Page 82 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

5 DIGITAL DESIRES: MEDIATED CONSUMERISM AND CLIMATE CRISIS 67

world of things. Hole in the ozone layer? Buy factor 50 sun-cream. Not
popular enough? Buy a new phone. Feel you need more control over your
life? Buy a new car. Worried about your health? Consume this food or
these drugs.
Most advertisers know that bound up in these carefully contrived
associations are a series of fictions. In wealthy countries people’s quality of
life is closely linked to social relationships, health, security and community
rather than their involvement in consumer culture (Jackson 2010; Kasser
2002; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). For this reason, most ads spend little
time extolling the use value of the object being sold, attempting, instead,
to create a mythic association (in Roland Barthes’ sense of the word)
between the object and the social world (Jhally 2006; Lewis 2013).
These messages are capitalism’s balm, countering concerns about pol-
lution, climate change and exploitation. Any fears can simply be green-
washed away. Most ads keep us so focused on the pleasures of consumption
that the people who actually make the endless array of commodities
become irrelevant. Campaigners for fair trade have had to battle against
this myopia, to force people to look beyond the beguiling images of
buying. But it is a constant struggle: for every time our attention is drawn
to sweatshops and the low wages that keep prices down and profits up,
there are a thousand soothing messages that whisper, ‘just buy it’.
If we are to tackle climate change, this is, to say the least, an unhelpful
cultural environment. Climate change requires us to think collectively,
advertising encourages us to act as individuals. Climate change means
investing in public, low carbon infrastructure, an act of will and imagina-
tion that is simply outside advertising’s field of vision. Climate change
means understanding the environmental costs of the production and dis-
posal of all the things we consume, advertising focuses purely on the
moment of consumption.
Perhaps most conspicuously, the task of reducing carbon emissions will
be difficult even if we keep consumption in the rich developed world at
current levels. Advertising—relentlessly, hundreds of times every day—
encourages us to consume more. Tim Jackson (2010) points out that with
even small increases in consumption and growth, emissions targets look
ever more beyond our reach.
Indeed, since it is difficult to begrudge increases in consumption and
economic growth in poorer, developing countries, the responsibility to
avoid hyper-consumption in the wealthier parts of the world (where it will
have little impact on people’s quality of life; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009)