Why settle for a milquetoast truth-in-advertising law? The Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) wants the world to ban all advertising by the fossil fuel industry.
One wonders how the United Conservative Party (UCP) will react to the call by António Guterres to ban all advertising by coal, oil and fossil gas companies, which, the UN chief said, “have shown relentless zeal for obstructing progress – over decades.”
As already noted in this space, the federal government’s mostly performative plan to introduce a hard-to-enforce provision to the Competition Act requiring fossil fuel companies to tell the truth when they make claims about the environmental benefits of their products and processes provoked a mighty cri du cœur a week ago from Alberta “Environment” Minister Rebecca Schulz.
The UN Secretary General called fossil fuel corporations the “godfathers of climate chaos,” and he made no exception for Alberta’s ethical oil, even though it can be shown through the use of social media memes with colourful charts to have no carbon outputs, rather like the cake you eat on your birthday has no calories.
Well, if the UCP strategic brain trust is smart, they’ll say nothing at all.
Everyone – even the top dogs in the Alberta government, surely – understands that that UN has very little power, and that which it does have is only applicable to issues to which a certain member of the Security Council gives its imperial nod.
Remember, though, certain elements in the UCP base attribute to the UN almost mystical powers on a par with those of Justin Trudeau and Rachel Notley. So – who knows? – maybe orders will come down to Schulz from Take Back Alberta to produce another screed damning Guterres’s proposed gag order.
And while I don’t say this to encourage the UCP, necessarily, what the head of the UN is proposing actually would be a gag order of sorts, unlike the picayune measure the Trudeau government has brought before Parliament.
“I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies,” he told an audience marking World Environment Day at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed even as they have sought to delay climate action,” he said. “I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising.” (That would include New York’s best-known newspaper, the Times, which a report last year showed pulled in revenue of at least $20 million US from fossil fuel advertising between October 2020 and October 2023.)
Well, Secretary General Guterres is certainly not the most powerful person in the world, but he is not without influence. And what’s important about this story is that the idea is being seriously proposed, not that it’s actually being contemplated anywhere. Yet.
Fossil fuel corporations and industry-captured governments like Alberta’s (no matter who is in charge) will try to frame this as a freedom of expression issue, and it is, but only in the sense that shouting fire in a crowded theatre, to use Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s famous phrase, is a freedom of speech issue too.
And free societies have happily accepted this principle when it came to other products – tobacco being the most prominent example – without taking it as an outrage to free speech.
As the leader an advertising industry group opposed to fossil fuel ads told the influential Heated Substack newsletter, “When the world’s top diplomat calls out your industry by name, there’s no way to deny that collaborating with fossil fuel companies is doing damage to the planet.”
So while a fossil fuel ad ban probably won’t be with us for a while, the idea isn’t going away any time soon either.
Maybe the UCP will soon publish a screed assailing the UN for painting its black helicopters green!
Marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day
Today is the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, D-Day, when the hammer of the Western Allies began to crush Hitler and his armies on the anvil of Russia. In the current fraught geopolitical atmosphere, Canadian news organizations seem unable to resist the temptation to rewrite history to suit present circumstances and suggest that D-Day was the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. This is misleading. It is important to remember that, as my military history professor Reginald Roy, late of the Canadian Scottish Regiment (Princess Mary’s), explained, were it not for the Red Army, “we’d still be fighting in Normandy.” The beginning of the end for Hitler was on February 2, 1943. Readers can look it up. But getting the significance of D-Day slightly wrong can be forgiven, an understandable product of American cultural imperialism.
On this date last year, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith appeared to be labouring under the impression that World War II started on D-Day! Hopefully the Alberta government will have that straightened out in its commentary today.
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