United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on nations to restrict or ban advertising from dirty energy companies over the summer — comparing the proposal to precautions taken for tobacco campaigns due to the public health risk.
However, when the Guardian reached out in June to 11 major news organizations and tech firms that run such ads for comment, most of them declined to respond, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, Reuters, Axios, Bloomberg, and MSNBC.
Moreover, according to the report, a recent investigation from Drilled and the Nation found that Politico, Reuters, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Washington Post all have oil majors as clients of their in-house production studios, events, and branded-content arms.
This is despite the fact that more than a century of evidence indicates that human activities are causing Earth to overheat, according to NASA, with dirty fuels responsible for most of the planet-warming pollution leading to more intense extreme weather events, among other things, including the increased risk of mosquito-borne diseases.
Politico, which later came under scrutiny this fall after publishing a climate-focused article sponsored by Chevron, was the only publication issuing a statement to the newspaper over the summer.
For its part, Politico said at the time that it has "hosted a diverse array of advertisements." The spokesperson added, "Advertisers are prominently identified, and a clear distinction between news and ads, including sponsored content, is maintained across Politico's platforms."
"No advertiser or advertisement sways editorial decisions or news judgment," the spokesperson continued in their statement to the Guardian.
Nonetheless, Harvard University climate disinformation expert and professor Naomi Oreskes suggested to the newspaper that dirty fuel ads could still be misleading readers.
"No one is saying this is easy. But we need to face the hard stuff," said Oreskes, who previously called out Exxon in a co-authored paper examining the oil major's deceptive public-facing tactics. Like Guterres, Oreskes compared the rhetoric to that of the tobacco industry. A leading trade body for the coal industry also has come under fire for greenwashing following a rebrand.
Oreskes pointed out to the Guardian that the United States has banned television and radio ads for cigarettes since the 1970s, while 60 countries have outlawed such ads altogether. Like cigarettes (including secondhand smoke), dirty fuels are connected to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths in the U.S. annually, according to the CDC and Harvard University.
"It is well past time that we imposed similar restrictions on fossil-fuel ads," Oreskes said.
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