The main purpose of ads isn’t to sell you a specific product immediately, their real purpose is to expose you to their brand to make the brand more familiar (and therefore more trustworthy) to you.

For example, recently, I needed a new insurance. So of course I went to the websites of the 5 insurance companies that I knew from advertising and compared their offers. Then I went to a comparison portal, which again I knew from the ads. The best offer was from a brand I didn’t know so I went with the second one which was from a well known brand. I trusted the second offer more, simply because the brand felt more familiar to me.

Here’s another story: there is this big online clothing store. I always hated their ads, they were really annoying, and at that time I didn’t understand why anyone would buy clothes online. So guess where I went, 5 years later, after a disappointing offline shopping tour, in desparate need for new clothes?

No it wouldn’t. Corpos would just put in more effort to hide the damage. Climate change can’t be stopped by individual consumers because they have no means to verify whether a product they want to buy hurts the environment.