Climate Action Day 5 – Beware the Corporate “Anti-Climate” Campaign

Starting and Sustaining Your Climate Action Journey

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

You may remember The Crying Indian advertisement from the Keep America Beautiful campaign. Cultural appropriation aside (the “Crying Indian” was not Native American), the ad was disinformation at its finest. As Michael Mann points out, it is the most prominent and possibly first indication of companies and industry groups engaging in a deflection campaign. Designed cynically to deflect attention away from efforts to regulate industries. All that trash you see? That is your fault. You are a litterbug! If you people would only stop littering, there would be absolutely no need to regulate the use of unsustainable single-use plastic.

Not merely a deflection campaign, The Keep America Beautiful campaign is a fine example of greenwashing. Corporations are engaging in greenwashing when they spend more on advertising to convince the public that they are “green” then actually working on improving their environmental practices. Companies like Coca Cola proliferated this greenwashing focus on consumers as the cause of pollution for decades.

There are lots of tricks, traps, and communication strategies deployed to deceive when it comes to climate change”

Heidi Roop

As Heidi points out, the fossil fuel companies in particular have engaged in deflection campaigns centered around encouraging you to reduce your “carbon footprint” and recycle. Worse, they used active disinformation campaign to discredit climate science and climate scientists (like Michael Mann). They also concealed and their own internal knowledge about the connection between burning fossil fuels and global warming that they knew for years.

ExxonMobil has engaged in particularly egregious disinformation as they sought to maintain shareholder value and secure record profits. In 1980, an internal report stated that “It is assumed that the major contributors of CO2 are the burning of fossil fuels… There is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases of forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Technology exists to remove CO2 from stack gases but removal of only 50% of the CO2 would double the cost of power generation.” [emphasis added]

It is up to us to hone and practice our critical thinking skills when navigating advertisements, social media, and the world around us. We also need to let those businesses who are engaging in deflection and greenwashing know that we understand what they are doing and will actively expose and oppose their effort.

Also beware of news organizations like the New York Times that are executing campaigns to craft and publish ads promoting fossil fuels. Their tactics include native advertising (advertising disguised as actual news content), contextual advertising (where ads are placed next to real articles to provide misleading contextual connections), and podcast advertising (where fossil fuel companies sponsor unavoidable advertisements embedded in podcasts). Grassroots groups are fighting back, for instance #AdsNotFit2Print is organizing to get “The New York Times to stop writing and running the fossil-fuel #AdsNotFit2Print!”.

For us as individuals, the only power that we have, besides signing petitions, is to “vote” with our dollars. We can send messages to corporations with policies and practices that we do not agree with by not only not spending money with them, but letting everyone know why we are making the choice. As you move through your day, “keep a critical eye out for climate information coming from the fossil fuel industry” – and let everyone know when you spot it.

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 6: Know What Powers You and Your Home

Back to 100 Climate Solutions

Howard Creel

#rescuethatfrog
Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com

1. 

   We cannot express enough gratitude for Howard and Heidi’s exploration and guidebook to practical action, pushing back against the much-ignored…

2. 

   Yours is a compelling back-story. Thanks for sharing

3. 

   This entry by Howard Creel is particularly excellent, and addresses much more than just our climate crisis. It’s a concise…

4. 

   Thanks, Mark. Of all topics in the series, I have gone the deepest on the sources and sinks of carbon…

5. 

   Brilliant post and analysis. A primer on the cynical tactic of greenwashing, everyone needs to know the difference between talking…