An absolutely basic response to climate change ought to be to commit to not making it worse, right? Apparently not: plenty of countries still subsidise fossil fuels. The oil giants are still prospecting for new sources of oil and gas. And then there’s advertising. “Why is the climate changing faster than us?” ask Andrew Simms and Leo Murray. “One reason is the mixed messages brought to us by advertising that normalises high-carbon products and lifestyles, in contradiction of climate science.”
Andrew Simms and Leo Murray founded the Badvertising campaign in 2020 to draw attention to the role of advertising in perpetuating high carbon lifestyles. The campaign has produced a number of reports on how advertising works and its role in consumerism. That research has now been expanded and explained in the book Badvertising: Polluting our minds and fuelling climate chaos.
We begin with a history of advertising and the recurring question of its effectiveness. Is it a driver of consumerism overall, or does it just direct people to specific brands? The vast sums spent suggest it is effective, and with the rise of online advertising people now see some 6,000 adverts every single day. “Step back for a moment and ponder the cumulative, unconscious impact that advertising and all its devices might be having on us,” the authors suggest.
Even if we don’t all run out and buy the product in the ad, the exposure to it helps to make it normal. It makes high carbon behaviour such as flying or driving normal and even aspirational. And so the book covers the most egregious examples of unhelpful advertising – for SUVs and airlines – with a chapter on each.
Almost every SUV advert you’ll ever see features the oversized car in the wilderness, or possibly whizzing around an empty city. School runs and supermarket car parks don’t appear, though in reality that is the natural habitat of the Sports Utility Vehicle. The adverts have been carefully crafted to appeal to our positive desire for nature connection, our less healthy desire to dominate those around us, and our fears around safety. But SUVs emit more carbon, and the rising market share of SUVs is a big reason why transport emissions aren’t falling in many countries around the world.
Aviation is another dubious form of advertising, because it’s a luxury product with no low-carbon technology waiting… ahem… in the wings. Most flights are taken for leisure and by the richest, making it one of the most stark examples of climate inequality. And yet the billboards and bus-stop ads for Easyjet or Ryanair continue to encourage people to fly for the most trivial of reasons.
Could anything be done about it? There’s a hopeful comparison to make with tobacco, which was gradually restricted in its right to advertise. It took a long time and the lobby groups are powerful, but the health effects of tobacco were recognised enough to make it unethical to keep promoting it. High carbon lifestyle products may be on their way out too, and though the government isn’t leading on it yet, several cities around the UK have restricted high carbon advertising.
Sports sponsorship remains a problem, and gets a chapter in the book. Just as tobacco held on in sports and in Formula 1 in particular, so oil and gas companies have embedded themselves in sports at the highest level. That’s another avenue for action.
These are things that we may be able to do something about locally, asking our local councils and sports teams to forego SUV, aviation and fossil fuel adverts and sponsorships. It’s a small step that would need to be replicated in multiple locations until it eventually becomes government policy, but it would help to remove that social licence to operate. Those sorts of social changes can be powerful, as Simms and Murray write:
“We hear a lot about technological fixes that promise, one day, to save us. But we hear very little about the simple cultural and social things we can do to stop making things worse. An end to the way advertising actively promotes our own self-destruction through overconsumption would be a start.”
Joy in Enough 