(Twelve-minute read)

When one looks at the current efforts worldwide to put a halt on co2

emissions you could not be blamed for feeling nothing but despair.

THE PROBLEM IS TO MOBILISE ANY OF US TO DO ANYTHING.

Indeed our most vivid pictures of a world confronting climate change come nowhere near what will happen.

By the end of the century, our children and grandchildren too may be confronted with a hostile climate, depleted resources, devastated habitats, large-scale species extinction, food shortage, mass migration and, almost inevitably, war.

We know that the richest 10 per cent of countries account for half of all

global climate-damaging CO2 emissions.

However, when it comes to action, environmental and climate protection has

not yet been taken on board by the vast majority of us.

We all know that if we just keep going as we have before we’ll soon reach our

planet’s ecological limits.

We all know that what is needed is a better synergy between environmental and the implications of emphasizing consumer behaviour as a source of climate change mitigation.

Our dilemma is that we live in a finite world but behave as if it were inexhaustible.

One of the greatest drivers of this dilemma is advertising.

Early in our history, a consumer culture emerged in Europe that sees society reward the most consumption-oriented lifestyle.

It is one of the main reasons for the prevailing economic system with endless consumption growth and the ruthless exploitation of the planet Earth. Everything has been turned into a source of profit including climate change.

Our Governments and world organisations are unable to effect change due to fear of upsetting the status quo and even if they were willing to take action there is a lack of funding.

The Beady eye has suggested a World Aid Commission of 0.05% as a means of creating a perpetual funded fund to address climate change. ( See previous posts)

The chances of this happing are zero however there is another source of action that could make a difference.  THAT IS OUR BUYING POWER.

Only then, presumably, when the pressure coming from below – from us citizens – targeting the policy- and decision-makers grows, will environmental and climate protection really makes the breakthrough.

This can be achieved by small groups by small groups coming together promoting stopping the purchase of anything that is not sustainable. 

The average resource consumption per capita and year today, for example in Germany, is around 30 tonnes. For a truly sustainable lifestyle, however, the consumption of resources would have to be reduced to 8 tonnes.

What about banning all advertising that DOES NOT PROMOTE SUSTAINABLE BUYING.

See previous post: WE DON’T GET IT. ARE OUR LIVES SCRIPTED?

We need a campaign driven by social media.

Social media marketing is a highly tracked place full of analytics, statistics, 

behaviours and trends!  Everything on the internet is tracked from optimal

times of engagement, likes and reactions, click through rates, demographics

to even referral traffic!

Say you’re doing a web search on something like the flu.

Before you can sneeze the next thing you know, an ad for a flu remedy pops up on your web browser, or your video streaming service starts playing a commercial for Tylenol.

Soon if not already with all these connected devices our privacy will be completely under assault 7/7.

In a cross-device landscape, creepy online Ads will be watching your every move with personalised stalker ads.

You would think that it should make us think twice about how much advertising we allow ourselves to be exposed to.

Not on your nelly: DIGITAL ADS ARE TAKING OVER OUR LIVES.

Here are a few hard facts:

The world population is 7.6 billion and the internet has 4.1 billion users.

Close to half the world’s population (3.03 billion people) are on some type of social media. The average person spends about 20 minutes on Facebook or one in every six minutes a person will spend online.

Failing to set our youth on a path to a healthy relationship with the world around them.

One thing they do is to take a product and to put it next to lots of other things that we already feel positively about.

1.57 billion YouTube users watch about 5 billion videos on average every single day. Of the 2.1 billion total accounts on Facebook, 270 million profiles are fake.

86% of women will look at social media before deciding to make a purchase.

People are accessing 69% of their media on their smartphones.

89% of people on smartphones are using apps, while only 11% are using standard websites. Unsurprisingly, Facebook is the most popular app at 19%(measured by time spent)

Pinterest is number one for mobile social media, with 64% of referral traffic being driven by smartphones and tablets.

57% of all mobile users will not recommend a business if their mobile website is poorly designed or unresponsive.

40% of all mobile users are searching for a local business or interest.

Mobile websites that load in 5 seconds or less will end in a viewing session that’s 70% longer than their slower counterparts.

92% of American teens accessed the internet on a daily basis, where 56% claim to connect several times a day, and 24% are connected almost constantly to the internet.

Advertising is one of the principal motors of a capitalist economy.

Excessive consumption is possible because we personally pay the price for it

only to a small extent.

The lion’s share goes to nature, another part is paid by people in other parts of the world, and in the future, our children and grandchildren will pay for it.

Today’s advertising is out of control.

It is the most objectionable aspects of our consumer economy. The modern marketplace abounds with products that pose difficult challenges for regulators. Thousands of new substances are synthesised annually and many of them are released into the environment, with mostly unknown effects on plants, animals and humans.

Will people after us still have the chance to live a life fit for human beings in 

a world that we have left for them?

Is it not time we all adopted a buyer’s precautionary principle of sustainability. This way of doing business is of paramount importance for our future, given the current overuse and waste of material and energy resources worldwide.

The precautionary principle is becoming more and more important, since today, as far as the environment is concerned, we are likely to cause far more new problems than we are to solve existing problems.

In the past 150 years, almost half of the fertile soil on Earth has disappeared.

Every day, about 100 living species die on our planet.

They are irretrievably lost forever.

The consequent significant wearing down of nature is now threatening the basis of the existence of us humans on Earth. This means that, as fast as possible, we must reduce consumption.

With the first generation growing up literally attached to smartphones, tablets and laptops, with access to social media and the Internet, effective conditioning is most effective when you don’t realize that it is happening.

We need our governments to ban pervasive marketing by fining companies that make false, deceptive, or misleading advertising claims. That is encouraging the purchase of their products by implying that they are doing good like save a Tiger when you purchase a plastic bottle of washing powder.

We need to ban outdoor advertising. Visual pollution branding message into the everyday landscape of commuters and becomes part of the very fabric of the living and working environment where it is placed.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

t