrong offers a masterful explanation of how electricity markets designed for a fossil fuel world shortchange renewables. Ultimately, he suggests, it’s profits, not generation costs, that shape investment decisions, so the public sector should step up and step in to support the decarbonisation of electricity generation. My reading list now also includes The Poverty of Growth (by former United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Olivier De Schutter). It promises to be a simple explainer of the current drivers of poverty and inequality and a manifesto on how to achieve prosperity without growth.
