[Intermernet]

Thanks for the mind-dump ;-) I appreciate answers that think on their feet!

I think the only thing I can ask you to consider is that, despite how bad fossil fuel use is, and despite how bad we've fucked up the environment using it, no-one can claim it wasn't actually useful (wasteful, short-sighted, wrong, polluting, possibly apocalyptic, whatever, but still physically useful).

Advertising isn't useful. It could be considered a perfectly renewable resource! It'll be viable as long as humans are around! Yay!, but it's not useful. It's actually actively harmful. The primary, secondary and residual effects of advertising could be summed and tallied and they would be shown to be a net negative. Those who are on the positive side of the calculation will have you look at their gains and swoon, but the negatives far outweigh the positives.

It's a fundamentally different question to dealing with global warming because global warming has externalities that we can't immediately control. Advertising has externalities that, given the chance, we could nullify within a generation, if not faster.