The tireless virtue-signallers of Amsterdam have found another route to saving the planet. Since May 1st advertising meat and fossil fuels has been banned in the familiar way the Left seeks to modify behaviour. The BBC has the story:

Politicians in the city say the move is about bringing Amsterdam’s streetscape into line with the local government’s own environmental targets.

These aim for the Dutch capital to become carbon neutral by 2050, and for local people to halve their meat consumption over the same period.

“The climate crisis is very urgent,” says Anneke Veenhoff from the GreenLeft Party. “I mean, if you want to be leading in climate policies and you rent out your walls to exactly the opposite, then what are you doing?

“Most people don’t understand why the municipality should make money out of renting our public space with something that we are actively having policies against.”

Supporters of the policy argue that the initiative will help to make people freer, even though meat advertising only constituted 0.1% of advertising revenue:

This view is echoed by Anke Bakker, who is Amsterdam group leader for a Dutch political party that focuses on animal rights – Party for the Animals.

She instigated the new restrictions, and rejects accusations of them being nanny state.

“Everybody can just make their own decisions, but actually we are trying to get the big companies not to tell us all the time what we need to eat and buy,” says Bakker.

“In a way, we’re giving people more freedom because they can make their own choice, right?”

Removing that constant visual nudge, she says, both reduces impulse buying, and signals that cheap meat and fossil heavy travel are no longer aspirational lifestyle choices.

The idea it seems, is that by “grouping meat with flights, cruises and petrol and diesel cars reframes it from a purely private dietary choice to a climate issue.”

Others might call this a form of brainwashing. One wonders what might else be grouped with meat, flights and fossil-fuelled cars.

Unsurprisingly, the Dutch Meat Association, which represents the industry, is unhappy at the move, which it calls “an undesirable way to influence consumer behaviour”. It adds that meat “delivers essential nutrients and should remain visible and accessible to consumers”.

Meanwhile, the Dutch Association of Travel Agents and Tour Operators says that the ban on advertising holidays that include air travel is a disproportionate curb on companies’ commercial freedom.

Of course, this doesn’t affect advertising online. So will it even work?

However, some researchers are cautiously optimistic, such as Professor Joreintje Mackenbach who is an epidemiologist – a medical professional who investigates health patterns within populations.

“If we see advertisements for fast food everywhere, it normalizes the consumption of behaviour of fast consumption,” says Mackenbach, who is from the Department of Epidemiology and Data Science at hospital Amsterdam University Medical Centre.

“So if we take away those types of cues in our public living environments, then that is also going to have an impact on those social norms.”

“Because like everything we love, festivals, nice cheese, a flower shop around the corner. All the stuff that we love, we don’t hear from through ads,” she says.

“I think and I hope that big polluting companies will be extra scared. And maybe will rethink the kind of products they are selling. I think you can really see that change is possible.”

A quick glance through Professor Mackenbach’s publications shows a strong interest in using nudge techniques to change people’s behaviour.

As the New York Times observed, in permissive Amsterdam ads for fossil fuels or meat are now verboden, but you can still get stoned:

Amsterdam is famously a place where anything goes. Prostitution is legal. Coffee shops sell marijuana and hashish. Truffles laced with the psychoactive compounds found in hallucinogenic mushrooms are available at ‘smart shops’.

But what is no longer allowed in the freewheeling city’s public spaces are advertisements for products that some city councillors consider to be true vices: Big Macs. Exotic vacations. Gas-powered cars.

Ads for airlines, cruises and faraway destinations are no longer allowed, because they implicitly promote the burning of fossil fuels. Ads for beef, chicken, pork and fish are also banned, because of the environmental harms caused by animal agriculture.

Interestingly, the City Council in The Hague passed the first such law in 2024. In 2025 a trade association and travel agencies sued, only for the judge to rule that the health of citizens and the climate were more important than commercial considerations. Getting stoned and substituting hallucinogenic tripping for going on foreign trips aside.

Never mind though, the abstemious and righteous Dutch can console themselves with festivals, nice cheese and flowershops. And by getting stoned.

Anyone fancy a Big Mac?

The BBC’s piece is worth reading in full.