Clean Creatives Pressure Wavemaker to Stop Greenwashing Chevron’s Climate Record
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 11, 2021
Contact: Jamie Henn, jamie@fossilfree.media, 415-601-9337
The advertising giant Wavemaker and its parent company WPP often brag about their commitment to sustainability and racial justice, but for nearly 20 years Wavemaker has made millions greenwashing one of the planet’s worst corporate culprits: Chevron.
Today, climate and racial justice groups joined with Clean Creatives, a campaign pressuring PR and Ad agencies to quit working with the fossil fuel industry, to release a fact sheet about the dirty partnership between Wavemaker and Chevron.
The campaign also partnered with the Years Project to produce a video that parodies one of Wavemaker’s commercials for Chevron, keeping the stock imagery of sunrises and people climbing mountains, but replacing the voiceover with the truth about Chevron’s impacts on the climate and communities.
“Wavemaker likes to say that they ‘positively provokes growth,’ but right now they are just growing Chevron’s pollution,” said Duncan Meisel, Campaign Director for Clean Creatives. “The advertisements that Wavemaker is producing and placing for Chevron are climate misinformation: they mislead the public into thinking Chevron is investing in climate action, when Chevron is a top polluter. We believe that Wavemaker can make better waves by dropping Chevron.”
The release comes just days after a spill at Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, California that dumped close to 600 gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay.
The fact sheet shows how for decades Wavemaker has produced advertisements that present Chevron as “the human energy company,” a model corporate citizen that cares deeply about “the environment” and “women and minority owned businesses.”
The reality is much darker. Chevron still refuses to take accountability for the 16 billion gallons of toxic waste they dumped in the Ecuadorian Amazon, home to over 30,000 Indigenous and rural Ecuadorians. As part of their massive legal and PR campaign to escape responsibility in Ecuador, Chevron abused the US court system by waging a retaliatory SLAPP lawsuit against the Ecuadorian victims and their lawyers. Their attacks on free speech and legal bullying drew condemnation from many of the largest environmental and human rights organizations in the world.
"For over twenty years Amazon Watch has witnessed firsthand Chevron's environmental destruction and racism, been the targets of its baseless attacks, exposed its corrupt and harmful acts alongside communities affected by its operations on five continents and even worked with shareholder advocates to pressure it to clean up its act,” said Paul Paz y Miño, Associate Director, Amazon Watch. “Not only did it set the terrible precedent of deliberate toxic dumping and destruction in the Amazon rainforest, but Chevron has never shown even an ounce of remorse or good faith in any of its negotiations or in the face of communities virtually destroyed by its acts. On the contrary, it has created a brand for itself as the most ruthless corporate bully on the planet. There is no better example of an oil company bent on the destruction of people and planet for profit.”
In the United States, Chevron continues to pollute communities like Richmond, California, where 80% of the population is people of color and children are now hospitalized for asthma at twice the rate of surrounding areas.
“Working with Asian immigrant and refugee communities who live at the fenceline of the Chevron Refinery in Richmond, we've seen firsthand how Chevron not only pollutes Richmond’s air but also our politics,” said Megan Zapanta, Richmond Organizing Director for the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. “Through mailers, billboards, and even a Chevron-owned local news site, Chevron tries to paint itself as a good employer and a necessary pillar of the community. We know better. The Chevron refinery visibly spews pollutants, while continually going out of their way to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and hiring very few local residents. Richmond residents are fighting for a Just Transition away from big corporate polluters towards a clean and locally governed economy. We're done with Chevron's lies."
Along with its track record of polluting communities of color, Chevron has a nasty history of funding racism in the US. According to a report by Global Witness, Chevron gives over four times more campaign funding to US politicians who fail to uphold racial justice and civil rights legislation. In 2019 and 2020, Chevron’s political action committee gave over $500,000 to US Congressmembers with failing civil rights grades, as scored by the NAACP. Chevron is also a top donor to police foundations, which often oppose civil rights reforms, in cities like New Orleans and Houston.
Chevron is also one of the world’s biggest polluters. Since 1965, Chevron has contributed more greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere than any other investor-owned corporation in the world. They’ve also spent millions of dollars lobbying against climate action and supporting climate-denying politicians, including many that supported this January’s insurrection at the US Capitol.
“Agencies like WPP and their subsidiaries like Wavemaker have aided and abetted climate polluters in the crime of the century,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center. “Yet no agency is capable of erasing companies like BP, Shell and Chevron’s legacy of human rights abuses, environmental degradation and planetary destruction through greenwashing.”
According to the team at Clean Creatives, Wavemaker’s ads for Chevron likely violate the FTC’s Truth In Advertising requirements by intentionally misleading consumers about Chevron’s commitment to climate action and investments in renewable energy, while leaving out relevant information about Chevron’s role in driving the climate crisis.
Wavemaker’s 2020 ad “Butterfly,” for example, presented Chevron’s commitment to carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as an environmental solution. According to the New York Times, however, Chevron is only spending “pocket change” on CCS as it “doubles down” on oil and gas production. Even worse, CCS is a false solution that has proven to be unworkable at any meaningful scale. Case in point: Chevron’s largest CCS project at the Gorgon LNG plant in Australia, has been “a disaster from the beginning” and is now just venting CO2 into the atmosphere.
Wavemaker’s placement of the Chevron advertisements clearly shows that the ads were created as political propaganda. Their 2020 ads “Butterfly” and “Value Everyone,” for instance, were run on This Week with George Stephanopolous, one of the “Sunday Shows” that is designed to shape political opinion in Washington, D.C. These ads don’t say anything about the superiority of Chevron gasoline, but simply repeat false claims about Chevron’s commitment to renewable energy and climate solutions.
“The ads that Wavemaker is producing for Chevron are political propaganda designed to block action on climate change,” said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media, the organization behind the Clean Creatives campaign. “They’re aimed at convincing the public and politicians that Chevron is already acting on climate, so there’s no need to regulate them or hold them accountable. Wavemaker’s parent company WPP told Reuters that it wouldn’t ‘undertake work which is intended or designed to mislead.’ Wavemaker’s work for Chevron clearly violates that pledge.”
Clean Creatives is calling on Wavemaker to drop Chevron and pledge to stop working with fossil fuel companies to spread climate misinformation. The campaign will be forwarding the fact sheet to Wavemaker’s other clients, a number of whom, like Ikea, say they are committed to climate action and may be deeply concerned about Wavemaker’s greenwashing on behalf of Chevron. Clean Creatives is also running targeted advertisements to Wavemaker employees on LinkedIn to make sure they are aware of the greenwashing their company is engaged in.
Since the Clean Creatives campaign launched last November, dozens of creative agencies and hundreds of creatives have signed onto a pledge to stop working with fossil fuels. Over the coming months, the campaign will shine its spotlight on more “polluted PR” and the dirty connections between agencies and fossil fuel corporations.
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