In his Special Address on Climate Action delivered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 2024, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres advocated for a ban on advertising from fossil fuel companies. That day, he remarked, "Billions of dollars have been thrown at distorting the truth, deceiving the public, and sowing doubt….Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they sought to delay climate action with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns."
Guterres's words comprised yet another bare-minimum request that most corporations and politicians have so far rejected at this urgent moment. Indeed, it's a twisted world in which the fossil fuel industry, despite its responsibility for most aggressively sabotaging our collective future, is allowed to circulate slick advertisements that imply that its existence is and will remain a net positive for humanity.
In my home state of Texas, fossil fuel sportswashing—nations and corporations leveraging sporting events and fandom to improve their reputation and distract from their wrongdoing—is a close cousin of greenwashing and a common practice. One of many examples is the Chevron Houston Marathon, an annual event where participants race against both the competition and the city's record-high air pollution, which is in part due to the petroleum giant that sponsors the event. Countless Harris County residents have developed chronic breathing problems because of Chevron's presence, many of whom are likely unable to run a long-distance race. (Houston's official half-marathon, by the way? Sponsored by Aramco.)
A few years ago, at a thrift store, I bought some old issues of National Geographic for a dollar each—the oldest of these dating back to November 1975—thinking that they held erasure poems somewhere in their pages. They gathered dust while I worked on other creative projects, but Guterres's speech compelled me to revisit them, curious about how long greenwashing has been around. Although I wasn't surprised by the fossil fuel ads in these vintage volumes, seeing them reignited my vitriol for the neoliberal complacency and hypocrisy that have helped produce today's climate crisis. The National Geographic Society, according to its website, has "stayed true" to its mission of "scientific excellence" and "education."
Flipping through the pages as someone who hadn't thought much about Nat Geo magazine since his teenage years, I considered the role that the publication has played in the U.S. media ecosystem, to say nothing of its role in manufacturing consent for colonialism, past and present. Nat Geo subsists in the same membrane as many other legacy publications by appealing to affluent and upper-middle-class neoliberals while never challenging their carbon-intensive lifestyles that are antithetical to what a bona fide conservationist magazine would endorse. It's okay if you fly across the Atlantic or Pacific several times per year, if you go on that safari in Kenya, that cruise in Alaska, the magazine subliminally whispers to its readers'. You're a person of culture—an explorer, even! In the world of Nat Geo, an explorative spirit is its own carbon credit. It's a world in which capitalism and our biosphere can somehow coexist in perpetuity.
Of course, there are solutions that must still be scaled before global economies can further decarbonize, but that's no excuse to keep permitting fossil fuel ads, let alone at their current rate. In his speech, Guterres added, "Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health, like tobacco.…I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies, and I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising." As long as such advertising persists, fossil fuel companies will be able to wage their particular brand of psychological warfare.
Erasure Poetry and the Petro Imaginary
The following pieces are examples of erasure poetry, in which a preexisting text is altered. This form is also known as blackout poetry. Here the preexisting materials are fossil fuel advertisements published by National Geographic.
Of these two pieces, "Gulf Coast Hunt: 1975" especially makes me think about how the language of fossil fuel ads has changed since the '70s, however partially. Note how this ad explicitly uses the words "oil" and "natural gas." In 1975, the industry's communicators hadn't yet completed one of their most powerful cons: referring to oil, natural gas, and related products as simply "energy."
"Energy" doesn't evoke an odor, color, or texture, whereas "oil" and "natural gas" do. "Energy" doesn't give you cancer if you've been around its extraction or refining process for too many years. "Energy" doesn't pollute a town's water supply. And "energy," by being abstract, sounds deceptively neutral. An activist could be anti-oil, sure, but anti-energy?
Speaking of the decade in which these ads were published, it's been reported that as early as the second half of the 1970s, scientists of at least one fossil fuel company calculated with disturbing accuracy how severe global warming would get in the first quarter of this century.
The BP ads are both from the December 2005 issue of Nat Geo. The issue includes several gripping photos of New Orleans residents facing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast in August of that year. Other pages of the December 2005 issue include advertisements for the Lincoln Zephyr sedan, the Audi A8 sedan ("luxury that makes the private jet seem a little, well, redundant"), the Jeep Commander SUV, the Ford Explorer SUV, the Toyota Highlander SUV, OnStar Vehicle Diagnostics, and the U.S. military.
Five years later, BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred, which dumped millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and devastated the region.