Public relations over public good

-

I'm moved by the new Cadbury ad. After all, who wouldn't? It combines nostalgia with gender empowerment, with cricket being the deified cherry on top. There is no doubt that the folks at Ogilvy are brilliant at what they do. And I'm certainly not the only one who thinks so.

 

 

Unfortunately, I'm also very conflicted about the ad, because the creator's name - Ogilvy - takes me back a different memory lane. About two decades ago, the IPCC released it's Third Assessment Report (please, bear with me, I will not bore you with science this time). In contrast with the cautious phrasing of the previous reports, the Third Assessment Report said it quite clearly: it wasn't natural variability, it was human influence that was causing the climate to change.

 

 

The anti-climate narrative before this had focused on our inability to identify climate change -- "Is the climate even changing?" -- and our (reasonable?) incredulity over the effect of our activities -- "Could the global climate even change due to us mere mortals?"

With this report, those questions were answered. Naturally, the next question that would arise would be -- "So who is causing all these greenhouse gas emissions?". And the focus had to be shifted very urgently away from the fossil fuel industry.

In 2004, the oil giant British Petroleum commissioned PR firm Ogilvy and Mather to formulate their "Beyond Petroleum" campaign. Through this campaign, they promoted the use of the "carbon footprint" - the impact your (and my) daily activities have on the climate. Julie Doyle, a professor of media and communication at the University of Brighton, suggests that this was designed to "assign responsibility for climate impact to the individual", thus taking focus away from the fossil-fuel industry. Very convenient for anyone with a disproportionate impact on the climate.

The brilliance of Ogilvy helped delay meaningful climate action for decades. The term "carbon footprint" has stuck with us, keeping us busy with our own guilt. So busy that we failed to notice that none of the fossil-fuel giants shared this guilt with us. So busy that we failed to notice which of our media outlets amplified fossil-fuel propaganda, and which reported fairly on climate change. So busy that we failed to notice which of our policymakers and political leaders have the understanding, intent and the spine to propose real and impactful climate solutions in the form of systemic changes.

This was in 2004, when climate solutions could have been more gradual and hence, easier on society. The graph below shows two pathways - with climate solutions beginning in 1990 and in 2021. The reader can imagine a middle one, with climate solutions beginning in 2004, or maybe even a few years later 一 if BP and Ogilvy had not distracted us.


 

So does my carbon footprint not matter?

It does. But it becomes a truly effective tool only when you also keep in mind that your individual choices are not enough to restrain climate change. Heck, your individual choices may not even be enough to change your own carbon footprint by more than in a decimal place! I recommend giving some thought to your individual choices as a precursor to getting involved on a collective scale. Making some alterations to your lifestyle helps appreciate the complexity and the scale of the problem. It helps make the problem more personal 一 something that may not be otherwise imminent, depending on your luck or privilege.


So what's the point of this post?

I'm wishing the reader appreciates three important takeaways:

(1) Climate change is a highly politicized and propaganda-ized (what's a better word?) issue. The science behind the problem as well as the solutions are actually quite clear. The only way to avoid hurting the profits of those most culpable is to distract from these solutions. A good counter-strategy would be to stay diligently focused on the science, engineering or economics that provide solutions.

(2) I find the climate narrative, at least in India, to be rife with the wrong "us vs them" narrative. I want to refer to a study by an MIT class. Though dated and simplistic, the conclusion it reaches remains correct and relevant: that we're all inexorably wed to the climate emissions from our public infrastructure. This is as true in India as it is in the US. This study found that even a homeless and destitute American would have a carbon footprint higher than the global average. Would you hate them for their lifestyle?

The rift is not between the West and the East. The rift is between pro-fossil-fuel and anti-fossil-fuel, or more holistically, climate believers and climate deniers. Here, I use the term climate deniers to include all those who are not committed to curbing climate change: whether it be suave skeptics, blatant deniers or sneaky delayers. Indians need not look only towards the West for such anti-climate-solution aggressors, there are numerous examples within our own country and systems.

(3) When I was growing up, I often heard people say, Videsh mein kuchh aaya hai toh bees saal baad yahan aayega. I don't know how accurate this is in light of climate propaganda, but I'm convinced that there is tremendous benefit in learning how climate solutions have been delayed in other parts of the world 一 and then ensuring the same tactics do not work in our own country. This is not to save the world or become a champion of some sorts, this is to save our very own selves.


To conclude

The older Cadbury ad has been described as iconic. Also made by Ogilvy, perhaps it did change Indian advertising (I wouldn't know). But I do know that other Ogilvy ads have changed much more of the world, unfortunately, irreversibly.

I don't know whether to hate on Ogilvy or not. As Ben Tallon puts it, "I have no way of truly knowing whether Ogilvy innocently and naively bought into whatever greenwashing BP used to present the carbon footprint campaign as a benevolent, important step towards addressing climate change, or saw BP at the door and knew exactly what kind of payday this meant, despite the ethical implications of accepting the role of mouthpiece for such a company."

Of course, I'm tempted to make connections, such as between Ogilvy helping Vedanta rebuild its image a couple of years after it was found violating green norms. I'm also tempted to extrapolate that after the PR industry has helped the tobacco and the beverage industries, it would naturally help fossil fuel giants as well. After all, they have money too, don't they? And finally, I'm tempted to interpolate between the connections that certain Indian fossil fuel firms have with our political leaders, the influence these firms have over Indian media, and the emergence of electoral bonds 一 the transactions of which must remain opaque to all of us who vote.

However, I recognize that Indian firms cannot be held accountable for the work of their foreign counterparts. Moreover, making these links authoritatively would require immense and meticulous work, such as that by Ben Franta, or Supran and Oreskes. I am left wishing that such work would happen in the Indian research landscape too .. or if it does exist, that the reader would point me to it.

Till then, I must go back to my work in climate science, which will remain futile as long as the fossil fuel industry's PR works. But I can not help but wonder what the world would have looked like if we had started paying attention to climate solutions when the older Cadbury ad aired. That was 1993, when I had a childhood that the next generation will certainly not have.

一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一

You can subscribe to such posts here. 

一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一

Recommendations for similar reading

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Darwin's Lost World - Part II

-
<< Previous page So what do we (did Darwin) know by now (then) ? That living creatures from the very very ancient past (we're talking in terms of millions of years) were often found preserved in the rock record. That we could make out some things about the past environments from these fossils. Fossils showed specific associations: you saw only certain types and groups of fossils in certain suites of rocks (belonging to different periods of geological time). There came a dead end at the base of the Cambrian. Scientists like to call this the Cambrian Explosion today, but back then, many of them were more inclined to dismiss this either as a figment of the imagination of relatively smaller body of researchers, or simply, incomplete/inaccurate science. That the Creator had made us all, was the popular view. 3 theories emerged to explain why we see the Cambrian Explosion (if it even is a real thing!): Charles Lyell Interestingly, it is said that Lyell was...
Read more

On Darwin's Lost World

-
Image
Martin Brasier was a prolific paleontologist. And from what little I know of him, he must have been a pretty cool guy. I recently read his book "Darwin's Lost World" and it was definitely one of the better decisions of my life. On Darwin Thankfully, even the most plebeian of science curricula finds it worthwhile to describe Charles Darwin's scientific accomplishments. To me, all through childhood, Darwin represented my superiority to the apes. When someone said Darwin, I would get a mental picture of an ape gradually turning human. That's an overly simplistic picture, but then again, there is so much to learn about everything  that one doesn't quite know where to start. Source The rock record is the only thing that can give us a picture of the ancient Earth. Most other branches of science can tell you what the Earth is like, and why it is the way it is. But it was Geology that first told us what the Earth was  like, and bits of why it w...
Read more

What is ENSO? Page 2 - SSTs and trade winds

-
Image
  This is Page 2 of the sub-series "What is ENSO?". If you haven't already, please read Page 1 first. For convenience, keep that page open in a different tab. = = = What is ENSO? In the previous post , we learnt to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperature anomalies . In this post, I'm going to answer a question that no one really asked ―  What if I wanted to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) instead? What if, for no good reason but because I felt like it, I wanted to do away with the "anomalies" bit? Looking at SSTs instead of SST anomalies makes matters unnecessarily complicated, but we're going to do it anyway because it also teaches us a lot. In the image below, I've plotted SSTs from the HadISST dataset. These are mean SSTs for the months of December, January and February (DJF) over all years from 1872-2009. Why did we select the months of DJF? Because ENSO events can be seen...
Read more