The world has begrudgingly come around to the idea that climate change is happening. What we do about it remains a point of debate, but you’d think we could all agree on one thing. While we work out the best solutions, shouldn’t we stop making it worse?
Apparently not, since fossil fuel subsidies remain. We’re still exploring 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 contradicton of climate science.”
Andrew Simms and Leo Murray have done something about this already, founding the Badvertising campaign in 2020. I wrote about their SUV campaign at the time. Through that campaign they have commissioned a series of thought-provoking reports on how advertising works and what its impact on the climate might be. That’s all brought together now in this book, Badvertising: Polluting our minds and fuelling climate chaos.
The book begins with a historical recap of advertising and its origins, and exactly how much it drives consumption. Does it drive spending or simply help people to choose? Plenty of people insist that advertising doesn’t work on them, but in the internet age we may be seeing over 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. Of course it influences us, and to deny it puts the industry in an awkward position – if they say they aren’t driving consumerism, does that mean their ads don’t work?
This is all a good deal more urgent in an age of climate breakdown. Every new SUV sold will be smoking the streets for an average of 14 years, but it is only bought once. The advert that convinces the buyer has a lot to answer for, and so the book zeroes in on two particular industries – SUVs and airlines, with a chapter on each.
Most people don’t need SUVs. Almost nobody drives them in the wilderness that reliably features in the adverts for them. They are less safe as family cars, use a quarter more fuel, and are the primary reason why emissions from transport stubbornly refuse to fall in the UK, the US and many other places. SUV sales are no accident. Drivers haven’t had this unmet need for oversized cars for the last century, secretly longing to drive a 4×4 in the city. Demand has been created from scratch, in order to make more money. The book details the backstory of the SUV, how loopholes in US efficiency standards helped them along, and how car marketers targeted drivers with anti-social tendencies as a specific audience. Yes, really.
Airlines are another focus because there’s simply no low-carbon option for flying, and it’s mainly the richest who fly. The richest 1% take 50% of the flights, and most of them are for leisure. It’s one of the most stark examples of how the lifestyles of the wealthiest drive the climate breakdown that destroys the lives of the poorest. And yet it’s still perfectly normal to encourage people to fly for the most trivial of reasons.
Could it be different? Sure, and the most obvious parallel is tobacco. It took decades, but tobacco was slowly restricted in how and where it could advertise. It clung on in sports sponsorship, which is another focus of the book. Despite powerful lobby groups protecting the industry, it was gradually silenced. The fact that cigarette adverts are banned today seems common sense, but it very much wasn’t for a very long time. We’ll think of SUV and flight adverts in the same way eventually, and Badvertising explains how we need might acheive that. It will involve moving beyond today’s inadequate self-regulation, reducing dependence on advertising in the media, and ultimately laws about what can and can’t be promoted.
Simms and Murray have written an engaging and practical book, distilling a wealth of research into some straightforward steps for reining in advertising. When you think about it, it’s almost absurd that Badvertising is necessary – but here it is with obvious and yet strangely contentious premise:
“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.”
- You can order Badvertising from Earthbound Books UK or US
Andrew Simms was associated with the New Economics Foundation for a long time, and now the New Weather Institute. Leo Murray is at Possible, formerly 10:10. Their projects have featured on the site here dozens of times over the years. Here are a handful of them:
The Earthbound Report 
“Car marketers targeted drivers with anti-social tendancies…” ever so funny. As someone whose cars have always been small and low-to-the-ground, I can admit to finding it enjoyable to be in the passenger seat of a friend’s SUV. Something special to be higher than others on the highway, superior, entitled, powerful…. Now that I can commute by foot and by bike, it’s not only cheaper and lower in C02, but it has a surprising benefit: The extra 2 mile commute on foot has stopped the craving for wine and given me back my self-respect.
Yes, it does feel great to be riding high above the peasants! What I found most depressing thought was how many SUV ads almost gloried in how environmentally unfriendly they were – like the ‘show mother nature who’s boss’ ad for Jeep. The deliberately sold SUVs as aggressive and dominant, and that’s deeply anti-social.
Yes. I had a conversation with some friends about how it bothers me to waste any gas at all…the friends are well traveled, well intentioned people. One of the nicest ones suggested that I’m “extremely sensitive” to my impact on others far away. She is a scientist so perhaps sees that the impact of individual consumption is ever so slight, whereas with my vague awareness of zeros I’m sure I overestimate my own impact. Yet it seems as though rather than being anti-social, people like my friend just don’t feel the ties of kinship to those who suffer as a result of our consumption. I wonder if there might be a way to kind of make them feel what we feel….To make the world where they live connect more fully to the world they don’t spend much time thinking about. Have always thought film was a good medium for that. Still haven’t managed to see William and the Windmill!
Correction – I saw William and the Windmill, but not yet The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.