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.

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.