Airline advertising

We all want to be able to travel and go on holiday, but we don’t need to fly to do this. For people to be able to enjoy seeing the world without harming it, we need progressive policies including affordable rail travel and good holiday leave to allow us to travel more slowly. We also need measures such as a frequent flyer levy, which place higher taxes on the frequent flyers who take the majority of flights and cause the most pollution. 

Having refused to take meaningful action on climate change for 30 years, airlines are still encouraging dangerous growth in sales using advertising. This video from Easyjet below is a good example of highly emotive content being used to override any concerns we might have about climate breakdown.

 Airline bosses’ behaviour during the pandemic has shown that they can’t be trusted to act responsibly. They’ve demanded huge public bailouts, pushed to start flying again regardless of the health impacts, and are firing thousands of workers so they can re-employ them with worse conditions. It’s clear that airlines need greater regulation to stop them causing harm, and their advertising is part of the problem.

 

Fossil fuel company advertising

Oil and gas companies such as Shell, BP, Total and Exxon use advertising to promote themselves as environmentally responsible. Looking at their adverts you could be forgiven for thinking they are mostly renewable energy companies. But the reality is that their businesses remain almost entirely focused on digging up polluting fossil fuels. In the UK, the body that regulates advertising, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), recently ruled that Shell made misleading environmental claims in its adverts - so-called ‘greenwash.’

Like Shell, BP have been criticised for heavily promoting their renewable energy projects, when they only account for around 4% of their investments. This allows them to appeal to climate-conscious consumers and maintain a facade of good corporate citizenship. They won’t draw attention to the other 96% of their investments in fossil fuels.

But people are now sceptical about their green rhetoric. As recently as 2018, major oil companies spent $50 billion on fossil fuel projects in direct contradiction of the Paris climate goals according to research group Carbon Tracker, and an estimated $200 million was spent lobbying against climate action. The public sees these companies talking green but acting brown, sticking with business and investment models that plan to extract and burn far more fossil fuels than the climate can safely withstand. Revelations that companies like Exxon knew that their products were driving dangerous climate change decades ago, but kept these findings secret, has further damaged trust in oil companies’ sincerity.

Advertising and PR campaigns are a means by which these companies present an image of themselves, greenwashing, which is different to the reality. 

What we’re calling for:

  • Energy company adverts must come with Climate Health Warnings explaining the climate impact of their company’s core business.   

  • Additionally, media outlets and advertising companies should not run adverts from fossil fuel companies. We define fossil fuel companies as firms that have over 80% of their investments in coal, oil and gas. Carbon Underground 200 provide a useful methodology for this definition. We call on all media outlets to follow the example of The Guardian in the UK and Dagens ETC in Sweden and not accept fossil fuel advertising. 

    Find out if you're invested in 200 of the largest owners of carbon reserves

    The Carbon Underground 200™, compiled and maintained by FFI Solutions (formerly Fossil Free Indexes℠), identifies the top 100 coal and the top 100 oil and gas publicly-traded reserve holders globally, ranked by the potential carbon emissions content of their reported reserves.

    Rankings are constructed using a reserves-based methodology with the underlying core data based on “reported” reserves. Coal reserves are the sum of proven and probable reserves based on the last reported reserves amount by mine. Reserves are allocated to listed companies based on percentage ownership of individual mines. Oil and gas companies are ranked on proven reserves (1P) net of royalty payments.

    The Carbon Underground 200™ relies on the IPCC Revised 1996 Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories as a methodological framework. The calculation of CO2 emission potential requires several conversions to the raw reserves figure.

    Use this link to find out more:

    https://www.ffisolutions.com/research-analytics-index-solutions/research-screening/the-carbon-underground-200/  

    In a future blog I will be looking into the differences between, flying, Cruise ships, ferries and Cars to see exactly how much each one is doing to the environment and to see which one is the worst!

    The blog song for today is: "seven seas of Rye" by Queen

    TTFN