For Ed Wiebe, seeing prominent ads claiming that “B.C. LNG will reduce global emissions” while on his daily bike ride to work as a climate researcher was particularly galling.
“What really got me was it was just completely blatantly false,” Wiebe said about advertising displayed prominently on city buses and billboards in Victoria and the Lower Mainland. “I just could not understand how they could get away with it.”
Wiebe wasn’t alone.
According to the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, or CAPE, “multiple” anonymous complainants believed the ads were misleading and asked Ad Standards Canada to investigate. Wiebe confirmed to The Tyee that he was among them.
But Wiebe may never learn the outcome of his complaint. He has been cut out of the process after another complainant leaked an initial decision, which unanimously found the ads by industry advocacy group Canada Action Coalition gave an “overall misleading impression that B.C. LNG is good for the environment, amounting to greenwashing.”
Fossil fuel companies should have their right to advertise taken away. This is what we did to cigarette companies when we found out they were knowingly poisoning the population. There is ample evidence that the FF industry does the same thing on a much larger scale. They even hired a lot of the same marketing people.
Just no more fossil fuel ads. No more billboards outside gas stations telling you what company’s gas it is or how much they are selling it for. No more YouTube ads where they talk about all of their greenwashing. People should just never hear anything positive about fossil fuel again.
Amen. 💯%