Tell The New York Times: stop promoting fossil fuels!

Twenty-two years later, The New York Times is not only running, but actually writing ads promoting the fossil fuels that cause the climate crisis. It’s hard to imagine a greater threat to human health than the breakdown of our climate.

The Times promotes fossil fuels in at least three ways: 1) native advertising, 2) contextual advertising, and 3) podcast advertising.

1. NATIVE ADVERTISING

T-Brand Studios is the Times’ “custom content” advertising studio. It actively designs native advertising for fossil fuel companies like Exxon, Shell, and Chevron. These ads appear on the Times website and other properties. While the Times does mark these ads as paid posts, native advertising is deliberately designed to resemble the typesetting and prose style of New York Times journalism, blurring the distinction between ad and article. The Times uses these native ads to help fossil fuel companies spread disinformation.

For instance, in “Moving Forward: A Path to Net-Zero Emissions by 2070,” a visually engaging interactive 3D and augmented reality paid post, T-Brand Studios paints Shell as studying to reduce emissions in the transportation sector. Likewise, another paid post glowingly describes ExxonMobil’s research into algae and other biofuels. Both these paid posts misrepresent these companies as active partners in the clean energy transition.

As the nonpartisan International Energy Agency reports, in 2020, clean energy research and investments by the oil and gas industry, including Shell and Exxon, accounted for only around 1% of these companies’ total capital expenditure, much less than the industry spends annually on advertising and lobbying against climate policy. And upstream oil and gas investment actually rose 6% in 2019 and is expected to rise by about 10% in 2021. In other words, instead of finding ways to replace fossil fuels, oil and gas companies are finding ways to extract more of them.

But The New York Times publishing and advertising teams seem to deny or not to care that science and even the International Energy Agency itself tells us that oil and gas companies cannot develop any new reserves if we are to avoid catastrophic warming.

This implicit climate denial not only runs counter to The New York Times’ editorial acknowledgement of the reality of climate change, it flies in the face of the paper’s stated values—its promise to offer its readers only content that is fit to print. These ads are promoting fossil fuels and thus contributing to global heating. They are pouring fuel on the climate crisis, which is already killing people today. These ads are #AdsNotFit2Print.

2. CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING

The NYT advertising team works with brands to show their ads beside articles on similar topics, allowing fossil fuel companies such as Exxon to place their ads next to articles about real climate solutions and giving their misleading claims legitimacy by association. In addition to allowing brands to advertise by topic, the Times boasts that they target ads “to specific articles we predict will evoke particular emotions in our readers” as well as “to articles we predict will motivate our readers to take a particular action.” The New York Times is helping oil and gas companies motivate their readers to buy the very products causing life-threatening global heating. This is truly mind-boggling.

3. PODCAST ADVERTISING

Even though this practice has already led some subscribers to stop listening, The New York Times also provides fossil fuel companies such as Exxon and Shell with an advertising platform on its podcasts.

All New York Times readers need to make our voices heard! We need to tell the paper’s publishers that promoting fossil fuels and making global heating worse runs counter to our values and the values we expect from the paper of record. Promoting fossil fuels threatens our health and safety, our very lives, and should have no place in twenty-first-century journalism.