The concept of “climate disinformation” does not lead us to genuine solutions for the problem of climate change — it leads us toward new risks.
An oil well north of Williston, North Dakota. (William Campbell / Corbis via Getty Images)
Why on Earth would countering climate disinformation be at odds with building clean energy? Can’t we just do two things at the same time? Why would these even compete?
Five years ago, I would have said, obviously, we need to do all the things. There are some areas where these activities do not compete, like securing federal funding for climate resiliency programs. But there are other domains, like climate philanthropy and media attention, where the incentive structure leans toward disinformation work being a stand-in for more expensive, more transformative work.
Aaron Regunberg wrote a thoughtful response to my recent Jacobin essay, “Obsessing Over Climate Disinformation Is a Wrong Turn.” He characterizes my essay as “essentially claiming that climate disinformation is not a serious obstacle to climate action.” But people believing things that are not true — in one of his examples, that wind turbines kill whales — is a very serious obstacle to climate action. There is no question about this.
My main point is that “climate disinformation” or “climate misinformation” isn’t the right way to understand the situation. It’s the wrong mental model, frame, and language. The concept of “disinformation” does not lead us to genuine solutions for the problem. It leads us toward new risks.
When I called antidisinformation work a cheap hack, I meant it’s an attention-grabbing fix — often a technofix. It’s the charismatic megafauna of the sociopolitical climate action landscape, but it doesn’t address the root problems.
We have two deep issues with the social dimensions of the energy transition. One is engagement. To the extent that we have public engagement in the energy transition, it happens on the project level, as part of regulatory requirements far too late in the process, and is vastly underfunded compared to the need. There’s an education dimension to engagement — no one has spelled out to people what it will take to get to net zero on a systems level, limiting people’s ability to deliberate on what pathways and political decisions they want.
But there’s also a two-way engagement and codesign dimension of people making decisions together that’s missing. As I’ve written elsewhere, we need a Manhattan Project for conversation. Creating that is going to be a multibillion-dollar lift.
The other deep issue is the broken capitalist media ecology. As I wrote in the book Democracy in a Hotter Time:
The possibilities of climate action exist within a media ecosystem that has monetized our attention and that profits from our hate and division. Algorithms that reap advertising profits from maximizing time-on-site have figured out that what keeps us clicking is anger. Even worse, the system is addictive, with notifications delivering hits of dopamine in a part of what historian and addiction expert David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism.” Society has more or less sleepwalked into this outrage-industrial complex without having a real analytic framework for understanding it. The tech platforms and some research groups or think tanks offer up “misinformation” or “disinformation” as the framework, which present the problem as if the problem is bad content poisoning the well, rather than the structure itself being rotten.
This week, I joined other authors of this book for a launch at Arizona State University, where our conversations focused heavily on climate change and disinformation. The group turned to Battinto L. Batts Jr, dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, for help understanding this. He described himself as a free-speech purist, noting the impossibility of trying to set up a regime to determine and regulate true and false information. As he put it, “Information is like water — it finds a way.”
To extend this metaphor, we don’t need to put a filter on a pipe that’s a privatized system owned by a right-wing billionaire. We need to rebuild the water infrastructure in the public interest — or, in this case, the internet infrastructure.
The frame of “fighting disinformation” doesn’t lead us toward that ask. But it’s natural for an environmental NGO complex that’s interested in its own continuation to hook onto disinformation as a frame.
Calls for deplatforming or the creation of some arbiter to decide what is true or false are a strategic dead end.
In the wider landscape beyond climate, “disinformation” provides plenty of programmatic grants for activities like monitoring, tracking, reporting on bad actors, and developing artificial intelligence tools to detect misinformation. A lot of this antidisinformation work is funded by Google and Meta themselves, and critics argue the field of misinformation studies is influenced by the soft power and framing of these companies. Fighting misinformation is also a “growth industry,” Crunchbase tells us, with over $300 million in venture capital money for firms building tools for combatting misinformation.
This might not be what climate advocates had in mind when they started talking about “fighting disinformation.” There’s a rich tradition in environmental sociology of tracking corporate lobbying and influence before “disinformation” was the frame, and many people draw from that lineage. But look at where the wider antidisinformation landscape is leading us — do critical scholars and activists really want to hitch ourselves to that Silicon Valley– and Wall Street–funded train?
The situation is not unlike what environmental activists worry about with carbon capture or carbon removal: an actor pollutes, cleaning up that pollution becomes an industry, the actor uses their influence to set the frame of how we even understand the task, and we don’t transform the structures that let that pollution be there in the first place.
Real Solutions
The fossil fuel industry takes advantage of these two deep problems — the lack of institutions and capacity for meaningful engagement and the broken media ecology — and runs with things like one of the examples Regenburg cites, hiring home renovation influencers to talk on TV about the glories of propane. It’s awful. But it’s a mistake to take their use of the structure that’s set up as the actual problem to target.
Where does the disinformation frame lead us? Regenburg’s piece is not very explicit about how we “take on disinformation” — though, to be fair, his piece had a word limit, and few people seem to know what to do about disinformation. It’s clearly something we’re still trying to figure out.
Transparency work that tracks corporate influence is important and should obviously be done. I also strongly agree with Regenburg that funding frontline communities that are resisting fossil fuel expansion is a major funding gap. This isn’t the type of work that I’m concerned about becoming a distraction. What I’m specifically concerned about is calls for deplatforming, or antidisinformation work that requires creating some arbiter to decide what is true or false. This is what I think is a strategic dead end.
There are three main risks here. One, we open the door to a censorship regime — either a legal censorship regime or a de facto one through a set of content-filtering algorithms — that might not serve us in the end, when “our side” is not in control of those institutions or machinery to make them optimized for our worldview.
Two, we can actually end up reinforcing the power of the fossil fuel industry when everything becomes about their secret machinations, and we attribute more power and influence to them than they already have. The Left is also vulnerable to ending up in mirror worlds.
Three, reframing skepticism about the viability of particular decarbonization pathways as “denial” or “disinformation” limits deliberative democracy. We need to keep actual delusion analytically separate from concerns about climate pathways. For example, The New Climate Denial report names “climate policies are ineffective or flawed” and “people need energy form sources such as fossil fuels or nuclear power” as “new denial.” But those are real conversations to have, and dismissing them as denial is a dead end.
So what do we do instead? We should keep doing the transparency work, but we should not frame it as “fighting disinformation.” We shouldn’t label so many things as denial or disinformation. We should focus on engagement and a new vision for how stories and information can be funded and shared. “Net zero” as a master frame for understanding the climate challenge seems to be fading into the background, as companies quietly remove these goals from their reports and countries fail to make much progress toward the goal. This is an opportune moment for a new way of understanding the work ahead — for creating a new narrative that links people to the same reality and shared aspiration. It would be tragic for the climate movement to be focusing too much on the defense, again, when the world needs us to be generative.