Yannick Bolloré: A Case Study in Corporate Climate Disavowal
The PR mogul's ethical contortions over working for an oil major illuminate one of the key psychological mechanisms hindering collective climate action.
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“I care about the climate for obvious reasons, because this is the planet where we’re living. I especially care because I believe that when you’re the CEO of a communication group as big as Havas — with 22,000 colleagues, we operate in more than 100 countries, we have clients in every sector — as a communication head I have the power, and we have collectively the power, to influence people, behaviours.” — Yannick Bolloré.
Resonant World #62
In her book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Eco-Anxiety, Dr Britt Wray (Resonant World#43) explores a psychological mechanism called “disavowal” — which she sees as the most prevalent defence used to avoid reckoning with the reality of climate breakdown.
Unlike old-school climate denial — where people simply refuse to accept science because they don’t like what it’s telling them — disavowal is a form of “soft denial” that millions of us engage in routinely just to help us get through the day.
“Disavowal is like having one eye open and one eye closed at the same time,” Wray writes. “Consider this: We believe the science, understand the risks, and are concerned about systems collapse, and then in equal measure we play down the threats so that we can continue to live out our lives according to our desires.”
I engaged in some disavowal a few minutes ago when — in grazing mode — I went to the fridge and ate a piece of cheese, despite being well aware of the climate and environmental impact of dairy farming, not to mention the cruelty involved.
I would love — in theory — to be a vegan. But I’m not there yet, and so disavowal allows me to continue my cheese-eating without undue distress, despite knowing what I know.
Clearly, when it comes to the climate crisis, then disavowal is a problem — perhaps the problem.
But one of the most important lessons I’ve learned studying individual, inter-generational and collective trauma with the facilitator Thomas Hübl and his team, is not to make such mechanisms “wrong.” (Resonant World#10).
Like other unconscious psychological defences, disavowal evolved to enable us to continue to function even in the face of circumstances that might otherwise overwhelm us. It’s part of the inheritance that has brought us thus far.
Rather than make disavowal into an enemy, we can choose instead to become more intimate with it. And that’s how we develop greater capacity to choose to respond creatively to a threat — rather than retreating into denial, or reacting from a triggered state, and potentially making a problem worse.
‘Hideously Compromised’
That’s partly why I was so fascinated by the story of Yannick Bolloré, the 43-year-old chief executive of the Paris-based global advertising company Havas, which the DeSmog team has been writing about in depth.
In brief, Bolloré, the scion of a French business empire, had cast himself in the role of a climate champion — signalling his concern about the crisis in Tweets and interviews, and signing Havas on to all kinds of pious-sounding pledges to use advertising as a force for good.
Then, in September, news broke that the oil major Shell had signed Havas up to do something called its “strategic media buying”. Shell spent about 220 million euros on this in 2022, according to AdWeek — so no small chunk of change. And in an industry facing mounting structural pressures, in the context of a growth-dependent economic and financial system, that money surely plugged a hole.
Havas’ embrace of Shell caused uproar among climate advocates within the advertising industry — and among Havas staff, who had prided themselves on working for what they had assumed to be a basically ethical company.
“There was a lot of anger,” among UK employees when the news broke, an insider told us. The staff were “upset that their company was doing something that controversial,” said this insider. “People were questioning, ‘Do I want to work in this place?'”
Having adopted the contradictory position of insisting on his support for climate action, while simultaneously working to advance the agenda of an oil major, Bolloré resorted to the obvious defence: disavowal.
In his case, disavowal allowed him to advance the argument — with a straight face — that Havas could spur Shell’s transition to climate neutrality by promoting change from within.
“‘We have to say we won’t participate in any greenwashing whatsoever and we will accompany them and help achieve their transition,” Bolloré told Campaign. “Maybe in choosing Havas, [it shows] they are serious in their transition journey”.
To ad industry professionals, Bolloré’s argument was preposterous: The idea that an oil major would take advice on decarbonising its business model from ad executives hired to burnish its reputation made no sense.
As Our DeSmog story lays out, Shell has a storied history of greenwashing (including moves to downplay the significance of climate science dating back the 1970s and 80s, which I’ve previously covered for DeSmog). Our story also noted Shell’s much more recent walking back of pledges to invest in wind and solar, and the numerous lawsuits brought by U.S. states and cities accusing the company of systematically deceiving the public over climate change. (Shell says the courtroom is not the place to respond to the climate crisis).
As Solitaire Townsend, the co-founder of the sustainability communications agency Futerra, told our reporters:
“[Bolloré’s] twisted himself up in knots to justify to himself that he can do these two things, that he can remain a good guy who cares about climate change, who wants to have a legacy and who doesn’t want to be looked back on as being this hideously compromised figure.”
And that’s the price anyone risks paying for disavowal — “hideous compromise.”
(I’d argue that a similar form of disavowal is at work at my former employer, Reuters News, which has signaled its commitment to covering climate change, while simultaneously creating events to help fossil fuel companies remove the “pain points” holding back faster production for oil and gas. (Resonant World#32). Other examples in the corporate world are, of course, not hard to find).
Bursting the Bubbles
So what does an understanding of disavowal add to the story?
In Generation Dread, Wray quotes the work of psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe, who describes disavowal as a key ingredient in the construction of what she terms “bubbles” — “make-believe” worlds curated by powerful people aiming to “diminish the moral unease, rage, grief, and anxiety that the citizenry would feel if the conditions of reality were made clear.”
Advertising plays a crucial role in maintaining these bubbles by normalising unsustainable patterns of consumption that are accelerating climate breakdown, and glamorising the kind of instant gratification and celebrity culture that alienates us from who we are at the core.
That’s why so many climate advocates found Bolloré’s attempts to pretend there was no climate contradiction involved in working with Shell so infuriating.
From where I’m standing, the sheer breathtaking depth of the disavowal on display in such an educated, well-resourced and influential public figure could almost have had a poignant quality, were the stakes not so high.
But Bolloré is hardly unique in employing disavowal as a defence.
As a climate movement, it’s not enough for us to stop at externalising disavowal as a move made primarily by corporate chiefs and politicians. As long as we’re unconsciously projecting our own disowned traits onto the people who appear to be standing in the way of climate action, we’re not going to win.
I’ve learned through the collective trauma work that disavowal is part of a collective pattern — a defence mechanism we’ve understandably adopted on a mass scale to navigate cultures shaped by the legacy of generations of accumulated inter-generational and collective trauma.
And that means disavowal needs a collective response.
I’m left with the question of how we can create spaces where many more of us can explore how disavowal lives in us — whether in relation to climate, other global crises, or situations much closer to home, such as our family systems, communities or any number of domains where we know at some level we are compromised.
If this sounds daunting, I want to offer a reassurance that over the last few years of collective healing work, I’ve experienced how we can establish a sense of connection and groundedness that makes it possible to meet otherwise intolerable realities from a more resourced place — when we come together in community in intentional ways. By thus becoming friendly with our disavowal, we can open up new pathways for moving beyond it, and embracing conscious ways of responding — a key step in Ken Wilber’s call to “Grow Up, Clean Up, Wake Up, and Show Up.”1
The impact of this collective healing work on the polycrisis cannot be measured directly — but I’m certain that it does have an impact, serving perhaps as a form of “global acupuncture,” in Thomas Hübl’s memorable phrase. And that’s why — along with climate accountability journalism of the kind we produce every day at DeSmog — I’m also committed to collective healing work, and exploring, in particular, how it can inform the climate movement.
Because we’re not going to be able to overcome the inertia of disavowal in society unless we first get intimately acquainted with how it lives in us.
I haven’t dived into the work of Ken Wilber in depth, but I love that phrase.
Powerful piece. Truth. Important. Thank you—keep it coming.