For months on end, buses and SkyTrain cars all over Metro Vancouver were wrapped in ads declaring “B.C. LNG will reduce global emissions.” Memo to TransLink: these misleading claims about liquefied natural gas (LNG) didn’t make my commute any faster.
And, boy, were they ever misleading. Canada’s Ad Standards Council said so itself. A January decision by the standards council, a national advertising regulatory non-profit, declared the ubiquitous ad campaign, paid for by pro-liquefied natural gas interests, created an “overall misleading impression … that B.C. LNG is good for the environment, amounting to greenwashing.”
Greenwashing, for the layperson, promotes false solutions to the climate crisis that distract from and delay concrete and credible action. These ads were paid for by Canada Action — a “grassroots” group with deep ties to the oil and gas industry and Conservative Party campaigners that declines to reveal details about its funders. The ads are “a textbook case of greenwashing, right down to the colour,” according to Vancouver general practitioner Dr. Melissa Lem, president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
The association published the council’s decision last month, making that very point. “Some members of [the] council were also concerned with the bright green background colour that was used to emphasize an environmental benefit that liquefied natural gas does not truly have,” the Ad Standards Council report stated. It should be noted that had the physician association not published a copy of the document, details of the decision would still be kept out of public view by the Ad Standards Council, a self-regulating body, where industry polices itself. But more on that later.
Canada Action defended its claims by providing evidence LNG could reduce global emissions, if China reduces reliance on coal-fired power plants, pivoting instead to B.C. liquefied natural gas and theoretically lowering global greenhouse gas emissions. But there is no proof — whatsoever — that B.C. liquefied natural gas will reduce global emissions. It may even delay the transition to renewables.
As such, the standards council unanimously determined the ads “distorted the true meaning of statements made by professionals or scientific authorities” and falsely promised ramping up LNG “will” lower global emissions.
“By using the word ‘will,’ [the standards] council unanimously determined that all of the advertisements promised a verified result without competent and reliable evidence,” the decision summary posted by the physician association reads. “No evidence was provided to support the expected increase in LNG demand.”
A minor quibble: Canada Action didn’t just use the word “will” in its pro-LNG advertising. In some cases they italicized it, emphasizing the certainty, doubling down on the verb when a factual statement demanded a different one: “might” was one option. So was “could” or perhaps even “won’t.”
This is fracking we’re talking about, after all, the process of fracturing bedrock by blasting a mixture of water, sand and hazardous chemicals into a borehole to get at the natural gas trapped within it. In addition to contaminating groundwater and causing earthquakes, the operation itself is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions, including high levels of methane pollution.
We’ve been made to forget liquefied natural gas comes from fracking. The term has all but been replaced with LNG, a seemingly innocuous acronym, part of a move to rebrand this particularly ruthless means of resource extraction as an eco-friendly remedy for climate change.
It absolutely isn’t. In addition to significant environmental harm, fracking has been linked to all manner of medical issues, as the physicians association has outlined: preterm birth, birth defects, low birthweight, childhood leukemia, respiratory and cardiovascular issues and premature mortality. Even in a world where liquefied natural gas has a positive impact on global emissions, a body of research suggests it hurts babies. No one is asking to save the environment at the expense of our children. As far as I know, it’s their future we’re trying to preserve.
“I’ve had the experience of treating a patient with an asthma exacerbation from wildfire smoke, and then stepping outside my office and seeing one of these ads roll right by,” Lem told reporters in May outside downtown Vancouver’s Burrard SkyTrain station. “It is distressing and it’s infuriating as a health professional who’s caring for patients who have been affected by climate change to see these incredibly misleading and untruthful ads polluting our public spaces.”
Yet with all that’s at stake, the big finger-wag from the Ad Standards Council was directed at the physician association, which had the audacity to leak the decision after Canada Action immediately appealed the ruling. Decisions are typically not made public until the appeals process runs its course, the Ad Standards Council said.
That’s handy for Canada Action. Its green billboards on the highway leading from Victoria to the Swartz Bay ferry terminal were swiftly replaced with new billboards proclaiming, “the world is asking for Canadian LNG.” And Canada Action doesn’t have to be embarrassed by the release of the final decision. The Canadian public is no longer entitled to see the report.
“Due to egregious violations of confidentiality in this case, by the leaking of this decision which was not final, we will only be advising the advertiser of the outcome of the appeal,” Ad Standards Council president and CEO Catherine Bate wrote in a statement. “We will not be able to report the results of that decision publicly, or to comment further.” Of Canada Action, the council also noted the coalition “has responded promptly, adhered fully to the complaints procedure and provided fulsome responses.”
But they’re punishing the public like we peeked at a Christmas present. (The other option, I suppose, is to give us coal for being naughty, but that’s probably worse, in this case.) It’s patently outrageous. This situation demands a thorough correction of the public record from a truly non-partisan source. Instead, we get scolded for learning the truth, while the offending party gets a press embargo as a treat. The misleading advertising was public. The findings should be public too. The key takeaways of the final report should be plastered on the side of Vancouver’s 99 B-Line, Canada’s busiest bus route, which runs east-west from Burnaby to the University of British Columbia. Is a decision summary seen by too few the best we can do?
Twas ever thus. The oil and gas industry has been calling the shots for years, putting out dubious statements supported by dubious research and letting the tedious labour of setting things straight fall to small outfits like the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. The BC Green Party did what it could, responding to Canada Action’s misleading claims (and misuse of the colour green) with a full cover wrap in Victoria’s Times Colonist newspaper two months ago. But a one-time print ad on Vancouver Island isn’t nearly enough.
This is why the Ad Standards Council’s decision was so notable. The council is harder to simply dismiss than, say, a niche political party or “a group of environmentalist doctors.” They’re the higher authority here, and we need them to be a real force. It’s not encouraging to learn they’re understaffed and dealing with a backlog of cases. When it comes to maintaining the standards of honesty, truth and accuracy in advertising, the Ad Standards Council is all that stands between us and wall-to-wall house hippos, the fictional critters that taught ’90s kids to think critically about what we saw on TV.
“The decision is significant because it shows the Ad Standards Council is stepping up and doing what government isn’t doing, which is regulating misleading fossil fuel advertising that drives demands for fossil fuels,” Lem told the Vancouver Sun.
That was chillingly true just two months ago. Since that statement, however, the federal government has taken action: an anti-greenwashing provision in omnibus Bill C-59, which recently became law, contains a truth-in-advertising amendment that will allow corporations to be fined for failing to back up their environmental claims. Under the amendment, claims about a business’s environmental benefits can only be made if they’re substantiated in accordance with “internationally recognized methodology.”
It’s a massive shift in practice that’s left Canada’s oil and gas industry rightly apoplectic. The game changed overnight — the burden of proof is now on corporations — and, just like that, so did the industry’s approach. The website advertised by Canada Action’s liquefied natural gas ads was taken offline. Same for much of the online content put out by the Pathways Alliance group, a consortium of Canada’s six largest oilsands companies whose net-zero claims have been slammed as greenwashing by the physician association.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said in a statement in late June it has “chosen to reduce the amount of information available on its website” — while simultaneously complaining the new anti-greenwashing provisions will put a damper on debate about environmental issues and silence the energy industry.
“It has been the Wild West,” Leah Temper, program director for the physicians association, told the Toronto Star. “Companies have been able to make almost any claim they want, using terms such as net-carbon neutral, without any reliable evidence base. Hopefully this will represent a sea change.”
Alberta Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz called the federal bill an attack on freedom of speech — which would be true if you believe expression grants the right to mislead the public without pushback or consequence. It’s always amusing to hear people whinge about the first amendment in Canada, since it’s not our amendment.
Canada’s charter permits the passage of laws that limit free expression, provided they’re reasonable and can be justified in a free and democratic society. This one seems imminently justifiable, especially in light of the global warming catastrophe unfolding before our eyes. In Canada, fossil fuel companies can no longer claim to be addressing climate change while they continue to be its most dominant cause.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
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