ABSTRACT
Advertising is the most ubiquitous form of institutional propaganda in US society due to its being the primary means of stimulating sales of products in consumer-oriented economies (Jowett and O’Donnell 2006). Advertising campaigns educate people to buy and consume a set of goods that they may or may not have preferred prior to the advertising exposure (Heilbroner and Thurow 1998). Yet, the impact of advertising stretches far beyond individual consumers to the global and ecological. As a key contributing sector of human activity, the manufacture and transportation of vast quantities of advertised goods around the world expends unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels that increase greenhouse gas emissions, which constitute the underlying cause of global warming (American Association for the Advancement of Science 2014; Klein 2014). Advertising helps fuel a planetary environmental crisis, which according to Hansen (2009), is rapidly turning into one of the most pressing problems facing humankind.
