Shell had responded to the challenge that the accepted definition of the phrase "sustainable development" was "development which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".
Is that definition highly controversial now?
In any event, that certainly does not constitute a massive propaganda campaign against the public.
Depends on which "we" you're talking about. But in the US, these are rarely enforced, and then only against blatant lies that have substantial financial impact.
It's perfectly legal to mislead, confuse, shade, distort, bamboozle, trick, and distract. And you can lie outright if the lie is small. Or if it qualifies as puffery, which basically the kind of lie we have come to expect from people selling stuff.
For example, Shell can say "We care about the environment" and show pictures of frolicking wildlife. They aren't obligated to say, "but we care about profits more" and show some pictures of oil spills.
My favorite example is Airborne, a purported cold preventative that does precisely nothing. They lied in their advertisements for years and made fistfuls of money. After more than a decade somebody finally sued them, and eventually the FTC beat them down as well. The result is that they had to give some of their ill-gotten gains back, and now lie by implication rather than by direct false statements.
But that only happened because a) they were provably wrong, and b) they had enough money for class action lawyers to decide it was worth years of effort to take a whack at their money pinata. As long as your lie isn't provably costing money and provably false, you're basically golden.
Said laws are pretty flexible, I wouldn't rely on them giving you a significant boost of certainty in many products you buy. But apart from actual lies, I believe the intent of the phrase "drown out" is supposed to convey that they can just put so much noise out there it's not feasible for an average Joe who doesn't really care to be able to detect the signal. Noise doesn't have to be false.
I tried googling for some example campaigns, but I couldn't find any examples. I would assume it would almost be impossible to do so in the age of the Internet, reddit, facebook, and twitter. Do you have any examples of Shell drowning out environmentalist groups like Greenpeace?
I didn't mean to imply there actually has been such flooding by Shell, just that it's not about the truth of advertising. I'm a citizen of the internet with AdBlockPlus, but I remind myself that a huge number of people still watch television and read magazines and newspapers. Greenpeace had about $22m in total expenses in 2009 and 2010 each, Shell made $31bn in 2011 profits alone. Is there anything stopping Shell from dropping a few billion on advertising if they wanted to (and convinced the share holders it was a good idea)? They have the money to flood the most popular media outlets, but a top google result highlighting an "aggressive ad campaign" (http://adage.com/article/news/shell-oil-breaks-industry-sile...) suggests they only spend about $15m per year in advertising. When it comes down to it, they probably don't even need to bother. Consumers will get their gas from the lowest-priced gas station they know of. I actually think this action by Greenpeace works in Shell's favor purely due to association when people see the Shell logo as they're driving down a street for gas. I imagine for the common folk Greenpeace hopes to manipulate it produces more of an "oh you" reaction than "I hate you and will never buy from a Shell station!" one, if the image macros are even believed to be official. "Everyone knows" the oil companies are evil (or at least corrupted and in bed with the government).
For the record, this was also a top google result about a 2011 advertised claim being thrown out as misleading. http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2011/10/19/shell-ads-banned-ov... Not that it says much, I'm sure I can find instances of every multibillion dollar company lying (as well as Greenpeace and PETA).
It's an uneven playing field. In order to play on their pitch (i.e. show TV ads, billboards, magazine ads, etc.) you need to have a lot of money. If you don't have money, you can't get your message across. It's lobsided and unbalanced.
It's about as honest a debate as a soviet election where all other political parties are banned.
