South Africans see fossil fuel adverts every day: a petrol station promising a brighter future, a mining company’s billboard beside the highway, an oil major’s Instagram post about protecting nature. Almost none of these ads mention drilling, mining, or emissions. Instead, they show solar panels, wind turbines, and scientists at work.
That gap between image and reality is what Lazola Kati has spent the last two years documenting and litigating against. As campaign manager for Fossil Ad Ban (FAB), a project of Fossil Free South Africa, Kati led the complaint that produced South Africa’s first-ever greenwashing ruling — against TotalEnergies. On the JET Voices podcast, she explains how a lean, two-person campaign team turned an advertising complaint into a national conversation about who actually gets to call themselves “green.”
What counts as greenwashing?
Greenwashing, in FAB’s definition, is what happens when a fossil fuel company’s marketing tells a different story than its balance sheet. A company might genuinely fund a conservation partnership or a bursary programme, but if its core business is expanding oil, gas, or coal production, that single project doesn’t cancel out the harm — it just makes the harm easier to overlook.
Kati doesn’t think most of this greenwashing is outright lying. It works by omission.
“It is omitting information to create a perception.”
That’s why FAB is pushing regulators to expand the definition of greenwashing beyond explicit false claims in wording, to include misleading imagery — solar panels and wind turbines in adverts for companies that invest a fraction of their budgets in renewables — and corporate social investment projects that are presented as generosity rather than a routine cost of doing business.
The ruling that put an oil major on notice
In 2023, FAB filed a complaint with South Africa’s Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB) over a TotalEnergies web page promoting its decades-long partnership with South African National Parks (SANParks). The ad claimed the company was “committed to sustainable development and environmental protection.” It was the first greenwashing complaint the ARB had ever received, and there was no existing process built to handle one.
Nearly a year later, in August 2024, the ARB ruled against TotalEnergies, finding that a company whose core business is fossil fuel exploitation cannot credibly claim to be committed to sustainable development, regardless of its conservation partnerships. TotalEnergies appealed, and in doing so, made its case directly to the board alongside FAB’s team. The appeal backfired: the ARB dismissed it, instructing its members not to accept advertising from TotalEnergies using that language in connection with the SANParks partnership.
“A significant victory in our fight against greenwashing.”
For Kati, the ruling mattered less as a punishment and more as proof: a public body had now agreed, on the record, that a fossil fuel company’s sustainability claims didn’t hold up to scrutiny — and other organisations could point to the precedent when filing their own complaints.
The scale of the problem
A single ruling addresses a single ad. To show how widespread the pattern is, FAB spent months building South Africa’s first study of fossil fuel advertising. Published in February 2025 as Smoke and Mirrors: Decoding Fossil Fuel Industry Advertising in South Africa, the report analysed more than 200 adverts placed by six of the country’s largest fossil fuel companies — Astron, BP, Engen, Sasol, Shell, and TotalEnergies — across TV, radio, print, digital, and outdoor media between May and August 2024.
The adverts, FAB found, reached roughly 15 million South Africans every month, consistently using colloquial language, imagery of renewables, and stories about community wellbeing to build an impression of environmental responsibility that the companies’ actual spending doesn’t support.
Beyond the boardroom: municipalities and social licence
An ARB ruling changes what member broadcasters can air, but it doesn’t ban an ad outright, and it doesn’t touch a billboard on a highway. That’s why FAB’s second front is local: lobbying municipalities to pass their own bylaws against fossil fuel advertising, following the lead of cities like The Hague, which became the first city to ban public advertising for high-carbon industries outright.
FAB is currently in conversation with several municipalities, including the Albert Luthuli local municipality in Mpumalanga, the City of Cape Town, and the City of Johannesburg, each chosen for a different reason: Albert Luthuli because it’s home to communities living alongside dozens of active mines, Cape Town because it already has a track record of passing environmental bylaws, and Johannesburg because of existing just-transition policy work the campaign can build on.
The underlying target of all of this is what Kati calls social licensing: the trust an ad-driven, tech-forward image buys a company with regulators and communities, making it easier to get new mining and drilling permits approved with less scrutiny. Take away the false image, the logic goes, and that trust — and the ease of approval that comes with it — goes with it.
What greenwashing costs on the ground
To understand how that trust gets built and abused, FAB’s campaigners have run workshops directly in mining-affected communities in Mpumalanga, including Carolina and KwaZuka, where residents described acid mine drainage seeping into drinking water and the land their children play on. Mpumalanga hosts the bulk of South Africa’s coal mines and coal-fired power stations, and Carolina in particular has been documented as one of the most air-polluted towns in the world.
Community members told FAB’s team that mining operations sometimes appear, operate for a few months without properly formalised employment contracts, and disappear — leaving unrehabilitated land, contaminated water sources, and workers who were never paid. Because a company’s marketing had already built goodwill in the area, residents say they often didn’t question the initial pitch closely enough to catch the gaps before it was too late.
That, for Kati, is the real cost of greenwashing: it isn’t just a misleading advert, it’s the social permission that lets extraction move faster than accountability can catch up.
Hear the full conversation
A ruling and a research report explain the what. On JET Voices, Lazola Kati explains the how and the why: the “gangster at church” analogy that reframes greenwashing for anyone still unsure what it means, why municipalities matter more than national ministries in South Africa’s policy landscape, and what it cost her personally to keep organising after being blacklisted following the #FeesMustFall protests.
🎧 Listen to “The Fight Against Greenwashing” with Lazola Kati →
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Further reading
“TotalEnergies slapped with historic greenwashing ruling” – African Law & Business
Smoke and Mirrors: Decoding Fossil Fuel Industry Advertising in South Africa – full report, Fossil Ad Ban
“Toxic water, toxic air” – Fossil Free South Africa
