Chris White Tech Reporter
January 29, 2020 11:17 AM ET
The Guardian announced Wednesday that the news outlet is banning fossil fuel company advertisements, even as the newspaper pushes back against activists who want it to nix automotive ads.
“Our decision is based on the decades-long efforts by many in that industry to prevent meaningful climate action by governments around the world,” the company’s interim CEO, Anna Bateson, and chief revenue officer, Hamish Nicklin, said in a statement. The Guardian will become the first major news outlet to enact an all-out ban on such ads.
Bateson and Nicklin acknowledged that doing away with the ads could bring financial strain. (RELATED: Apparently, The Guardian Might Have Thought Impeachment Managers Were Selected Through ‘An NFL Style Draft’)
“The funding model for the Guardian – like most high-quality media companies – is going to remain precarious over the next few years,” they said in the statement. “It’s true that rejecting some adverts might make our lives a tiny bit tougher in the very short term.”
They added: “[W]e believe building a more purposeful organisation and remaining financially sustainable have to go hand in hand.” Advertising makes up nearly half of the British outlet’s revenue, The Guardian noted in a report announcing the move.
Readers are also pushing The Guardian to eliminate automotive advertisements as well, Bateson and Nicklin acknowledged before explaining why the outlet would continue to accept such ads.
“Stopping those ads would be a severe financial blow, and might force us to make significant cuts to Guardian and Observer journalism around the world,” they said, noting that the media industry is in crisis mode and needs as much ad revenue as possible to survive.
Greenpeace, one of the largest and most influential environmental groups in the world, is pushing news organizations to swear off such ads. The organization praised The Guardian’s move.
“This is a watershed moment, and the Guardian must be applauded for this bold move to end the legitimacy of fossil fuels,” Mel Evans, senior climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said in a statement to The Guardian.
Damn hypocrites!
My guess is they already have no ads from fossil fuel companies so it will cost them nothing to say no to companies that has no interest in them. Why would a fossil fuel company buy an ad in the Guardian? And what would the ad say?
Buy oil?
I fear you underestimate the hypocrisy and ignorance of Big Oil executives.
Singapore airport (and Auckland and Heathrow) is festooned with adverts from BP (and other Energy companies).
The BP ad that caught my irritated eye shows someone dropping an apple core in a bin.
The ad claims that BP are working on creating jet fuel from rubbish.
No doubt BP has many excellent engineers, geologists and chemists.
I wonder what they think about this greenwash?
creating fuel from garbage?
Swedish state radio reported that process as an unscientific hoax in a hit pirce on Andrea Rossi, the ecat inventor.
Swedish national radio is deeply invested in climate communism and an end to cheap energy. Therefpr they see cheap energy as a threat, no matter how clean.
Anyway, it would be inyetesting to know how much money, if any, the Guardian stands to lose.
Long haul aircraft burn so much fuel there probably isn’t enough garbage to fuel them. A fully loaded 777 can hold upwards to 31,000 US gallons. You can see why a 1% improvement in efficiency is a very big deal to an airline.
Yeah, it’s hypocrisy 101.
The Guardian/Observer still has whole sections devoted to travel. Promoting destinations all around the world that will only be reached by jet, this is presumably paid for by the large number of adverts from travel companies.
But there are numerous such processes. One was Occidental Petroleum’s “GarbOil.” If I recall rightly, it needed high temperatures and produced by-products of less than zero utility, i.e., organic acids. It was not a hoax, but it did require expensive materials and was not competitive with ordinary petroleum products.
http://www.pittsburgpowerco.com/files/Harvey_Gershman.pdf
The Guardian has long since stopped being a newspaper. It is now a propaganda sheet. It does not matter how much it loses each year. The Guardian Media Group plc is funded by The Scott Trust Limited, which has assets in excess of $1.3 billion.
BP invested in Fulcrum Bioenergy to the tune of $30MM. Fulcrum is building their first plant in Nevada to convert sorted Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) into hydrocarbon fuels using gasification followed by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis of hydrocarbons. The F-T product can be upgraded into diesel and jet fuel meeting all ASTM specifications applicable to these fuels. The paraffinic naphtha can be blended with gasoline or used as a denaturant for fuel ethanol.
As they are using MSW, this benefits the environment by reducing the load on land fills, which is a good thing. Most landfills of reasonable size can support a 1000 to 2000 bbl/day facility and use up much of what would otherwise be wasted material.
Unfortunately, Congress mandated that plastics be segregated from the other waste and recycled. That isn’t happening anymore, but the plastics still have to be removed from the MSW to meet Renewable Fuels Standard requirements. As there is no good way anymore to recycle plastic, they should be allowed as they contain a significant amount of energy that can be recovered in this process and make what are essentially the cleanest fuels possible. Pure paraffinic and iso-paraffinic hydrocarbon fuels.
In diesel engines, these fuels can reduce particulate emissions by 90% and NOx by 15% with no change in the engine. Aircraft also see similar reductions from turbine engines, especially on the ground. These fuel reduce or eliminate the visible black exhaust from jet engines during takeoff and landing.
So overall, BP is trying to do the right thing. We should give them credit for this effort.
City AM has had some great 2 page ads from Aramco pointing out the world needs energy and suggesting that oil is the 24/7.
Bet you are right
Fossil fuel companies should retaliate by refusing to supply them with fossil fuel products. Where should I start? Gasoline, lubricants, natural gas, chemical byproducts, plastics, etc.
Björn, if the MSM regularly belittled zodiac sign fashion jewellery.
And you as representative of a zodiac sign fashion jewellery producer had some financial means, but no direct access to the MSM.
Then would you be surprised if someday in e.g. The Guardian an advertisement for “zodiac sign fashion jewellery” took space over 2 hole pages of that press release.
I wonder how they ship their product?
R.I.P., Guardian.
RIP? … I don’t concur.
RIP soon. Please!
Once they are dead, I don’t want them coming back as undead.
Do you?
Been dead for years. This is more like another limb dropping off the slowly decaying corpse.
Also, Happy Brexit.
😐 how stupid the greens truly are is mind blowing…
How are Greenpeace going to do their market testing for their campaigns without the Grauniad?
The BBC, of course.
The media industry is in crisis too?
Did they catch it from the climate?
They could call it the click-bait crisis maybe?
Stay woke, go broke! It’s only a matter of time.
That really depends on their readers and the other advertisers. link
I don’t see the Guardian so I don’t know, but I can guess. The Toronto Sun seems to be about half car ads. I can’t remember a single fossil fuel ad. They could dump all the fossil fuel ads and not hurt the bottom line in the slightest. If they dumped the car ads, they wouldn’t survive.
Maybe the car advertisers dump them instead.
Unlikely. The hypocrites buy cars too. They just switch their thinking to the other side of their cognitive dissonances. Easy peasy, they think no one’s watching.
and they will beg money from the governement , and the governement will take money from fossil fuel companies and give them..
it is so sad so much fossil fuel money is needed to fight fossil fuel companies making money.
if you don’t want something to be sold..just don’t buy it !!!!
Clean, Green, renewable greenbacks.
Ah, the licence to print money funded by taxpayers somewhere down the line I suspect, taxpayers usually nearly always end up footing the bill!
I think it very unlikely the right wing Johnson govt will give money to the left wing guardian, which is a small employer and in an industry, the media, which is unlikely to get much sympathy for a bail out.
Do they do travel adds – are thetyincluded.
Climate change is forcing the Guardian to throw itself over a cliff.
Cue footage from Attenborough
Is there anything CO2 can’t do?
It’s worse than we thought!
Buh-bye!
Diabolical Climate Ironies …
The struggling Guardian publishers, the Guardian Media Group, were bailed out to the tune of £600 million by Ronnie Cohen’s Apax Partners by selling it’s 50.1% stake in Trader Media Group.
Trader Media, then valued at £1.75bn is best known as the publisher of the used car classifieds website AutoTrader …
The Guardian, it could be said, is staying afloat on the back of used car sales …
https://off-guardian.org/2018/04/08/douma-chemical-attack-facts-so-far/#comment-19789
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/media/10587296/Guardian-Media-Group-gets-600m-for-AutoTrader-stake.html
https://www.apax.com/contact-us/offices/london/sir-ronald-cohen/
MG
Mark
You beat me to it. The sale was the only reason the Guardian kept going. I would imagine there might be some agreement in place that confirmed the sale would enable the former auto trader to continue to have favourable terms with the former parent group.
600 million is a lot of money and illustrates the financial value of continuing to offer car sales ads. Mind you I suspect the carbon footprint of the holidays they allow to be sold is equally large as for cars so considerable hypocrisy is going on here
Tonyb
The Graun’s hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Guardian Media Group is controlled by a trust based in the Cayman Islands. Tax avoidance!
https://order-order.com/2012/11/26/the-guardians-offshore-secrets-guardian-media-group-still-operates-caymans-company/
Hear hear! Thanks, beat me to it. The thing to remember about socialists is that whatever they accuse you of is the thing they are doing. Their very own mental Room 101. For those who don’t read the link the deal went through the Cayman Islands to save tax so that The Guardian could continue to survive on its tiny readership (BBC, civil servants, academics) whilst churning out endless articles about fat-cat tax avoiders. The salaries of the posh private school and Oxbridge types who infest the place are spectacular.
Isn’t that the way all socialists become wealthy? Some even can afford a Tesla 3.
Who owns Apax trading ???????. Wouldn’t be the first time that a shell company has been created to distance a company from revealing a controlling interest in a another company
Its a private equity business.
Hmmmn it seems that Apax and the graun group go back some way before this sale.
“The funding model for the Guardian – like most high-quality media companies”. WHAT???
This ad is brought to you by a CO2 neutral but politically socialist yet profit seeking corporation that rejects fact-based news reporting.
yeah and shes an “interim”CEO
so I guess shes removable without severe financial cost
suicidally stupid for her future employment unless she goes to greenpeas
Go woke, go broke.
Hypocrisy…yes.
And irrelevant as hardly anybody reads the paper.
I noticed though they don’t care enough about the environment to jeopardize their real money stream (how much really comes from oil companies).
Automotive companies should help them and not advertise there however.
“Our decision is based on the decades-long efforts by many in that industry to prevent meaningful climate action by governments around the world”
S.L.B.T.M. (Sounds Like …)
One of the defining characteristics of mindless Greenies: symbolic statements instead of meaningful ones. It makes them feel good while accomplishing nothing.
I just signed up for a contract with a media company in Australia, don’t kill my job just yet! Give it 15 years, please! I can then retire!
Funny that, along with ALL their competitors, they get a lot of holiday advertising. Who are the hypocrites – them or their readers?
Sheesh – where to start…….
Average Joe Driving his car – needs fuel. I would assert that the absence or presence of ad. in Guardian has no impact on buying choice.
If EVs are to be the saviour of the planet, where does the Guruniad think these are going to be advertised. Especially as readers of this “newspaper” are probably in the key target demographic for EV manufacturers.
The average Joe increasingly sees all this as wine nonsense. Slightly OT , yesterday a lady came to get a packet of sugar from our table in a café. When offered a second, she said “No, no…it’s fine – I am trying to save the universe…..”
I take it she was rather large then?
Exactly Mark!
Oil companies don’t buy ads to encourage the use of gasoline; no one buys an extra gallon or two because of a Shell advertisement. The sole purpose is grab a larger share of an existing market.
Dropping Fossil fuel ads will do nothing to the total amount of gasoline sold and thus has NO impact on CO2 emissions. It is pure virtue signalling.
I wonder whether their ban extends to heating oil companies who distribute oil on behalf of the producers? I hope also that all petrol and diesel car manufacturers will stop their advertising in the Guardian in support of the oil companies. The Guardians stupidity is quite beyond belief when the company itself needs oil in various forms for their very existence. They could not survive without oil for their cars and delivery vehicles, heating oil, machinery oil and grease, and as raw materials in the very many products they need for the daily production of their paper. What is the thinking of a management which takes a decision to damage its own income without having the slightest effect on the banned advertisers?
Imagine if oil companies started denying the supply of fuel & lubricants to industries that are openly and aggressively opposed to their existence and engaged in a campaign to force them out of business?
The Guardian cannot die soon enough IMHO
So I guess they will get no ads from
Holiday companies
Steel manufacturers using BOF route
Oil and gas
Pharmaceutical companies
Home heating systems based on say gas
Petrochemical companies
Fertilizer conglomerates
Fashion
etc etc
I also guess holiday and car supplements are out?
If the Guardian were really concerned about carbon-footprints, and attempting to tell the scientific truth they would immediately shutdown their server farm and disband the entire organisation as completely counterproductive, and without merit. A shabby celebrity obsessed gossip-rag pretending to be in a ‘moral’ and ethical position to ‘virtue’-signal while attacking others who are telling the truth, as the basis of a business to sell ads via click-bait, using everyone else’s bandwidth.
When the garbage media’s bilge overflows it slops on the Guardian front page.
Tesla is set to jump 67$+ to around 750 dollars at the start of this mornings market. Going to be a wild day as the market futures are showing -200+ due to the continuing corona virus problem.
Oil companies need no adverts for their product as the demand is determined by people using vehicles and appliances that use the stuff, a captive customer base. Therefore it must relate to recruitment ads or similar.
A ‘ban’ on such ads can only improve the quality of the companies personnel since only those astute enough to find out about positions in other ways will then apply. A win-win for the companies.
Yes, “inflexible demand.”
The COGS continue to turn and grind together. I wonder what they will be using for lubrication now they have decided to ban oil?
I particularly like the Guardian’s description of themselves as “significant”,
The constantly offended green socialists love shooting themselves in the Michael (foot).
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51281986
Indeed … the ludicrous “business as usual” case has and always will be an improbably small possibility – but hey, using it generates funding because it generates scary outcomes and clickbait for headlines –> fame.
It’s all a crock and it depresses me
The Guardian is such a joke of a “media” organisation. The moderators would do the old Pravda proud.
In one of their usual polemics the author, using all her training as a novelist, stated “Scientific consensus, affirmed by Australia’s exhausted fire chiefs, is that the fires are effects of the anthropogenic climate crisis.”
My (apparently community standards breaching) statement was that I doubt that any scientific body would back that statement, some might attribute an increase in intensity, but none would claim the fires were a result of AGW. Needless to say that after a few of their “community” posted nothing but invective, my comment was deleted by their little band of moderators.
If you have the stomach to actually read the commentary that apparently meets their standards you’d really have to wonder at the intellectual and maturity level of their “target market”.
What you cannot achieve through democratic processes you may achieve through backroom dealing. The Gaurdian can decide which advertisers it does business with. No big. Just a small part of the campaign to demonize a very important part of the economy
I would really like to see them swear off political ad money. Here in the US it a major source of engine for media companies. And yet those who rake in that cash crop bemoan money in politics.
so are they going to be cutting their power off?
and then theres the paper ink and delivery vehicles carting their cage liner around as well
if anyone still didn’t think they were batshit crazy there..this oughta wake em up
wonder how many staff are looking elsewhere right now?
I think this is a very serious situation and reminds me of stories from my Grandparents from the 30th in Germany. The middle and upper class Germans discussed behind closed doors, that this Nazi idea is horrible, will lead to war and that they should stop this, or at least that all others will see the truth after a while and it will disappear. Then the Nazis blackmailed the companies, cooperate, or we will close your business, and they threatened the middle class Germans, shut up or get fired.
Now the Antifa works like the SA from Hitler, threatening people on the street and disturbing conventions from non-believers. I really hope that Trump will label the Antifa as a terrorist organization.
When I read articles last week that a company that will not “go green” won’t find new venture capital, that is a dangerous situation. I hope I’m wrong.
I think you have hit the nail on the head, i have myself have concluded that current events appear very similar to Nazi Germany. Hysteria, fear mongering and propaganda abound, companies are now basically forced to proclaim their Environmental, Social Governance (ESG), which btw has no standard or measurable value, in order to ensure they are not shut-out of the public investment stream. History is repeating its self once again, we could be facing an economic holocaust. If CO2 is the cause of global temperature increases there is no instant fix, we simply cannot shut the taps off, millions of people will die and again what did i say about history?.
The next ‘logical’ step is to ban the funding of ‘green’ technology with money from the oil and coal industries.
I don’t understand why the fossil fuel companies don’t fight back and ban the use of their products by companies and peopled that are undermining them. Why not try banning people from using their credit or debit cards from purchasing fuel? Like a no-fly list … a no-buy list.
Think this will hurt the quality of their journalism?
/sarc for the irony-impaired
“The funding model for the Guardian – like most high-quality media companies – is going to remain precarious over the next few years,” they said in the statement. “It’s true that rejecting some adverts might make our lives a tiny bit tougher in the very short term.” – article
Hoity toity, aren’t they? It’s called cutting off your nose to spite your face. They must live on beans and toast and not much else. The stoopid is strong with them!!! Perhaps the auto companies will get tired of paying them far too much for ads and withdraw their business.
Obviously, no one at the Grauniad went to business school. I hope they have enough biscuits (cookies) to last them a few years.
The sooner The Guardian is buried, right along side News of the World, the better. The Guardian has become unreadable; a mouthpiece of the unhinged loony left. And to think I used to subscribe!
I expect they will survive, people don’t really care enough to punish companies for poor behaviour. Nike and Starbucks seem to be doing OK, and they are as the poster children for “woke”
They always beg for a donation when I see them on the web.
Was the Graun always as bad as it is today? I used to read it 20 years ago but I can’t abide it nowadays. My impression (which may well be wrong) is that it has gone far, far down the Identity Politics/Woke rabbit hole since the days of Peter Preston.
I understand that Warren Buffet is getting rid of all his newspaper holdings. There’s a man who knows when a business model is dying.
How I love the hypocrisy from the mainstream media. No integrity, no principles, no honour, nothing!
By the way, big pharma is also one of the biggest advertisers which might be the reason why many health scandals (like Vaccinegate) are ignored.
High quality. The Guardian?
It certainly is for lining the bottom of bird cages. Would be like wall to wall Axminster carpet for budgies.
Smart move from the Grauniad – it’s not as if they are struggling for revenue…. oh hang on
Who cares? If they advertise autos, they advertise fossil fuels. Period. However, now that they have capitulated, the auto ads will go next and the death of the Guardian will follow. Don’t you love a happy ending?
From the article: “Our decision is based on the decades-long efforts by many in that industry to prevent meaningful climate action by governments around the world,” the company’s interim CEO, Anna Bateson, and chief revenue officer, Hamish Nicklin, said in a statement.”
To prevent meaningful climate action? In what way? It appears to me that the oil companies are pretending to be alarmists, and are doing nothing to rein in the unsubstantiated catastrophic claims about CO2. Alarmists should be pleased with how low-key the oil companies play this CAGW game.
It’s not really about the oil companies resisting the alarmists and their delusions, because they don’t, rather it is simply about the fact that oil companies produce oil.
There sure are a lot of fools in this old world. Some of them are trying to govern us.
The Guardian’s only readers are those who ideologically oppose Fossil Fuels advertising and fossil fuels. All they have done is deny themselves revenue. Of greater concern is that there are folk in Fossil Fuel companies willing to waste money advertising in the Guardian.
The sooner the Grauniad joins the Pravda and Izvestia in the rubbish bin of history the better. The staff of the Grauniad can all retire to their tax-avoidance-haven in the Cayman Islands.
Hopefully the Grauniad goes full woke on the business side, then in 12 months it wont exist. The seem to be following a well trodden path. No actual journalism to be seen there folks.
I remeber in the 1980’s and early 90’s EXXON and it’s international subsidiary ESSO would print ads in ‘National Geographic’ talking about new oil finds and the modern technology used in order to get this oil to market. They were interesting as it showed how humans were able to overcome barriers in order to get this energy to market. But to be honest I don’t think I’ve seen a printed oil company ad in years.
It probably has occurred to the thick heads that the oil companies will spend their Guardian budget on other newspapers without any promotional loss, and laugh at the Guardian losers.
Does anybody actually still buy The Guardian..?
Apart from – obviously – schools and universities for their staffrooms..?
Björn, if the MSM regularly belittled zodiac sign fashion jewellery.
And you as representative of a zodiac sign fashion jewellery producer had some financial means, but no direct access to the MSM.
Karl Kraus called that kind of “Neue Freie Presse” “revolver press”.
Derided from https://www.google.com/search?q=clay+roofing+tiles+revolver+press&oq=clay+roofing+tiles+revolver+press&aqs=chrome.