The U.N. secretary-general called for a ban on advertising by the fossil fuels industry and called the PR companies aiding them “‘Mad Men’ fueling the madness.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres used his World Environment Day address Wednesday to call for a ban on advertising by the fossil fuels industry, and he asked public relations firms and ad agencies to stop representing fossil fuels.
“I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction,” Guterres said in a speech on climate action delivered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet, they’re toxic for your brand,” he said.
Guterres accused oil, gas and coal companies of mounting greenwashing and disinformation campaigns and compared them to the misleading PR campaigns once used by tobacco companies to evade the harm from smoking.
“Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health, like tobacco,” Guterres said. “Some are now doing the same with fossil fuels.”
Guterres’ speech comes amid mounting evidence of misleading public information efforts by fossil fuel interests. Several investigations and academic studies document how some fossil fuel companies have used their advertising and lobbying campaigns to sow doubt about the science on climate change. In some cases, such as with Exxon Mobil, that included hiding what the companies themselves knew about the harm that would come from burning more oil.
“Exxon Mobil systematically misrepresented what they knew about climate change and misrepresented what mainstream scientists were saying,” Harvard University science historian and author Naomi Oreskes told Newsweek in an interview last October.
Oreskes and co-author Geoffrey Supran’s peer-reviewed work includes a January 2023 study showing that Exxon had developed—but withheld from the public—remarkably accurate climate modeling decades ago that predicted some of the heat and other impacts we experience today.
