Shifting from street protests to comedy to win support on climate change

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There was only one way to win the online game played by hundreds of staff at asset manager Abrdn: convince the board to cut oil and gas investments, distracted by pastries. The game was sent to employees by climate activists and was quickly banned on company servers.

Campaigners are using such stunts to highlight inaction on climate change in the real world. The goal is to capture the attention of the clients and staff of big polluters and their financiers without being too confrontational.

After Shell brough court action against Greenpeace for boarding its oil platform in the North Sea — subsequently settled — the activist group visited the company’s London HQ to leave a model of “the world’s tiniest violin”.

It also enlisted the help of Jesse Armstrong, creator of the hit series Succession, to poke fun at Shell. The legal action was branded in social media as the “Cousin Greg” suit, using an episode of the mocking drama in which the character threatens to sue Greenpeace.

Shell declined to comment for this story. It has previously said in relation to the court case: “For Shell, the right to protest is fundamental and has never been at issue.”

The same activists sent fake email invitations to Ogilvy staff to invite them to a fossil fuel-themed funfair © Jay Amin/Serious People

Activists are increasingly turning to a mixture of hope, humour and realism to encourage action on climate change, as corporates backtrack.

Drawing on this idea, Global Optimism, a consultancy co-founded by Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the 2015 Paris agreement on limiting global warming, emphasises in its advice to governments and companies that climate change is still “conquerable”.

Also adopting a lighter-hearted tone, some advertising and communications professionals have rallied around playful campaigns to highlight inaction in their industry, in a shift away from the more confrontational tone adopted by groups like Just Stop Oil.

WPP-owned Ogilvy was named by campaigners as one of the advertising agencies with the most fossil fuel contracts in September.

Following this, Jamie Inman, a former brand strategist, along with comedian and campaigner Oli Frost, sent out fake email invitations to Ogilvy staff to a fossil fuel-themed funfair, where the slides were supposedly made from oil pipes. The emails appeared to come from WPP’s chief executive Mark Read. Some of Ogilvy’s clients received tickets to the funfair in the post.

Ogilvy declined to comment. WPP’s sustainability report says that it applies “rigorous standards” to any content produced for energy companies. A person close to WPP said that several contracts with fossil fuel producers that had been attributed to Ogilvy by activists were with a separate company in the WPP group.

In another campaign in 2024, Inman and Frost used publicly available information to work out the email addresses for employees of asset manager Abrdn and send them a link to an online game. According to Inman, at least 600 played the game, which made fun of the UK asset manager’s decision to keep investing in some fossil fuels.

At the same time, multinationals including oil companies are pouring money into ad campaigns that highlight their investments in clean energy. Shell is one example of a company that has hired influencers to boost its image with younger people.

But according to Mark Borkowski, a PR adviser to large companies, one challenge for the corporate world is that climate anxiety has made it harder for some companies to recruit creative talent. “Big Oil and some of these people who would be described by younger folk as toxic, they’re not coming up with the creative goods,” he said.

European regulators have also become more willing to crack down on greenwashing: the UK advertising watchdog has banned ads from a number of airlines and energy companies for overstating their environmental credentials.

Climate campaigners recognise the value in continuing to highlight the data on climate change. Even if governments see their existing plans through, at least 2.6C of warming is predicted, far above the goals set by the Paris agreement to limit global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, the UN said in its latest report.

“There is no shortage of academic research that has singled out hope from its context, put it in a Petri dish and concluded that it is useful” in driving climate action, said Steffi Bednarek, a psychologist specialising in climate issues. But she also highlighted recent research that found that “distress” does drive some people to act.

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