New Yorker
- Bill McKibben
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If money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns,
then P.R. campaigns and snappy catchphrases are the kindling.
Illustration by Lia Liao
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Author
Bill McKibben
is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a
contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes
The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker's newsletter on the environment.
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Past sins are past no more: an overdue historical recalibration is under way,
with monuments being pulled down, dorms renamed, restitution offered. People
did things, bad things; even across the span of centuries, they’re
being held to account, and there’s something noble about that. The Reverend
Robert W. Lee IV, for instance, recently
backed
the removal of his famous ancestor’s statue from Richmond, Virginia. The
memorial, he wrote, “is a hollow reminder of a painful ideology and acts of
oppression against black people. Taking it down will provide new opportunities
for conversations, relationships and policy change.” Such a response raises an
uncomfortable question: What are
we doing now that our descendants will
need to apologize for? Might we be able to get ahead of the sin this time?
The most urgent practical question currently facing the species is almost
certainly whether we can rapidly transform our energy systems and stop pouring
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Chief executives of oil companies keep
the conflagration going, but the industry doesn’t work alone. Last year—before
the final fully intact ice shelf in Canada
collapsed
into the Arctic Ocean; before record fires
killed or displaced
nearly three billion animals across Australia; before the world
measured
its first reliable hundred-and-thirty-degree-Fahrenheit temperature, in Death
Valley, California; before that state faced the largest fires in its history;
before at least five tropical cyclones spun at once through the Atlantic—I
wrote about
the role that banks, asset managers, and insurance companies have played in
supplying the capital required to keep the fossil-fuel industry humming. In
the months since, those industries, pressed hard by activists, have begun to
shift; giants such as BlackRock have announced
sweeping new policies, even if they’re still far from matching their rhetoric with action.
Now I want to focus on another industry that buttresses the status quo: the
advertising, lobbying, and public-relations firms that help provide the
rationalizations and the justifications that slow the pace of change. Although
these agencies are less significant monetarily than the banks, they are more
so intellectually; if money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming
burns, then P.R. campaigns and snappy catchphrases are the kindling.
Climate change is sometimes compared to
the Holocaust
or to
slavery, because all three have killed and degraded human lives on an almost
unimaginable scale. But the comparisons are, at their root, wrong, at least on
moral terms—among many other things, for most of the more than three centuries
that people have been burning fossil fuels, they had no idea that they were
damaging the future. Coal and oil and gas were seen as—and, at one time,
probably were—more liberating than oppressing for the societies that burned
them, despite the pollution they produced. It was just around three decades
ago that the heat-trapping molecular structure of carbon dioxide, and hence
the “greenhouse effect,” became a pressing public issue, and, by that time,
fossil fuel was one of the world’s largest industrial enterprises. The burning
of fossil fuel wasn’t evil in its origins, in other words—no one need feel
guilty for having been a part of it, which is good, because all of us in the
rich world are, even if we have solar panels on the roof and a Tesla in the
garage.
By this point, however, we know precisely how dangerous the continued
combustion of hydrocarbons is. And we have seen that there are affordable
alternatives to them. Indeed, solar and wind power can now be produced more
cheaply than fossil-fuel energy. And we’ve seen
great investigative reporting
lay out the fact that the big oil companies have known of the causes of
climate change since at least the nineteen-eighties, and worked actively to
deny them or cover them up. Clearly, that was immoral. So what do we say in
2020 about the people who are still helping the oil majors and the gas
utilities in their efforts to slow a transition to clean energy?
I’m not talking here about coal miners or natural-gas pipeliners or people who
work at filling stations, much less people who drive cars or heat their
homes—they participate in a world that they didn’t create. But lobbyists and
P.R. firms develop promotional campaigns for the industry, and people are
starting to hold them accountable for it. In August, Storebrand, a
ninety-one-billion-dollar asset manager based in Norway, divested from
companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron precisely because of their lobbying
activities. “Climate change is one of the greatest risks facing humanity, and
lobbying activities which undermine action to solve this crisis are simply
unacceptable. The Exxons and Chevrons of the world are holding us back,” Jan
Erik Saugestad, Storebrand’s chief executive, said.
What’s interesting about many of the current P.R. campaigns is that they don’t
involve classic climate denial. Outside of the
Trump Administration
and the right wing of the Republican Party, that’s now a dead letter. You
could no more persuade a Madison Avenue agency to argue that carbon dioxide is
harmless than you could persuade it to argue that Black lives don’t matter.
Instead, these campaigns often look for ways to leverage people’s
environmental concern in service of precisely the companies that are causing
the trouble.
Let’s start with a completely charming series of online ads that B.B.D.O. put
together, in 2019, for Exxon. B.B.D.O. is one of the iconic ad agencies (it
was frequently mentioned on “Mad Men”), responsible for everything from
“Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry”
(DuPont) to “Ring Around the Collar” (Wisk detergent). Building on a YouTube
craze for videos showing cooks preparing tiny cakes and hamburgers, a creative
team put together a series of four
Web ads
called “Miniature Science.” In the second ad, algae is grown in little dishes,
cultivated in a tiny seawater pond, and kept circulating by a minuscule paddle
wheel. After a few days, the algae is drained from the pond, and a pocket-size
pestle crushes its cell walls to free its oil. Once the paste has been mixed
with traces of hexane, sodium hydroxide, and methanol, it produces “a
low-emission biofuel.” In the next installment, the mixture is used to propel
a boat around a bowl. This algae biofuel, a sprightly narrator notes, could
power “entire fleets of ships tomorrow.” In fact, the ad contends, algae could
fuel “the trucks, ships and planes of tomorrow.” It concludes, “This is big.”
But it’s not big. The algae tech dates back more than a decade, when a number
of oil companies invested relatively small sums in the project. In 2009, Exxon
partnered with a company called Synthetic Genomics to conduct research and
figure out how to scale production; the oil giant
estimates
that, between 2008 and 2018, it invested about two hundred and fifty million
dollars into biofuel technology. Some five years after that partnership began,
Exxon was
spending
about a hundred million dollars
a day trying to find and develop new
sources of oil and natural gas and on other costs. Considering this, the algae
money represents a rounding error: a few days’ worth worth of capital
expenditures from a company still fully committed to its legacy products. And,
in any event, by the time B.B.D.O. was producing Exxon’s ads, most other
companies had ceased work on algae biofuel, because it had become obvious that
it would never make economic sense. As the industry newsletter Oilprice.com
put it, you’d
need
oil to trade at five hundred dollars a barrel—more than ten times its current
price—for algae to ever compete with it. As a result, Exxon itself has
essentially conceded that this technology won’t amount to much. The company’s
latest forecast put off until as late as 2025 the date for actually producing
algae fuel, and even then it will be producing just an estimated ten thousand
barrels a day, or roughly 0.2 per cent of its refinery capacity. Meanwhile, a
trial at Swansea University, in Wales,
showed
that, if you wanted to supply, say, ten per cent of Europe’s transport-fuel
needs with algae, you’d need growing ponds three times the size of Belgium.
According to one blog, you’d need ponds
covering eighteen per cent
of the agricultural land in the United Kingdom just to cover Britain’s
transportation habits.
But, if algae has underachieved scientifically, it has dramatically
overachieved as a greenwashing tool. The B.B.D.O. Web ads were the least of
it; there were also TV campaigns and print ads from agencies such as
Universal McCann. “If you look on ExxonMobil’s Facebook or Instagram, you’d think that algae
is all they’re thinking about all the time,” Zoya Teirstein, a reporter for
Grist,
told
the
Harvard Political Review. According to Kert Davies, the director
of the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center, Exxon began running algae ads
during the 2016 Olympics, and has spent more than fifty million dollars buying
TV time to tout the biofuel’s wonders. Another example: a long “
paid post” prepared with the
Times’ brand marketing team (the editorial and
news staffs were not involved) which aims to explain “how scientists are
tapping algae and plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future.” As a
researcher explains, “Eventually, we want to power something the size of UPS
or FedEx’s global fleet with renewable diesel. That would be pretty
aspirational. It’d be a real ‘We did it’ moment.”
In fact, both
UPS
and
FedEx
are busily electrifying their delivery-truck fleets. (
Amazon
and
Ikea, too.) As experts have been saying for years, a working climate future
depends on the rapid electrification of almost everything—because, if
something runs on electricity, it can be powered by the sun and the wind. A
decade ago, that was still a hopeful idea, but, in recent years, as the price
of solar and wind power has plummeted, it’s become an eminently practical one.
It’s already true for domestic consumption, and increasingly it’s even the
case for heavy industry, including
steel production. Here is the energy expert Saul Griffith
speaking
to Ezra Klein, of Vox: “We don’t really have a vision for how to create the
same amount of liquid fuels as we do today to drive our cars. So really the
only answer if we’re going to continue to have a lot of cars is to electrify
them. Similarly, we don’t really have an answer to providing heat to our homes
that’s zero carbon unless we electrify. It’s really the only pathway that’s
viable to get to zero carbon.” Again, a decade ago, this could have seemed a
dream. But, as lithium-ion batteries have got more efficient, and electric
vehicles have got cheaper, it’s now clearly the only way forward. And it has
to happen fast: as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out
two years ago, if we don’t make “fundamental transformations” in our energy
systems by 2030—which the group defined as cutting emissions by nearly half—we
have no chance of meeting even the modest targets set by the world’s nations
in Paris five years ago. There is no time to waste.
And yet wasting time is exactly what we’re doing, because the renewable
electricity that could stave off climate change is a huge threat to oil and
gas companies. Consider another campaign, which began development in 2017.
As
Mother Jones has
reported, the American Public Gas Association, a collection of utilities that
supply homes with natural gas,
launched
a campaign called “Natural Gas Genius,” which was developed by the
consulting and communications firm Porter Novelli. (Jack Porter and Bill
Novelli were sixties- and seventies-era ad men, too—they worked together to
market the Peace Corps.) The message of what the A.P.G.A. called the
“refreshing, sassy” campaign was “I choose natural gas to live better,” and
the firm found a mid-tier Instagram influencer to help disseminate it.
According to the A.P.G.A., The campaign’s “target audience is homeowners who
are looking to buy or renovate a home in the next five years. We are
confident in the ability of this new type of message that speaks to the
emotional aspect of natural gas, to help us achieve our goal of increasing
consumer consideration of natural gas direct use in their homes.”
That is, they were trying to do the opposite of what climate science
suggests. If you’re buying a new home or renovating an old one, you can
install an electric air-source heat pump instead of a gas boiler. It will
heat (and also cool) your home effectively and cheaply, and produce far
fewer greenhouse gases in the process. You can also install, instead of a
gas stove, an induction cooktop—an appliance whose use is
growing rapidly
in Asia and Europe. Not only will it boil water considerably faster and help
with the climate; it will remove from your kitchen a flame that pollutes the
indoor air and can harm your kids. According to a Rocky Mountain Institute
report
released earlier this year, “children are more vulnerable to air pollution
due to several factors including their developing lungs and smaller body
size. Children in a home with a gas stove have a 24–42 percent increased
risk of having asthma.” The report states that new modelling from
researchers at U.C.L.A. found that “cooking on gas can spike emissions of
nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide to levels that would violate outdoor
pollutant standards.” Indeed, “homes with gas stoves can have nitrogen
dioxide concentrations that are 50–400 percent higher than homes with
electric stoves,” the report notes, adding that even the Trump-era E.P.A.
has
acknowledged
a causal link between short-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide and
“respiratory symptoms.”
There’s not much question as to why the American Public Gas Association
bankrolls the campaign—its members sell gas and it opposes natural-gas bans.
(The A.P.G.A. president and C.E.O. David Schryver said, in a statement,
“proposed gas bans are flawed, short-sighted and only serve to negatively
impact homeowners by restricting consumers’ ability to choose a reliable,
efficient and affordable energy source,” adding, “as publicly owned
utilities deeply committed to their customers, APGA members see themselves
as responsible stewards of the environment and of their communities.”) Nor
is there much question about why Exxon is growing algae. As the
Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey,
put it, in a recent lawsuit filed against the company, alleging that it has
misled consumers and investors, “ExxonMobil’s relentless ‘greenwashing’
marketing campaigns target consumers with messaging regarding ExxonMobil’s
purported environmental stewardship, corporate leadership in the realm of
environmental and climate protection, and innovative clean energy research,
while failing to disclose that ExxonMobil is spending little on clean energy
development, and instead is secretly opposing actions to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions and ramping up production of fossil fuels that cause climate
change.” (Exxon said, in a statement, that “legal proceedings like this
waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money and do nothing to advance
meaningful actions that reduce the risks of climate change,” adding, “our
corporate advertising efforts highlight proof-points to extensive our [sic]
R&D portfolio. . . . We’re investing in new technologies
that have the potential to provide affordable lower-carbon energy.”) The
effect was certainly pretty clear to industry observers. Muse by Clio, an
ad-industry daily newsletter, reported that, if the miniature-algae campaign
“burnishes the brand as it stares down rough headlines, or just softens the
company’s image in general—well, that’s not small potatoes either.”
The sociologist Robert Brulle, who is a visiting professor of environment
and society at Brown, has
studied such marketing extensively.
The campaigns, he said, are “integrated efforts that combine lobbying with
P.R. ad campaigns, editorial writing efforts, outreach to sympathetic media
outlets, and grassroots mobilization. There is pretty much no real
difference in the aims of lobbying and advertising, as they are all part of
a large-scale coördinated effort to shift public policy in a specific
direction.” And that direction is always the same: go slowly toward the
energy future, if you go at all.
But there is some question as to why ad agencies and P.R. firms—and creative
talent in general—go along. They can make millions of dollars if they do,
but that money’s not an existential issue for them, in the way that it is
for the oil and gas companies. Fossil fuels remain an important part of the
economy, but a rapidly shrinking one; in 2008, the energy sector—mostly
hydrocarbons—represented 15.96 per cent of the
S. & P. 500. Now that’s
dropped
to 2.34 per cent, and it’s the smallest fraction of the index. So there are
other things that you could be sassy and refreshing about, other products
you could miniaturize and make fun Internet videos about. Miniaturize
shampoo!
Did the people making the ads understand the real goal? The account
executives I asked, in e-mails, didn’t respond. (B.B.D.O declined to comment
for this story.) At Porter Novelli, my queries were answered by Maggie
Graham, the company’s global chief of staff. “As more is learned about
natural gas,” she wrote, “the industry is adapting and our role is to help
consumers know about natural gas as it pertains to their priorities,
including environmental issues. As a firm, we continually assess new
research and findings relevant to our clients, so that we can integrate it
into our work.” On Thursday, the company announced that it had finished that
assessment, saying, in a statement, “Porter Novelli is committed to
regularly assessing evolving issues, the science that guides them and their
impact on diverse, global audiences. As such, we have determined our work
with the American Public Gas Association is incongruous with our increased
focus and priority on addressing climate justice—we will no longer support
that work beyond 2020.” The A.P.G.A. declined to comment.
That decision is a big deal—and it makes sense. The statement of ethics of
the American Marketing Association
instructs, “Do no harm. This means consciously avoiding harmful actions or omissions
by embodying high ethical standards.” According to the Public Relations
Society of America’s
code of ethics, “We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing
the interests of those we represent and in communicating with the public.”
The
standards of practice
of the American Association of Advertising Agencies states, “We will not
knowingly create advertising that contains . . . false or
misleading statements or exaggerations, visual or verbal.” At this point,
it’s practically impossible to represent the fossil-fuel industry without
violating these canons.
And other people in this class of creatives are starting to recognize that
the situation places new demands on them. In June of last year, Extinction
Rebellion activists, mostly from France and Sweden, were
arrested
outside the Cannes Lions annual advertising gathering. “We are coming back
here next year with ten thousand people,” an organizer said. The
coronavirus pandemic
cancelled that plan, but, a few months later, more than twenty small
agencies
signed
a pledge to disclose work with the fossil-fuel industry as a first step
toward divesting from those clients. Solitaire Townsend, the founder of
the Futerra agency, which organized the pledge, said, in an interview,
that three hundred firms have now promised to produce “climate disclosure
reports,” detailing how much of their business comes from oil and gas
firms. “Most of the big agencies are pushing back, hard,” Townsend told
me, this month. “But every copywriter, ideator, designer, and strategist
will have to pick a side. Creativity isn’t neutral.”
Townsend added that she’s heard every possible justification. “The worst
one is ‘We need to put our own house in order first,’ from multinational
ad agencies raking in millions of dollars but with a sustainability
strategy appropriate for a kindergarten. That leads to meetings held in
renewably powered offices, with recycled coffee cups and organic snacks,”
even as the agencies work on “briefs to extend the influence and producing
capacity of the fossil-fuel industry.” She went on, “And don’t get me
started on Davos events, with ad execs announcing new creative
partnerships to ‘inspire young people to climate action.’ The irony is
staggering when you think about it: agencies who won’t even disclose if
they work for fossil-fuel clients purporting to motivate the young people
already out on our streets striking for climate action.” (This same
dynamic is playing out in the legal profession, where law students at top
schools have come together to rank the nation’s top law firms, and more
than six hundred of them have pledged not to work for firms that represent
fossil-fuel companies. Last winter, students disrupted recruiting events
for Paul, Weiss, which represents Exxon, at Harvard, Yale, and New York
University.)
Before the pandemic began, the growing opposition to banks and asset
managers funding fossil fuels led to civil disobedience and protests. (I
was part of a group
arrested
at a Chase bank branch in Washington, D.C., in January.) If next year sees
an adequately distributed vaccine, it may also see that kind of nonviolent
action at ad agencies. A newly launched project, Clean Creatives, is
designed to “target precisely the voices who rent themselves out to the
industry,” Duncan Meisel, of the N.G.O. Fossil Free Media, said. (I have
volunteered with Meisel in the past, opposing oil pipelines.) He added,
“We know it won’t be an easy fight—they’ve literally made their careers
spinning bad stuff into good stuff, so we’ll have to be on our toes. But
every fire and every flood makes clearer precisely what they’re
doing—physics simply can’t be spun.”
Even with that kind of aggressive campaigning, success may depend mostly
on whether the talent itself decides that it wants to keep working for an
industry that’s on the wrong side of the century’s most urgent issue. “I
very much hope our great-grandkids look back with benign bemusement on how
any creative person could have wasted their talent on an industry about to
become irrelevant. That would be the best possible outcome, as it
presupposes we overcome this monster,” Townsend said. “The appalling
alternative would be the creatives of today being considered craven
propagandists for the most destructive industry in human history.”
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