Banning fossil fuel ads with Dr Victoria Harvey

The UK advertising industry is the third largest in the world and is known for its creativity. And although many industry leaders are very concerned that their work is fueling the climate crisis, the biggest agencies continue to take on the fossil fuel companies and other major polluters as clients. The UK trade bodies deny that advertising leads to increased consumption and say that only 12% of advertising is effective (so nothing to see here). ⁠

Dr Victoria Harvey⁠ worked for a decade to try to change the industry from within, but when it showed that it was unwilling to change itself she joined with others to take this issue directly to the people. In May Chris Packham's petition garnered 110,000 signatures and on July 7th parliament debated whether or not the UK should ban fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship. I recommend reading ⁠Victoria's parliamentary briefing for MPs with a forward by Chris Packham here.

Victoria shared with us her PhD research into how the advertising industry could move away from its current destructive model towards more climate-friendly objectives and together we explored why a UK-wide ban on fossil fuel advertising is needed and how we could bring it about.

This issue is often compared to the ban on tobacco advertising, because like the effects of smoking, climate change is a public health crisis. And the number of deaths globally from climate change each year are now similar to the annual global deaths from smoking when tobacco ads were banned in the UK in 2003.

Although there is broad support for the change in parliament, the government has no plans to move forward with regulation at this time.

Currently progress is happening most rapidly through councils banning fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship in their cities and regions. Edinburgh is leading the way and many others are joining in. Many art and cultural institutions are also refusing to work with the big polluters and know that change is coming. And there are of course hundreds of smaller agencies that have taken a stand and are unwilling to work with high carbon emitting clients.

You can watch a clip from Victoria’s introduction below or listen to a longer edit of the discussion on our podcast here.