The New York Times Company Should Stop Creating Fossil Fuel Ads

As a former climate-focused writer at the paper, I think it's time for the Times Company to stop making ads for fossil fuel giants, but not yet for a total ban.

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My top line: The New York Times, Washington Post and other climate-focused media outlets need to stop creating co-branded feel-good content for Exxon, Shell and other confirmed climate-action delayers. An end to all such advertising can come as media revenue models evolve.

A creditable new climate campaign, Ads Not Fit to Print, is pressing The New York Times to stop selling ad space to, or making ads for, fossil fuel companies.

The argument centers on an objectively glaring disconnect between the media company's news coverage of climate and clean energy and its approach to related promotional content that energy companies pay for:

"The New York Times devotes an entire section to climate reporting, often featuring stories about the accelerating dangers of global heating on its own front page. Yet it also uses the power of its news brand to create and publish advertisements promoting the products causing dangerous global heating in the first place."

The campaign centers on The Times's own argument when it ended tobacco advertising in 1999. As a Times spokeswoman explained in the paper's news coverage of the publisher's decision at the time, "[W]e don't want to expose our readers to advertising that may be dangerous to their health."

For the sake of the planet and its own credibility, particularly with young audiences, the campaigners say, "The New York Times should stop writing or running any print, online, or podcast ads for companies whose main business is the extraction or sale of fossil fuels."

I hope you'll weigh in with your views below and sign the petition if you agree.

I support the general thrust, as I tweeted several times in recent days. But I don't support a hard stop to The Times or other media accepting fossil advertising. Read on for my argument.

As I tweeted, I think an important start would for the Times Company's T Brand Studio subsidiary to stop creating co-branded advertising for fossil-fuel companies. For one thing, there's just too much melding of upbeat corporate messaging and The New York Times logo - the heft of which derives almost entirely from 170 years of news reporting.

The brand blur can be seen in the closing frames of a 2018 video made for Exxon Mobil by T Brand Studio:

And while the words "paid for and posted by" are there with Shell's gold scallop logo for readers with an eye for fine print, this snazzy package on an app "envisioning a lower-carbon future" also highlights The New York Times's 1907-vintage masthead logo:

In such instances, the energy companies are clearly benefiting from perceived affiliation as much as basic exposure.

The Times is hardly alone. The Washington Post and other news companies have profitable shops churning out branded content or native advertising for fossil giants and others. Amy Westervelt, writing for The Nation, and Sharon Lerner at The Intercept did solid work exposing this business model in 2019.

In this murky area of narrative/branded/native content, The Times and other media businesses should be drawing much clearer lines between the messages advertisers are conveying and the news.

If more is not done, the media are indeed helping create what Harvard scholars Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes call the "fossil fuel saviors" frame the oil and gas industry craves.

The issues here are hardly limited to fossil fuel promotion. Media content shops have been generating flashy news-ish content for entities ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the nation of Japan.

So why not pull the plug on all fossil advertising?

The Times view

In an emailed statement, Nicole Taylor, The Times's director of communications, described advertising as essential to maintaining vigorous independent reporting:

"Our comprehensive climate reporting unequivocally explains the impact of climate change on global communities, ecosystems, health, and equality. Advertising, including paid content produced by T Brand Studio, is independent of our newsroom and plays an important role in helping to fund our independent journalism and the continued expansion of our coverage on the biggest stories of our time, including climate change, across a breadth of analysis and formats."

The climate campaigners say the paper's subscription-first strategy means it can move increasingly away from ads altogether.

One thing missed there is that boosting subscriptions takes a lot of money, so a chunk of that income is used up before it gets to the newsroom. Advertisers, in contrast, are lining up at the door, so even though ads are just roughly a third of income, they generate more operating revenue.

In her Heated column on the Ads Not Fit For Print campaign, Emily Atkin assembled a detailed critique of The Times position, including a dig at the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, for not articulating a clearer sense of his views of the climate crisis. She wrote, "Sulzberger also said in 2018 that 'the science can be dense and complicated,' so he prefers visual storytelling."

It's worth noting the sentence that followed in the Ask The Times Q&A she linked to. Sulzberger added, "At the same time, our reporters have been aggressively covering the Trump administration’s actions on climate, like the push to roll back environmental regulations and how that benefits the oil and gas industry."

For all that great journalism (I was proud to contribute to it for 21 years) there's much work to be done here. That's why I'm glad that Genevieve Guenther, the founder of End Climate Silence, and the many other partners in this campaign are putting pressure on the paper.

My view

As I noted on Twitter, In a perfect world, media could thrive on subscriber revenue and The Times would not sell ad space to any company known for greenwashing or worse. I hope publisher A.G. Sulzberger and the corporate team review T Brand's output and other practices to see about setting brighter boundaries and a higher bar, including a close look particularly at Exxon Mobil.

Particular trade groups or companies must be accountable for specific misdeeds, like Exxon Mobil's documented dissembling on climate risk over the decades, some of which was confirmed in a recent Greenpeace sting. Dozens of court cases are seeking accountability, as Columbia's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law is tracking. (For a comprehensive update, read "Lawsuits target Exxon’s social media ‘green washing’" in E&E News.)

And politicians like Rhode Island's Senator Sheldon Whitehouse have been relentless in highlighting work, like that of sociologist Robert J. Brulle, revealing the institutional influence of Big Oil, including through advertising and, most recently, a relentless blitz of social media. On my Sustain What webcast and in a recent post here, he called Exxon messaging around clean-energy technology part of "a fraudulent scheme" and repeated a challenge he has made to the company to prove they weren't "spending more on the advertisements than they were on the research." (I'd happily host a webcast and write a fresh post here if Exxon wants to show he's wrong.)

I hope The Times takes this challenge seriously.

Here's my top-line reason for rejecting a blanket ban on fossil ads.

What distinguishes fossil fuels from tobacco

There is an enormous difference between companies extracting fossil fuels and those selling tobacco. With tobacco, there is no public good and, as the World Health Organization warns, there is a horrific current toll of more than 8 million deaths a year and a projected death toll in this century of up to 1 billion people, with most of those losses in lower-income countries. (Lately, I've been wondering how a magazine as seemingly progressive as Conde Nast's Wired can still be running cigarette ads!)

As I've been writing since my first cover story on global warming in 1988 (which had a cigarette ad on the back), greenhouse-gas pollution, mostly from fossil fuel burning, is heating the planet and contributing to a host of environmental and societal harms. Bad practices in oil and gas extraction, production and transport have and can create terrible impacts, and those impacts (along with old-fashioned toxic pollution) often harm communities of color most. No one has made that case better with data than the sociologist Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University.

But fossil fuels have provided enormous societal benefits (from fertilizer to refrigeration to mass electrification to mobility to...) that have to be considered along with the substantial costs and risks, including those attending an unmitigated buildup of greenhouse gases.

Low-emission fossil fuels will remain a key part of western power grids and oil will be needed for mobility and more for another few decades, at least, as even Elon Musk acknowledged in a talk I attended in 2016. The scale and skills required in any effort to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from power plants requires companies with the requisite scale and skills. (I'm a skeptic on carbon capture at climate-relevant scale, but this frontier has to be pushed given so many emission-mitigation failures so far.)

Most important, energy justice is as real as climate justice. It's impossible to draw a development path for much of Africa, for example, that does not include more fossil fuel use - particularly gas. The need, and justification, is greatest in countries that have contributed almost nothing to the buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air now.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo of Nigeria just made this case compellingly in Foreign Affairs in a piece subtitled "Why Banning Fossil Fuel Investments Would Crush Africa." It's worth adding an extended excerpt here:

After decades of profiting from oil and gas, a growing number of wealthy nations have banned or restricted public investment in fossil fuels, including natural gas. Such policies often do not distinguish between different kinds of fuels, nor do they consider the vital role some fuels play in powering the growth of developing economies, especially in sub-Saharan Africa...

Right now, Africa is starved for energy: excluding South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa’s one billion people have the power generation capacity of just 81 gigawatts—far less than the 108-gigawatt capacity of the United Kingdom. Moreover, those one billion people have contributed less than one percent to global cumulative carbon emissions....

Climate action shouldn’t mean strangling all fossil fuel projects but rather facilitating the flow of capital to the countries that need it most.

I embrace Osinbajo's stance because I've spent too much time reporting in places where there is no reliable electricity, where the cost of energy is measured not in cents per kilowatt-hour but in a woman's hours collecting mealtime firewood and her lost years of life and health from cooking twice a day in indoor smoke clouds worse than those cloaking the combusting U.S. West.

Here's a view from two households I visited in Karjat, India, illustrating why blanket vilification of fossil fuels is unjustified.

Fossil fuels are not implicitly evil. Propane, also called LPG, is clean and efficient. In two households in Karjat, India, a modern commercial wood-fueled cookstove spewed toxic pollutants. The propane stove is no different than a western range. (photos by Andy Revkin)

None of this means fossil companies, or any special interests, should have it easy. The work of Senator Whitehouse and dozens of environmental lawyers is vital, as is the pressure from campaigners like those behind #AdsNotFit2Print.

I encourage you to watch the Sustain What webcast I hosted with leaders of another partner in this Times campaign, Clean Creatives, an organization trying to get advertising agencies and p.r. strategists to abandon fossil accounts:

Let me know what you think in the comments below. If you prefer, you can register without joining Facebook.

Related reading:

"Ad Agencies Step Away From Oil and Gas in Echo of Cigarette Exodus," Tiffany Hsu, The New York Times, March 25, 2021.

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