 Ie, we are going to make a start everyone. Thanks for coming along to this session this afternoon on narratives, vested interests and opposition strategies around fossil fuel production. My name is Peter Newell from University of Sussex and I have the honour of moderating this session this afternoon. We have four speakers, they have each promised hand on heart that they are going to stick to ten minutes so hopefully I won't need to intervene to remind them to stick to time. We will just take them in the order that we have here in the programme. First of all we've got Clemens Carper from the Free University in Amsterdam who's going to talk about fossil fuel advertising under consumer law. Clemens, you have the floor. Thanks so much for allowing me to present. I'm talking about a topic of challenging fossil advertising under consumer law. I want to touch briefly on three areas. First, the problem with fossil advertising in the climate crisis, now that's maybe not that challenged here so maybe we can talk a little bit about fossil advertising as a supply side issue. Then fossil advertising bands is an instrument of fossil fuel control and the third part about one strategy which is mobilising consumer law against fossil advertising. Now first issue problem with fossil advertising in the climate crisis, obviously one problem is that it normalises a harmful commodity and presents the continued use of it as normal and acceptable even if it's not. This one is a campaign by Shell where they plastered their logo all across Amsterdam public transport systems like the Amsterdam ferries which is what triggered my interest years ago. What fossil advertising also does is it misleads the public about the impact of fossil fuels and about their producers. This one is a BP reimagining itself as a net zero. Fosal advertising subverts or can support a subvert public understanding of the need to cut emissions and also about the necessary consumption changes. For example by promoting unrealistic technofixes so you can see here this is an ongoing Shell campaign that drives CO2 neutral through the forests. Last thing that fossil advertising does, it influences policy makers and media. This graphic shows how fossil advertising on Facebook reacted in 2020 presidential elections in the US reacted to the Biden announcement of the climate plan so you can see how there is a direct relationship of fossil advertising. Maybe more generally speaking one could say that fossil advertising is not so much about creating additional demand which is typically how advertising is conceptualized but research shows that fossil advertising is often more about creating or maintaining the social licence to operate for fossil fuel producers so in that sense you could say it's more supply side measure because it is aimed at extending the market continuing the possibility of marketing fossil products in the future. Now a second point, the advertising bands as an instrument of fossil fuel control. The model that we could look at of course is the World Health Organization's framework convention on tobacco advertising which is a successful international agreement about a harmful commodity and interesting about this framework convention is that it takes an integrated approach targeting both the demand side and the supply side so it's argued that both are necessary. It contains a comprehensive ban on all tobacco advertising promotion and sponsorship. Maybe also interesting about the tobacco convention is how explicit it is about the harm of tobacco producers. So it states very clearly essentially that tobacco producers should be kept away from public education measures about public health measures about policy making about tobacco which is of course very different to what we have been seeing about how let's say public policy deals with the role of fossil companies. Maybe also one interesting issue to mention at the framework convention of tobacco control is the concept of brand stretching. Brand stretching describes the use of a tobacco brand for non-tabacco products. So Marlboro Light on a car or whatever also prohibited according to the framework convention or should be prohibited according to the framework convention. That's interesting from a fossil perspective because what we see now in advertising by fossil companies is that fossil companies mainly show advertising about renewable energy actually even though their investment in terms of capital investment is still quite low. So this is an example of BP's Twitter feed promoting their solar investment. There is an ongoing European citizen initiative about the European aiming for European legislative ban on fossil advertising by Greenpeace that was there opening action last year in Rotterdam. I looked at the numbers, this is likely not going to succeed. So the one million necessary signatures will not be managed. But there is various local initiatives. For example the city of Amsterdam has been banning advertising for fossil fuels and high fossil or high carbon products. Which leads me now to an alternative strategy of targeting fossil advertising if not like if the legislative means creating a legislative ban is not yet successful is to mobilize consumer law against fossil advertising. Consumer law or one part of consumer law prohibits deceptive commercial practices and that would include advertising that is either factually incorrect or otherwise deceptive. There's in virtually all jurisdictions there's hard law bans, hard law meaning that it's enforceable by courts or regulatory authorities. In the EU it would be the unfair commercial practices directive implemented into all national laws. In the US one example that I pulled out would be the New York City consumer protection law. There's also various soft law instruments that can be mobilized. For example the OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises or industry self-regulation in the UK it would be the ASA Advertising Standards Authority in the Netherlands which is my accidental area of expertise, the Reclamacode Commission. Now what type of cases against fossil advertising can we identify? There's a first type of case that is now big in the US which is targeting the systematic deception of the public by fossil fuel companies. So there's now a number of big cases going on launched by US states or cities against fossil companies. For example the New York City Earth Day lawsuit which targeted Shell, Exxon and BP and American Petroleum Institute for having systematically and intentionally misled consumers in New York City about the central role their products play in causing the climate crisis. This of course is in some ways modeled on tobacco litigation some decades earlier. This is a second type of complaints that we can see, complaints or lawsuits that we can see, challenging unrealistic techno fixes. This one is the Dodge version of the Drive CO2 neutral campaign by Shell. You can see a tanker full of gasoline saying I'm driving CO2 neutral to the driver in the back, U2, shaming the driver with this image of the fire and the dead fish and the dead tree. This one we challenged successfully in the Netherlands for misleading consumers because the climate benefits of offsetting is not equivalent to the climate harm of emissions which would be translating into law the fact like the scientific critiques about forest based offsetting. Another example would be a lawsuit in Australia against Santos of fossil fuel companies about using carbon capture and storage in their emission strategy so saying that's not a viable technology. A third type of lawsuits that can be seen is these ones you would use consumer law to scrutinize corporate mitigation plans. This is an advertising by Totai. Their new climate ambition is to get to net zero by 2050 that was challenged under consumer law in France by NGOs earlier this year and the argument was that this is something that would be called an ambition which is usually not like an advertising authority is not going to say that this is illegal because how do you prove that an ambition is incorrect but if you look into the investment strategy of the company you see that Totai is actually planning to expand for example gas exploration and that way it is actually impossible to reach that target if the company is actually following up on their investment strategy. So that would be a third way of mobilizing consumer law a little bit beyond just like targeting individual greenwashing cases because then you'll always be behind what the corporations are doing but these would be three ways how you could leverage consumer law in a more strategic sense. Summing up fossil advertising bands they could play a relevant role in overall strategy and fossil fuel control and one thing I presented is how consumer law could be mobilized against fossil advertising. Thank you. Thank you. Cerepike with climate access which is the climate communications organization in the US and we also have just started one in Canada it's not public yet so you're the first to know and as mentioned I work on the fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty and the senior communications advisor and we're hiring a comms director if you know anybody. Today what I'm going to do is cover the research and guidance that we've developed based on that research on how to frame supply side issues. We did look specifically at how to talk about a treaty but also just a whole range of issues that get into this topic area and what that resulted in is six different playbooks so we did this work in six different countries. Five were through the fossil fuel treaty six was through the Canadian organization but we still tested how to talk about the treaty. There were a number of different research inputs to this work. We did a roll up of existing public opinion research in each country with the exception of Kenya because we couldn't find any. We did a media analysis how are these issues being talked about. Social media analysis who's talking about what and what way and then message testing and I want to point that for outside of the US and Canada we worked with organizations to design and run that message testing because we weren't going to assume we understood the context ourselves to do that. So what I'm going to do is walk through some overall trends that we saw from the research. Some a little bit about the meta narrative so we're aiming for like what is the overarching story but then how does that get customized per the context and as you probably all know the industry is quite good at having common arguments everywhere they go but doing that distinguishing for countries. So in terms of the overall trends people support renewable energy but unfortunately all of the countries are still quite split over whether or not we need to move away from oil and gas and so I think this is a really important trend because we've just seen climate concern go higher and higher and higher all around the world but we're not seeing movement on attitudes about getting off of the dirty stuff. Concerns about rising energy costs are common in every jurisdiction it plays out differently if it's global south versus global north but nonetheless that's still there. People are becoming increasingly afraid of extreme weather events and recognize there is a problem but that is not being connected back to fossil fuels. The climate impacts of fossil fuels nor air pollution which is often a bigger concern of people's when it comes to fossil fuels. The label natural creates confusion right natural gas like what is natural gas so people don't automatically put that in the fossil category and are really unclear of its impacts both on health and the climate and that was true in all of the jurisdictions and there's also low confidence that the power of the fossil fuel industry can be limited so nobody likes it it's like we're between a rock and a hard place but nobody thinks we're actually going to break all of the economic and political power that they have. Some distinctions climate concern is actually higher in the global south than in the US and Canada however people self report not being as literate about climate change not really knowing enough about it or having the information. In the global south development needs are directly tied to fossil fuels and you see that both in public opinion but in the discourse and then in the US and Canada you have extreme political polarization really skewing the whole conversation. So in terms of we did look at the dominant industry narratives on social media and the media and I think it was a great example of what you just presented because it tracks that very much they claim they're part of the climate solution position themselves as innovative and contributing to a positive future they argue expansion must take place due to energy and economic needs and they promote net zero pledges despite being based on unproven expensive options. So when it comes to the top level framings what we really are seeing that is working across all the jurisdictions is actually leading with a positive vision of what will be like when we get off of fossil fuels. So often we start with all the problems and all the bad stuff but it's actually much more motivating for people if we can help them imagine because again we're in this rock in a hard place so people can't see it they don't know what this is going to be like. We've got to make the links between fossil fuels, air pollution health and climate change and extreme weather people care about extreme weather air pollution but we have to tie that back to fossil fuels. We have to highlight why the fossil fuel companies cannot be trusted and why government accountability is needed emphasize that actually we do not need fossil fuels to meet our development goals or our energy needs there are enough renewable energy potential in every region of the world and it's now the affordable safe option and that's really important people again like renewable energy but don't necessarily think they're going to have access to it be able to pay for it or that it will be as reliable. Amplify it's not an energy transition of fossil fuel producing countries keep growing out the problem. The first step is to end expansion so we don't need to turn off the taps immediately but we need to stop expanding the problem and we need as part of that to make sure that the big fossil fuel producing nations that are wealthy are taking responsibility and finally what we found is that people really like the idea okay maybe we're not going to turn things off overnight but we need a plan to get off of this we actually need a plan and it does need to be a global plan so that everybody's in or else nobody's going to believe it's going to happen. So what does that play out then in terms of that meta narrative I was talking about so in terms of narrative just for those who aren't in communications every good story has three components there's tension right there has to be something that has to be overcome a problem something that you want that you can't quite get you have to have what's the choice right what can we actually do about it what is that pathway going forward and then what will get better when we actually achieve that and as I just mentioned putting that benefit first is actually a lot more appealing and that's really about making the benefits clear and tangible through examples of how things are evolving for example I'm from a real small town in Fort Erie in Ontario Canada which now has one of the largest solar manufacturing plants in the world and it used to be farmland right so these stories of the transition emerging that we really the costs of inaction are greater than taking action the challenge there's a lot of different ways to do this again it does get tailored depending on the country but we need to make sure we're letting people know that the extreme weather events they're worried about are being driven by three products coal oil and gas and that these also these three products are also harming our environment our health and creating problems for workers the lack of energy access is holding people back right and we heard earlier in the in the plenary it's not going to be met with fossil fuels to emphasize the fact that we are building out more of the problem and I think this is where the work of the production gap report is actually super compelling and when you can say things like this you know the plan production will result in two times the pollution like make it really tangible for people that really works too last week the global registry of fossil fuels was just released so another sort of real tangible data point we have is that there's seven times the well the reserves that we have in the world if we were to develop them would result in seven times more pollution than what our budget allows so people need those like you know things that they can grab on to making sure we're pivoting to who is responsible for the problem it's the fossil fuel companies who are behind this and that is why we do need the the the government action the pathway this is about now right this isn't about five years from now this is the crossroads moment we're at and we also know that from the data that was presented this morning from IEA but really emphasizing that in our stories the pathway forward making it really clear people don't know what it means to actually make this transition we're all trying to figure it out too but to kind of de-wonk it and what are some of the steps we can start taking now we need that plan to phase out fossil fuels and fast track clean energy and other low carbon solutions that's all language that tested well in every country so the idea of phasing out phasing down and scaling up ramping up the good stuff I hope none of you ever say managed decline it doesn't work it sounds like you're managing the end of your life and that's not a fun thing that most people like to think about the fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty tested very well as a vehicle that this could actually foster the international cooperation and the idea that you'd have to get people all in right and working together okay so I just want to show a little bit I'm not going to talk through this but in terms of how this plays out so again that metanarrative there are commonalities I want to just say though there are differences so for example in the US you can lean into things like you know the US's place in the world economically being a leader being innovative when it comes to India you're talking a lot more about air pollution the issues from coal right so you have to again make it distinct for the context but nonetheless there are commonalities there and then I just want to leave you with a few tips that also emerged from all of this work it's really important to reference examples of when the world came together in the past to take on great challenges because we can forget that but when you reference ideas like what we did on land mines banning those dealing with the ozone holding the ozone later dealing with hisbestos then people really get a sense of wow actually maybe we could do this we've done it before we could do it again elevating those stories of local resistance into a larger global call to action that the movement to get a to phase down fossil fuels and expand the good stuff is gaining momentum it is now the inevitable don't say natural when talking about gas never put that word in front of it and this you know is a bit context specific but we do know things like in the states if you say methane gas because people have a sense that's dirty there's been campaigns in Canada just saying unnatural gas which really I actually love that kind of twist with the way the industry does it avoid using things like big oil or you know the don't give them more power by talking about how huge and powerful they are it's about focusing on this is a dying industry whose time has come bye bye see you later take your mess with you and then finally we do need to talk about the economics and beyond the affordability and reliability of clean energy where are people's lives and livelihoods going to be in this transition and the numbers are great right you need those but those alone don't work and if you see the industry doesn't do it that way either they don't just make make a straight up oh there's now x number of jobs in this industry instead they tell stories of who are the people in these jobs what are their lives like how have they gotten better how are they achieving what they want so the industry does that really well on the fossil fuel side we need to start elevating like who has the jobs how did they get there what are their lives like now as a result but there also are some really great numbers out there for example california is an oil producing state there's now six times more jobs in clean energy than in the in the yucky stuff so we have all of those playbooks about to be released feel free to give me your card and I'm happy to send them all to you but thank you very much thanks very much Cara so next up we have Chris from Culture Unstained in the UK he's going to be talking about taking the logos down from oil sponsorship not big oil sponsorship but oil sponsorship uh to fossil free culture Chris for those of you that haven't heard of culture unstained before we're a kind of research and campaigns organisation but we sort of um it's that thing of crediting all of the other people involved in a movement in a campaign which we're part of this much bigger fossil free culture movement that do the work around cultural sponsorship um and I imagine most of us have sort of encountered or are aware of the strategy of using cultural sponsorship previously by the tobacco industry in order to kind of manage its brand and maintain that social licence to operate that industry term um and that's been a really cool part of the fossil fuel industry's playbook for a long time these are primarily UK kind of based examples of that as well um some of the kind of key things just to highlight about it is the use of naming rights so the the way of kind of substituting the names of the companies the corporations so we have the BP Portrait Award it is embodying the artwork and cultural activity um the Wanderlab at the Science Museum in London isn't just the Wanderlab it's the Equinall Gallery so it's and again in the top right for the Paralympic Games you see this kind of recreation of the BP brand so that's really embedded in the Paralympic Games branding I guess what I want to kind of dig into a little bit around the the cultural sponsorship piece is I think as we've been hearing already it taps into the the kind of social licence question so on the face of it it looks like a kind of cheaper form of advertising the amount of money that goes to these cultural institutions is proportionally very small compared to the budgets of of the companies but of kind of some of the work we do is digging into what are the ways that these companies are really creating obstacles by embedding themselves in state institutions, cultural institutions and I guess it it's a similar model to how we might look at the relationships between universities including the one we're in and many others and we see a similar kind of pattern playing out with cultural institutions. This was a slide from BP's sort of PR planning ahead of relaunching with that net zero ambitions and primarily Bernard Luni launching an Instagram profile which I'm sure we've all spent a lot of time looking at or I have but as you see in the bottom corner sponsorship whether that's cultural institutions or sport sponsorship etc etc is still a core piece of that that kind of advocacy piece and as it's becoming more and more apparent young people and influences are kind of on the agenda there but like I say it's very calculated so years ago at the BPAGM someone put a question to the board about investment in cultural sponsorship and they said the same kind of considerations BP would make about production or investment in New Wales they applied the same kind of thinking to cultural sponsorship in terms of is it making a return for us. This comes from a much larger piece of mapping and analysis we did several years ago so it's obviously things of advance beyond here but what we discovered is that the specific targeting of cultural sponsorship within a UK context and then also within cultural institutions in Russia there was a kind of mirroring and what BP was latching itself onto at the same time as being involved in the kind of lobbying of government ministers and so on was the cultural diplomacy pieces so the loaning of objects from Russia to the British Museum in London the tour of the Morinsky Orchestra to the Royal Opera House in London so these pieces where the kind of formalities of government meetings and political process are kind of put to one side and champagne glasses and canapes are the basis for the interaction. A kind of just an illustrative example of this is this is Velary Gagiev the conductor and at that time of the Morinsky Theatre and this was a BP promotional film this screenshot comes from where he says we share the same approach to the changing world around us so really those the lines the language the talking points have been embedded in the cultural activity and he's become an ambassador for BP at the same time as being a very close ally of Vladimir Putin. This gives you a flavour again of that going even deeper so some of the investigations work we've done more recently that even just our kind of culture institutions protecting and upholding the positions of the companies of the Science Museum in London as a matter of practice in the contracts will have effectively a gagging clause a a non-desparagement clause in these contracts so for the Science Museum which is now putting on new exhibitions around energy and climate it's not in a position to offer any kind of bold critique of the activity of BP, Shell, Equinor and Adani because all four of them are its corporate partners. At the British Museum it's a slightly different situation BP is their sponsor but they have this this group the Chairman's Advisory Group which has various corporate representatives including BP but they don't believe they need to disclose the minutes or the membership of that organisation so these are the kind of bodies where these relationships are shored up and that's that's why we see a real kind of importance in challenging exposing them. This becomes all the more problematic when these kind of relationships are contested and then the response from the companies is to ask all of the security teams from the respective cultural institutions to come over for a meeting in their head office in London and collaborate and in the UK context again these cultural institutions are state funded we refer to them as arms length government bodies so there's meant to be a level of independence and neutrality but here they are using their security teams in order to uphold the BP narrative and this this was actually from a meeting with our department of business energy and industrial strategy and we were talking about production the North Sea and then at the end they really wanted to talk about the opposition to our sponsorship because that's how important this territory is to BP so again that that question of going beyond the kind of I guess the symbolic way we might think about it the the management of the brand to actually these are the kind of integral relationships that they want to shore up and hold on to and the way we've arrived at that point is this kind of domino effect of these relationships ending and in in terms of telling that positive story I think the cultural sponsorship campaigns we've seen across several countries have been an opportunity to show that domino effect and really kind of push these institutions people have emotional or personal connections to and relationships to and seeing them shift so all of the Shell sponsored cultural institutions on the South Bank in London have now ended partnerships with Shell but at the same time we saw the same thing happening in the centre of Amsterdam on their museum client the van Gogh and the consocavel there and earlier this year the National Portrait Gallery in London ended its relationship with BP after 30 years and and part of the significance of this is that 30 years is also the same amount of time that BP has been operating in Russia so again that cultural space was the basis for those kind of conversations and interactions and again I think there's so my background is originally sort of from studying music and art and so on and I think there's real power in terms of these questions about narratives and opposition strategies to the techniques used by the activists and some of this I've been involved in myself but this is Liberate Tate and you might have seen some of these iconic images in Tate Modern and Tate Britain this is Liberon de Louvre in Paris this is Fossil Free Culture NL in the Van Gogh Museum and this is BP or not BP in London and again using the cultural spaces as public spaces to contest these narratives and also occasionally bring a large BP branded Trojan horse to the front gates of the museum but really effective ways of interrogating and disrupting the narrative and I think sometimes when we think about the role of art in how we mediate our language and our thinking around climate issues it's sort of seen as having a passive role the thinking happens here we mediate it through art whereas here I think the art making is very complex sophisticated organised and it's playing quite an active role but I think the real strength and maybe thinking about some of the issues that came up in an earlier session is the intersection and so when the British Museum hosted this exhibition on Indigenous Australia a few years ago there are a whole series of objects which are the subject of restitution claims so rather than seeing these issues as separate from one another BP or not BP mounted protests and worked with Rodney Kelly who is calling for the Gweegal Shield and the museum's collection to be returned and started joining the dots and looking at the kind of histories of colonialism that were embedded in the British Museum and the ways in which they were embedded in the kind of processes of fossil fuel extraction today and really trying to shift and address the ways that we think about and frame our kind of campaigns against the fossil fuel industry and the way that's sort of moving is here centering the voices of British Iraqi women around an exhibition that was displaying Iraqi ology and so while BP was using that to promote its operations in Iraq today and again there were contested objects in archeology in that space and so maybe just to conclude I appreciate it's quite a whistle stop talk through some of these things but I was pointing to this quotation from Raoul Martinus who was shortlisted for the BP portrait award and he said valuable creative expression is not limited to the traditional artistic formats every choice is inherently creative if our cultural institutions took a principled stand on this urgent issue it would in and of itself be a beautiful creative act certainly as valuable as any painting a performance they might showcase and I think it just demonstrates the real awareness of the how entrenched the relationships of a BP or Shell or any other company the government and the state and the vested interests are within these cultural spaces but then also the power of activists and creative art makers and culture makers to disrupt that and start shifting the narrative and I'll stop there thanks thanks very much Chris and so now turning to the petrochemical industry York I'm going to from Lund University it's going to be talking about narrating decarbonisation stories of climate action in the petrochemical industry I am yes thank you for that I'm Joachim I'm presenting work done in collaboration with some colleagues and also Frederick Bowie who's who's here in the room and now we're moving downstream I guess or upstream depends on how you look at it but from oil and gas extraction to the petrochemical industry and I want to start by showing you this picture of an artwork called the the giant plastic tap that's created by Benjamin von Wong and this is from Nairobi at the United Nations Environmental Assembly earlier this year where there was made a resolution for a global treaty on plastics and here it could say there's it it instigates a discussion on whether we should turn off the tap not on only on oil and gas but also on plastics and that's a really really relevant discussion because if you look at industry projections if you look at the projections by the IEA, BP and their energy outlooks, consultancies in the chemical industry they all expect that the main driver of oil demand growth going forward in the coming decades will be plastics and petrochemicals so as say the use of fossil fuels for transport declines then plastics will proliferate chemical use will proliferate and so it's expected to be a major source of revenue going forward and so this context of a potential global plastics treaty and the prospects of turning off the tap on plastics is a major threat to the industry not surprisingly and there's been a ongoing lobbying and campaigning a lot of work on trying to focus potential or plastics treaty towards waste management ocean cleanup that sort of thing and not so much about the production site but at the same time there has been caps calls for caps to global production on plastics to combat not only the plastics but also the climate crisis and that's where this presentation comes in and so given that it's pretty interesting to look into the transition narratives I think in the petrochemical industry and that's some and this work um is what are the findings from this work is then what I'll spend the rest of the presentation on and I mean in terms of theoretical framework we do draw a little bit on the work of Peter Newell here but and also but also focus more on narratives and and then we look at a bunch of different PR materials sustainability reports been attending industry conferences and the like and then overall we've you know coded that and then we compiled that into main three main transition narratives and the first of that one I think is is arguably the most important one and arguably also the one which is very unique to plastics and petrochemicals and that is the notion of the industry as realises of sustainability and I mean it's great that we've already been talking about narratives and we you know see the idea of some challenges and the pathway and all of that and here the problem is actually that people misconstrw or misunderstand the industry and the role of industry in fostering sustainability or realising sustainability it might be that chemicals are emission or energy intensive but what they do is that they enable emissions reductions they you know EVs are lighter because they are made of plastics plastics are used for wind turbines they're needed for solar cells they're needed for the energy transitions plastics is the claim increase or decreased food waste all those sorts of claims and so you see for example here Linda saying that a subset of Linda applications enable more than twice the greenhouse gas benefit then was admitted in all global operations so actually the industry as of now is a net benefit in terms of climate action and you see here this is to the right hand side that's BSF one of the biggest producers in the world having the same sentence in year after year after year and there's this inability report saying we offer our customer solutions that help prevent greenhouse gas emissions improve energy and resource efficiency I can say Linda for example some of the products that they highlight that is solvents used to increase jet turbine efficiency so I mean it's often also these products are used for what you could easily label non-sustainable activities and what's the problem here well the problem is of course that these this claim is used to to fend off criticisms leveraged against the industry and it also pretty interesting in terms of carbon accounting because claiming emission reductions from product offsets means that you know you'll have double counting if you also actually count the emission reductions at the source and so you will have a lot of companies claiming all to reduce emissions and still have a lot of emissions and we see it here for example Dow they have a net zero target across all scopes as one of the few petrochemical companies but if you read the footnotes in the sustainability reports you will see that this target includes product benefits or offsets from product benefits so exactly what we just saw from from Linda with company with massive direct emissions already claiming that they are a net benefit okay second narrative and this is perhaps a bit more you know close to the technological optimism that sort of climate delay discourse but it's the notion that the industry is uniquely suited to confront the climate crisis they are breakthrough type technology pioneers it's in their corporate DNA and they are innovators and have been so for a century so who is better suited to address climate change than them this is from a industry conference Robert Seaman saying if chemistry can't do it nobody can bsf saying we are pioneering carbon free production processes Dow they are delivering breakthrough innovations so and that's the type of language and so other actors you could say in the innovation regime or calls that are pressures leveraged against the industry pushing innovation in a certain direction you know all of that that's not really part of the important part of the story the important part of story is that the pioneers that those are the industry actors okay and then the third and and final transition narrative that we focus on is also something that resembles you could say other industries but it's a notion that the industry is already well underway and that it has it's on this journey often it's framed as a journey towards climate neutrality a sustainability journey and that they are you know however difficult managing this in an orderly fashion and you should you know trust industry that all of what they've been doing is part of this pathway towards net zero and it's in years top top right right it's really smooth it's pretty neat with reaching zero no no worries and often they are ahead of a head on target or they're doing pretty well and I guess one of the especially worrisome variations of this is when this relapeling actions that have been that would have been taken so otherwise for legal reasons or for economic reasons and then relapeling it as part of this this journey towards towards net zero and so you know building on again a long history of ecological concerns you could say the industry is handling things and when you then put those three together you end up with a say discursive strategy where the industry is doing well already and they will be even better in the future and also are realizing sustainability now so they are they are helping realize sustainability in an ever greener ever more sustainable sustainable way so and this is say an effort to map the to the value chain so to speak and where the narratives fit in and when we then related to say the broader disc literature on on on discourse of climate delay we see they they resonate with those although they take a particular form in the petrochemical industry but they resonate with notions of all talk and little action what about ism and technological optimism and what we also see is that although acknowledging sustainability issues these are often framed in terms of the force of consumer demand and individualism redirecting responsibility comparable to tobacco and a big oil or not so big oil small oil and when you then take it together you see that the industry portrays itself as essential and indispensable the chemicals are the building blocks of modern life they are the building blocks of sustainability so they will be needed and so you cannot or should not question what the industry is doing you should be thankful and happy that it exists and this is the petrochemical the petrochemical europe saying that we build the future and similar to how say oil and gas cooperation will then show renewables petrochemical industry will also show renewables when when they do their PR campaign and then just lastly while they're framing there's this very remarkable quote I think at an industry conference made by a consultant in a in a global consultancy major petrochemicals conference asked and at the and it was on like current trends and climate plastic crisis how to navigate that he ended his presentation by asking the audience the you know representatives from the biggest petrochemical producers in europe can you negate or convert threats and position to capture opportunities that was the main the main question asked in the context of these transition pressures so yeah summing up industry actors plan for a chemical future for petroleum expectations our plastics will drive and petrochemicals will drive oil demand growth and then these narratives that we've found they frame corporate actors as transition enablers you could say indispensable to the transition and I would I would argue that the contest of the struggle over how to frame plastics how to frame petrochemicals is likely to be a key point of contention in the upcoming global plastic treaty negotiations thank you so thank you to all our speakers for keeping time and for giving us a rich set of presentations and plenty of food for thought we've got nearly half an hour for questions and discussion so I think we'll take clusters of questions to try and keep the flow of the conversation going when you introduce yourself please keep your questions short and tell us who you are and where you're from question there front row first of all please yeah thank you uh this question's for claimants or anyone else who wants to answer it I was just wondering if you've looked at the role of states in obstructing uh when you're looking at um sorry addressing greenwashing in Australia we have all those advertisements like shell is carbon neutral uh the difference is in Australia they're also accompanied by a little trademark that says certified carbon neutral by the Australian government and yeah we're good um so I guess what I'm really interested in and not to self promote but this is what I'm talking about tomorrow is in a lot of cases states are getting involved in industry greenwashing because it benefits them to do so so how do you then use consumer law or or soft law or those international frameworks when greenwashing is actually being baked into regulatory regimes at at a state level or at a federal level I don't know if this is something that's being carried out elsewhere or else Australia is just particularly good at being bad but I'm just finding it's it's it's going to be hard to tackle greenwashing by industry when government is endorsing the greenwashing okay thanks so much and then two but yeah the same row just along Christian Downey from the Australian National University I loved all those presentations thanks so much I had two quick questions one for Clemens and Chris Clemens you mentioned about all the advertising for social licence reputation issues I was interested if you'd done any distinction between that money spent on reputational branding versus that that's for particular issue based campaigns would be great to hear if there's any data on that and on the cultural sponsorships Chris the other thought I had so some of my work involves interviewing some of these lobbyists is that they don't only use these cultural sponsorships just for social licence practices but they also use them for access for their lobbyists because as you were pointing out with the Russian example you know a minister turns up to open the gallery they can send along their chief lobbyist to go and hang out with that minister so that seems to be how these different strategies complement each other I think is also something to explore thank you my name is Paola Jangus and I'm a PhD student in the technical university of Berlin thank you so much for your presentations and I'm also looking at these sort of issues but what can we learn from all this research that's been done on private companies sort of an advertising so when the government is the owner of fossil fuels when the government is the owner and I think those courses there are a little bit different and again this is also work I'm working on the transition when the transition narrative is we need those fossil fuel rents to pay for the transition so we'll also transition at some point but and it's a very different enemy if it's the government so what can we learn from from the strategies that you've researched when the fossil fuel company is the government right thanks so much this goes quick set of reactions and then we'll take some more questions so Chris one of the questions for you I think yes is the the short answer I mean there are other pieces of research that we've done around and that kind of more hidden dimension of the kind of corporate receptions that kind of thing but the one that always stood out to me is we did a piece of investigation around an event the British Museum which was around the Mexican festival with Day of the Dead and that event was not in the events calendar and it really suddenly appeared over a matter of a few weeks and it was very heavily BP branded and afterwards through sort of freedom of information requests it turned out that while there was all this cultural activity downstairs that have been laid on BP were upstairs in the restaurant with members of the Mexican government and this was just a couple of months before new drilling licenses were being auctioned so in that case we were able to kind of track this kind of direct link between the the British Museum essentially being complicit in the the advancing of that that kind of fossil fuel production um the two questions that were directed at me were about the distinction between brand versus issue-based advertising I have not really worked about this like in practice I think from a consumer law perspective because you want to prove ideally that a statement is factually incorrect that issue might be more easy if it's like a specific product based or so advertising but now in the past in the past years I think we managed there are some cases where also like the legal like the brand like brand type advertising could also be seen as factually incorrect so it's possible but that's like my specific legal take on it's probably not very helpful the issue that you mentioned this is like a big issue what about like state certifying the carbon neutrality claims like that's the specific part I take from what you said um that's a big challenge in the I can say like this kind of certification appears currently only in private certification so vera or this like this certification companies being taken as like a sign this is like like objective neutralization or labels like carbon neutral labels so we have like a case we had like a case in the Netherlands where like the slave where the authority was in in essence deferring to this label to this carbon neutral label or saying well we're not going to check this and the risk we don't have that yet in Europe is the like yeah is that is that it's legal certification of offsets that EU has now issued this carbon cycles communication and then there's also like all kinds of private standardization attempts of the offset market um on the I think so my take on this is from a purely legal perspective in argumentation is to say that whatever the state is certifying can be like they can certify it but consumer law or like other areas of law such as disclosure rules corporate disclosure rules they have a different standard of um a strictness of like how how true must your statement be right and you could argue that whatever the state is like lazily certifying for their purposes of like carbon accounting or so it's not the same as what consumer law requires consumer law requires actual factually true statements which yeah so that would be my attempt and otherwise I think that um the risk like for corporations on relying on carbon offsets needs to be communicated then that needs to be worked out so we worked out now what the risks on the consumer law are and I think now needs to be worked out what are the risks for corporations under disclosure rules so corporate and financial disclosure rules um and then maybe yeah I don't know fraud like these issues yeah okay that's just before we get another round of questions Carl wants to come in on the question about the state and state greenwashing yeah um I think your point is a good one on how these pieces fit together because the industry operates the same everywhere they go right so whether it's like government owned or not they're they're doing the same thing so for example our colleague from the fossil fuel tree did a case study on Malaysia and Petronas the state owned oil company and they do all of the things that Chris mentioned in terms of pushing themselves into cultural organizations similarly in Canada even though it's not public Canada subsidizes fossil fuels at the highest level of energy 20 country so you could sort of say it's uh stay downed and the same argument is made it's not just that we want we need the industry for jobs and economic development but they're paying for our sports teams our community centers etc right and their advertising is embedded in all of that so I guess to me um it's about starting to take apart those arguments that it's like we need this for all of these reasons and uh elevating the alternative so for example one thing that works really well in Canada is to push back on how important oil and gas is for the economy and say there are more people who work in the beer industry because like Canadians are all about beer right so so that kind of thing um can work uh pointing out the level of investment government investment going into harming and killing people and what could be avoided I would not recommend using the word subsidies because we actually do need to put public money into getting the alternative scaled but using language like we're pouring our money down the drain you know our money taxpayer money taxpayer dollars down the drain when it could could be going into what we're trying to to create um that will save those lives and and save those communities great excellent point uh yeah Richard thank you Richard Dennis from the Australia Institute thank you though wonderful presentations I think my questions mainly for Chris but uh in Australia our national war memorials beautiful building as you'd expect it to be and we have the eternal flame that burns so we never forget the soldiers that gave their life for Australia and it is of course sponsored by the gas association in the war memorial um so I guess my question to you but to all of you is like what it how do you see the benefits of taking on these campaigns as a way to force the fossil fuel industry to uh to resist because I don't think Australians I don't know about other countries I don't think people quite realise how panicious this advertising is and calling for it to be banned calling for it to be removed forces them to demand the right to keep doing it which I think is a win and I guess my specific question apart from the strategy is in Australia there's no publicly available info on how much the sponsorships cost but from what I've been able to find it's trivial you know like an institution might cost a hundred million dollars a year to run and for a hundred thousand dollars they get naming rights so you know we kind of push for more information on this is is that information available in other countries because I fear they're getting a lot of a lot of pr for actually very small amounts of money any other questions in this round yes one at the back there and then the lady here in purple yeah thanks a lot and Clemens appreciated your reference to the WHO framework convention on tobacco control also looking at some research that came out during that process there was a a study about the role of the spy firm Mangevin Bisco in Duchan which formed in response to the Nestle campaign in the 70s where the strategy they advised was to isolate the radicals, cultivate the idealists and then you could co-opt the realists and therefore the opportunists would come along with you so I guess looking at the idealists as kind of a key sector here which are those who would who aren't as extreme in their methods but support the goals I wonder I mean Carol already talked a little bit to this in terms of the positive values but just how do we keep the idealists on side with these with our tactics. Thank you another great question there's just one other question about there in this round and then we'll get some more responses from the panel. Hi I'm Ben Ayliff from the energy transition fund I was just curious if you'd seen any sort of shift in the tactics or the strategy that oil and gas companies are using to advertise to connect themselves with well-loved institutions in light of what's happened in Ukraine and so whether with the sort of the competing narratives that we see now around energy security national security price cost of living but then also you know the appallingly high profits that these companies are making cause for windfall taxes and things like that I just wonder if you've been able to see any shifts in the kind of strategies that yet they're using to navigate and to thrive in this kind of space too. Great thank you Joakim do you want to start because you didn't get to say last time round. I mean it's it also I mean questions reflect the focus on oil and gas and I think I should just briefly comment on that I guess because that's not that surprising because it is like there is pretty much or more or less that consensus at least if you look to take to say for example the IAA projections as some sort of consensus on it like in terms of continued upscaling of chemical production so it's you know it's it even though that petrochemicals and fossil fuels are intrinsically linked and that mean total shell um xl mobile are amongst the biggest chemical producers in the world um they are not questioned on that part of their uh on that part of their activities although it's you know potentially large well large and increasing share you could argue in in in uh given the prospects of potentially or at some point eventually declining um oil and gas extraction so so I think it's just I guess a plea to to consider I think that in uh in relation to understanding some of these these companies that that a lot the large part of their business is is chemicals and that that's not necessarily it's not a given that plastics the production should should should increase and that it's seen that there you know this is a notion that there is a uh future for for oil and chemicals and that you know in in questioning say what alternative uses there there is also a scope of room for for questioning the the proliferation of of uh yeah chemicals production okay thanks Cara you when it's coming yeah on sort of what's changing um and what's not I've worked uh on supply side communications for about 15 years so tracking this and and just hearing the other presentations I'm just struck by an even greater level the degree to which their messages are very consistent even the petrochemical and the oil and gas folks and how insidious that is um and and so unfortunately I would have to say I've seen a lot of the same arguments being made over that time span things like putting the blame on individuals um is a classic shells been doing that forever you know or have you bought your programmable thermostat right it's just they do that all the time and that's really intentional to keep their role out of it and not look at the systemic but I do think there are a few things changing that are are really challenging one is that they were flat out climate deniers and now they're not now they're like we're on this path right as we've seen and I think that is incredibly dangerous um and they've also done a better job of mapping out what those pathways are of actually saying what does this look like and we haven't done that our governments haven't done that and and so that was my point about we have to make that pathway really clear because we're keeping up with them and now having to debunk carbon capture and storage blue hydrogen arguments and it's much harder to reframe an argument than set the frame in the first place Chris or Clemens other of you want to come in you don't have to we can collect more questions but um uh so when one of the things I said that that question about the amount of money is a really interesting one because try try as we might um it's very very difficult to get hold of that information even even through freedom of information or in the UK but the powerful thing about it uh so an organisation platform who used to work on this issue actually took Tate galleries to information tribunal to force not the current amount of the sponsorship at that time but the past amount even to be publicly disclosed and the strength of that as a kind of campaigning strategy is it just exposed the kind of closeness of the out of Tate with BP at that time the the chair of their trustees was John Brown who was the former CEO of BP as well so there was a nice kind of separation there as well but but these kind of forums and I think we sort of seen this in the kind of climate litigation piece in the use of law is actually um creating these arenas or these forums for that that information to be exposed and and the kind of you know exposing the lie of philanthropy which underlies this uh there was a piece of research that I was kind of point back to about how charities use celebrities in order to promote their campaigns and causes and people ordinarily think oh that's how we're going to extend our reach and our social media and more petition sign-ups and so on but actually there was research to suggest that the use of celebrities is to persuade and frame yourself to governments and policymakers that you're in touch with the public mood and I think sometimes there's that aspect going on with the cultural and the sport sponsorship is yeah it's it's about kind of communicating those things and I think in terms of the the sort of shifts is there's a move kind of slightly away from cultural institutions at least at least more towards you know Instagram influences and and those kinds of spaces a little bit more as well and just on Ben's question around the the question of Ukraine and and so on I think kind of fortunate well fortunately isn't the right word but in terms of BP sort of have managed to sidestep that question somewhat because of the offloading of Rosneft but what's what's interesting at least for the campaign we're about to do is the next British Museum exhibition sponsored by BP is on Egypt and so that's emerging right before COP 27 but you know there's another really important human rights context that we want to be highlighting that the BP kind of managed to regale out of and in terms of us shining a spotlight on that the kind of relationships around Russia as well so you know that that kind of kind of aspect of sidestepping but the cultural institution again is providing that that kind of deflection. I just maybe wanted to pick on a little bit on the issue of what are the benefits of taking on advertising. I think that the what's interesting about advertising from a legal perspective is that it opens up like a nutritional legal role like a legal route to let's say address various issues like mitigation strategies, the role of the fossil industry, techno fixes, offsetting so these issues like within the legal framework and often also like with a lower threshold in regard of standing sort of getting into courts because it's just that's the one thing and the other thing is more in terms of communication I feel that through like everybody knows something about advertising which makes it like easier for people to relate to like more abstract issues like offsetting or or mitigation or or so on so you can talk about like countries really like do something about CO2 and like making like really concrete in that way so yeah. Thanks you've pretty got time for one or two. Thank you so much what a fantastic panel. Zephyr Ryman stand at earth and fossil fuel treaty. I am I've been thinking a lot about how the industry has been not only having these consistent narratives as you've pointed out Cara and others but also simultaneously designing strategies around how to get the vehicles for getting that those messages out which is why I love the culture unstained work but it but so but also through harnessing populist anger and fueling populist divisions around fear and and security I'm thinking about the tremendous work of the academic Timothy Wood who's written quite a lot of papers on the kind of creation of a petro public and the work of and the insidious work of the oil industry in what we're seeing now especially in the US in Canada and I think also Australia and and so I have two questions really for you and one is how do we take back this frame on security and planning because in the in the climate air given you know 33 million displaced in Pakistan alone etc it feels like the the narrative around security should be ours and it is so not right now and and secondly what are your thoughts on the vehicles for how we get these narratives out because what I'm really concerned about is when you see the social media analysis by well you know there's a number of different academics who are doing it where you kind of add up the the astroturf groups that are being created the the the kind of social media campaigns that fuel populist anger and and create this petro public I don't see us doing that in in in the movement or those who work on climate change and I find that terrifying and and we seem to be constantly maybe getting better at some of the narratives and echo chambers we're trying to create but then sending it back out through the same voices you know and it it doesn't speak at all to any of that tremendous research like Jane McLeavy no shortcuts or even Jonathan hates work the righteous mind where the it's not about necessarily the message right it's about the tribes it's about who you're who you're hearing from how you're a part of something bigger and I feel like we need new thinking on how we're getting these narratives out and what we're creating because right now I'm terrified of what we're seeing in the kind of the the polarization and populism that is being fueled by the oil and gas industry okay so let's not end on a note of terror we need to end on a note of hope we've got four minutes left and we've got four panelists i'm going to give you one minute each to or maybe we could squeeze in one more question but let's let's go for one minute each on what gives you hope in terms of this terrain like where are where are we making progress headway should it be about engaging with with security questions what are the what gives you the most hope in terms of trying to shift the debate or reframe supply side discussions let's go back down this way Cara you start maybe this is a weird thing to start with when you say what gives you hope but I do think it is important that we're at this level where people have real fear around extreme weather and that's unfortunately a lived thing now right we've gotten to the point where the frog is in the boiling pot um and so I do think we need to reclaim that the pathway to security is getting off of what's causing the problem in the first place and just own it um and then I I agree with you completely support around like we have to get more creative with our channels and I guess what gives me hope is that I feel at least on the advocacy side we're starting to have different conversations that it can't just be like government relations work or being really wonky and how we're talking that we actually need to start to be more proactive and and create some of those um normative campaigns ourselves and I think we have evidence from other movements like Freedom to Mary on how to do normative campaigns and we really start to need to start bringing that in versus always sounding very technical very wonky and quite um divisive I don't have a really sophisticated view on uh on on hope or so on the issue I can only say in what I do which is uh grabbing legal stuff and throwing it at fossil companies is um some of them work and the things that I've been trying out which is in the consumer law area is something that is easily replicable by other like regular folks out there which they also do so we had like this this one successful complaint against jail and this one like this one was was then mirrored by like other people who like picked it up and also challenged CO2 neutral bananas for example uh thank you okay you okay yeah I can add in terms of the I guess which is my role at the plastics so the chemicals view that you know that that artwork that I showed you right that that was like pretty pretty strong pretty strong picture in you know in Nairobi in at at the UNEA and it you know it's part of a movement towards uh working for addressing say the supply of the production of plastics on a global scale like caps to global plastic production have been made and there's you know that that type of imaging imagery is really really powerful and uh you know the the artist is also an activist no surprise and I I think that say just seeing the work going into trying to stop and address that at and naturalize the idea that that plastics production will double in the next 20 years versus that putting you know it's stopping the tap or turning off the tap I think that that movement has has a lot of momentum and and I think I know that it wasn't like imaginable a couple just a couple years ago that that would actually be at that high level a potential for global treaty addressing say the scale of production so so in that sense that's actually really really hopeful but that also means that it's so really really really important that the linkages between fossil fuels and plastics are made visible in relation to the ongoing treaty negotiations thanks so much Chris final word um I think some of the kind of creative tactics and the creative activism I pointed to not just to say this is great but actually maybe to look at those tactics and think what worked about some of them or what didn't work about some of them and when I've done like workshops with people in the past who don't think of themselves as activists learning a song or a performance is a good way of getting them to go across that line and and transgress but but also in terms of the kind of disruption it can have in the fossil fuel industry's narrative that said just thinking about the social media space and on a personal level I think uh the young women of colour like Michaela Loach and Vanessa and Kate they're breaking down the kind of complexity of net zero and new drilling and so on and I it's not a specific thing but I think whatever support and resource we can bring to those kind of voices because I think like you were saying about the kind of tribes and how the messages are flowing I think that's where we maybe need to put a lot of focus and energy because that's where people it feels more relatable it feels more personal and there's that different kind of connection and networks that are happening in those spaces um but yeah Michaela Loach is amazing. Great well thanks so much everyone we're out of time so thanks to all of you for coming along for a fantastic discussion thanks to our panellists the conversation can carry on now over coffee and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thanks Peter.