As health professionals, we see every day the harmful effects of fossil fuels on public health and the environment. That is why today we are launching an electronic petition in the House of Commons, on Clean Air Day, to call on the federal government to take action and ban the advertising of these dangerous products, as well as sponsorship by the industry that produces them.
Last year, more than 700,000 healthcare professionals signed an open letter calling on the government to restrict fossil fuel advertisingbut no such action has been taken to address the great public health crisis facing our country.
In Canada, tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical advertising is restricted due to the negative health effects of these substances. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), banning tobacco advertising is the most cost-effective and effective way to reduce the demand for tobacco.
Yet companies in the coal, oil, natural gas and automotive sectors are allowed to promote their products that are harmful to health, the environment and the climate almost without restriction.
Fossil fuels release toxic pollutants from their extraction to their combustion. The air pollution they generate kills 8.7 million people a year, as does tobacco. Their combustion is also the main cause of climate change.
Rising temperatures and extreme heat events, wildfires and expanding zoonoses are already threatening the lives and well-being of people in Canada, not to mention the 2021 heat dome in British Columbia, which caused the death of more than 600 people. In these times of climate emergency, advertising on fossil fuels cannot be defended.
What’s more: Fossil fuel advertising is increasing demand for the products that are causing the climate crisis. Gas companies are encouraging the installation of fossil fuel-based heating systems, amid growing evidence that indoor air pollution from gas appliances causes asthma and other respiratory problems. Automakers continue to market ever bigger and more polluting vehicles, despite politicians’ pledge to phase out gas-powered cars by 2030. To protect their profits, these companies want to keep the world as it is. is and delay the necessary transition to a clean economy.
Strategies borrowed from the tobacco industry
For more than 50 years, the fossil fuel industry has waged a coordinated campaign to undermine the democratic response to climate change. Just as the tobacco industry has continued to promote its addictive products by concealing or denying evidence of the close links between smoking and cancer, it has worked to suppress and distort the evidence, drawing on corporate strategies tobacco and even using the same public relations firms.
Today, the fossil fuel industry continues to wage a disinformation campaign that misleads the public about the environmental and health characteristics of its dangerous and toxic products.
False claims of carbon neutrality serve to delay the necessary transition to safer and cleaner energy sources.
Although several greenwashing complaints are currently being investigated, the problem of fossil fuel advertising is systemic and cannot be solved by regulation alone. Tobacco control measures – which have succeeded in changing the discourse on smoking in Canada and saving hundreds of thousands of lives – can be applied just as effectively to fossil fuels and facilitate the transition to a carbon neutral economy. .
Banning fossil fuel advertising could help people better understand the links between pollution and health, while ensuring that everyone has the information they need to better protect their own health. Banning this type of advertising could help create new social norms and allow us to move towards a healthier, low-carbon future.
France has already enacted an advertising ban for petroleum energy products, energy from the combustion of coal and hydrocarbons, and gas will soon be subject to it. Municipalities have also adopted this approach in the Netherlands, Australia and the United Kingdom. The wind is turning.
As professionals on the front lines of the fight against climate change, we call on the government to take action to protect public health and the future of our children. Today, on Clean Air Day, let’s dissipate the smokescreen we’re being sent and treat fossil fuels like the poisons they are.
* Co-signers: Husein Moloo, Physician, Director of Planetary Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa; Joe Vipond, emergency physician and former president of ACME; Melissa Lem, Family Physician and ACME Board Chair, Director of PaRx (the pan-Canadian version of Prescri-Nature), Assistant Clinical Professor, University of British Columbia School of Medicine; Sehjal Bargava, Resident in Public Health and Preventive Medicine and Family Medicine, University of Ottawa, ACME Regional Committee Co-Chair for Ontario; Marianne Papillon, family physician working in public health; Eugenie Waters, family physician; Geneviève Ferdais, general practitioner at GMF du Sud-Ouest and CLSC Verdun, clinical lecturer at the University of Montreal; Larry Barzelai, family physician; Courtney Howard, emergency physician, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, vice-president of the Global Climate and Health Alliance; Warren Bell, physician, former president and founder of ACME