The most wonderfully commercial time of the year is upon us, so it’s only appropriate to look at advertisements. Emily Atkin’s set up a new instagram to track fossil fuel ads, and she recently discussed the $3.6 billion that the five biggest fossil fuel companies spent on advertising between 1986 and 2015, per a new study from Dr. Robert Brulle.
Published in Climatic Change, the study sought to divine what motivates fossil fuel companies to shell out on ads, focusing on four key factors: overall reputation of the industry, congressional attention on climate change as an issue, media attention to the issue, and external events like oil spills, major science reports, oil prices, GDP and public concern.
What they found was that, despite expectations, it’s not public opinion about climate change or the issue that appears to spur big ad buys, but instead media coverage and congressional interest. When the possibility of legislation seemed real during the cap and trade debate, their ad spending skyrocketed.
So it’s not that fossil fuel companies are particularly worried about what the public thinks, but instead they’re afraid of legislation, which makes sense. They know people are generally dependent on their product, and recognize that systemic changes are the real threat to their ability to continue profiting off of the destruction of the planet’s life support system.
Unfortunately, these days the industry not only has a significant portion of Congress in its pocket, it also has friends in high places - specifically, the Trump administration.
But it turns out that the support of an unpopular and inept administration is not always the best thing for public reputation. Take, for example, the recent award won by the Department of Energy: Worst Word of the Year.
Australia’s Plain English Foundation decided that the DOE’s use of the phrase “freedom gas” instead of natural gas was the worst example of “new and horrible public language.”
It apparently beat out such euphemisms as “voluntary employee separations” and “non-consensual sex,” which makes sense given that “natural gas” is already a benign-sounding euphemism for such a highly polluting and climate-poisoning product.
We’ll have to wait and see what new nonsense doublespeak the administration and fossil fuel industry come up with next year. But whatever 2020 brings, rest assured we plan on continuing to be a major pain in their freedom gas.
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