This article was written by Gillian Steward and was published in the Toronto Star on June 4, 2024.

If you are old enough to remember when smoking was allowed in theatres, airplanes and restaurants you might also remember the tobacco industry’s advertising campaigns.

Some ads claimed smoking could actually be good for a person. There were even ads claiming pregnant women “craved” cigarettes; that doctors preferred Camels. No mention of lung cancer or heart disease, even though the industry knew smoking could kill you.

When medical science publicly fought back with evidence that proved the link between smoking and lung cancer, the tobacco industry claimed it wasn’t “sound” science. Only their science was “sound” science.

It’s this kind of dangerous propaganda that the federal government is no doubt hoping to curtail with amendments to the Competition Act, which will establish policing of claims made by businesses that stretch the truth or downright lie about their “green” credentials.

Not surprisingly, the Alberta government is outraged because it sees the legislation as an attack on the oil and gas industry.

But there is good reason to doubt some of the industry’s claims.

Just last week a leaked investigation by Ads Standards Canada, a self-regulatory organization, unanimously found that two wraparound newspaper ads sponsored by Canada Action Coalition gave an “overall misleading impression that B.C. LNG is good for the environment, amounting to greenwashing.”

Canada Action Coalition is a nonprofit that describes itself as grassroots supporters of the oil and gas industry, although it has received large donations from industry players.

It’s been well documented that many of the same people who devised those misleading propaganda campaigns for the tobacco industry later moved on to work for the petroleum industry. In the 1990s it was desperate to downplay emerging evidence that carbon emissions from fossil fuels were causing the planet to heat up.

As part of the campaign U.S.-based ExxonMobil paid for front organizations that had official sounding names such as The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition to question the science, seed doubt, or completely deny climate change was even a real thing.

In 2007, the U.S-based Union of Concerned Scientists released the results of an investigation that showed “ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry’s disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue.”

In April, Democrats on a U.S congressional committee investigating the oil industry revealed documents that showed it is still using those same tactics.

Maybe Rebecca Schulz, Alberta’s environment minister, has never heard about any of this. Or maybe she thinks Canada’s oil industry is somehow different. Or that it is her job to defend the petroleum industry no matter what, even though she is the environment minister. She called the greenwashing rules “an undemocratic gag order” that must be stopped even if the government has to use the Alberta Sovereignty Act.

The jargon, data, and science of global warming are complicated enough. Throw in some half-truths or complete fabrications and it’s no wonder many people are confused about the actions that need to be taken if we are to drive down the carbon emissions that are turning the planet into a hothouse.

Reducing our dependence on oil and natural gas is top of the list. Burning those fossil fuels in our cars or furnaces means we keep spewing more and more carbon into the atmosphere. If we keep doing that we can expect heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods to plague the planet and all living things well into the future.

Of course, the petroleum industry isn’t keen on reducing its output and putting itself out of business, even if that would save the planet. Just as the tobacco industry wasn’t keen on letting people know that cigarette smokers were likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease.

Despite its deceit, we all know what happened to the tobacco industry.