It’s almost as if there was a playbook, but with different groups working on variants of a theme, where the theme is always “shut up.”
The model, of course, was tobacco. Banning ads specifically directed at children or making false claims (explicitly or implicitly) about the healthy properties of cigarettes — well, that’s reasonable enough. Other moves, such as the state stepping in to stop tobacco companies from sponsoring sporting events, or Britain’s grim cigarette packaging rules, another legacy of the appalling Tory party, not so much.
And so Bloomberg reports that Australian climate activists are “pushing to end advertisements and sponsorships they say allow fossil fuel companies to burnish their reputations while profiting from products that heat up the planet.”
In the end, a private organization should be free to decide for itself which sponsorships it is prepared to accept, but it’s not hard to see the direction in which things are going, not least because it is already happening.
From the same Bloomberg report (January 2023):
In August, France became the first country in Europe to prohibit the advertising of fossil fuel products altogether.
To meet the need for supply diversification, France plans to install a new regasification terminal for liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Le Havre, the country’s Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne announced in June.
Oh.
Quite why fossil-fuel companies should want to continue to invest in Europe remains a mystery.
In the meantime, expect fossil-fuel censorship to continue.