Page 83 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

68 J. LEWIS

becomes ever more pressing. And yet, advertising focuses its resources on
those people who already have the most, since that is where most of the
world’s disposable income resides.
Advertising is, for all these reasons, a deeply political discourse, one that
is antithetical to tackling climate change. It confuses any attempt to
question the benefits or to count the environmental costs of consumerism.
In the developed world, curtailing consumption may have little impact on
most people’s quality of life, but it is an extremely hard sell. And it is the
constant presence of advertising in every urban and media space that makes
it so.

CREATING A NEW CLIMATE
The picture painted thus far is a pessimistic one. The media and commu-
nication industries are a dominant part of most people’s lives—in countries
like the UK and the US, the average person spends over 8 hours of every
day using, watching or listening to a media or communication device
(Lewis 2013). When the production and consumption of those devices is
dominated by a business model that encourages profligacy and waste, and
when their content is dominated by a discourse promoting consumerism,
any optimism about their role in reducing emissions seems misplaced.
This has nothing to do with the technology, whose potential remains
exciting and socially beneficial. The problem is an economic one—princi-
pally a market system that relies on profligacy for profit and where the
easiest way to fund content is through advertising. And yet the system
manifestly fails on its own terms.
Planned obsolescence is bad even for the technologically sophisticated
consumer, forcing them to pay for components they don’t need.
Advertising may be the dominant genre across most media, but it is the
only one that exists regardless of consumer demand. In the UK, when the
same event is broadcast on both non-commercial (BBC) and commercial
channels, most people choose to watch without commercials. Almost by
definition, advertising repeatedly fails on its promises and creates dissatis-
faction (Kasser 2002): if buying certain products really did make us happy,
fulfilled, popular, healthy and secure, then that would be the end of it. But
there is no end point in advertising, which keeps on coming, in wave after
wave, so that we are always on the edge of fulfilment without ever being
able to reach it.