Is corporate PR duping us and derailing solutions to global warming and chronic diseases?” which deter political action to solve global warming, chronic diseases and road deaths. These include normalisation , victim-blaming and focusing on complexity narratives .
“British Petroleum invented the carbon footprint calculator and corporate focus groups in the United States worked out that people were less likely to be politically active if we start calling global warming climate change instead,” he explains, adding that republican politicians in the US switched immediately to calling global warming climate change en masse once this was pointed out to them.
“We need sustained and organised movements always putting pressure on politicians to counter the corporate lobbies,” he says. The best country is not the one which adapts best to pollution but the one that prevents environmental destruction, he contends. Similarly, an over focus on treating obesity and diabetes will never prevent it.
His book is full of statistics and study references to back up his theories. One stand-out figure is that annual individual consumption of sugar rose from 10lbs in the 1820s to 150lbs in 2019. “The world became saturated with cheap sugar in the last number of years.
Janis Morrisey, chairwoman of Health Promotion Alliance Ireland, says charities remain small organisations against the might of industry and that knowledge about the commercial determinants of health remains low among Irish politicians.