Why Focusing on “Climate Disinformation” Is Counterproductive

On August 8, 2024, the Guardian published a story titled “‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy” with the subhead “UN says a global ‘backlash’ against climate action is being stoked by fossil fuel companies.” The article quotes a United Nations official at length, without stating whom the author spoke to, or when, or where.

The price of this kind of story isn’t just the energy it costs for the cloud services to bring it to your eyeballs, nor the cost to write it, which is cheap. That is the point: it’s cheap and easy to write content like this and more expensive to report a story about climate action on the ground, or to do research and advocacy that involves organizing and engagement with the public. There is an attention cost to this kind of antidisinformation discourse, though, and that is important. The person scrolling has their attention put on the outrage-inducing fossil fuel companies, rather than what they can do about it.

But the cost of the focus on climate disinformation goes beyond missed opportunities: it could actually diminish the prospects for climate action.

That’s because the focus on “climate disinformation” sets up a negative feedback loop. No one doubts that misinformation is often an issue in today’s politics, especially around climate. But instead of focusing on misinformation alone, we should think of the challenge of engaging the public with climate as a triangle with three points: misinformation, conflicts over values, and distrust of elites. Right now, the climate commentariat is collapsing all of these challenges into a problem of misinformation and failing to deal forthrightly with the value conflicts and trust issues. This in turn creates polarization, inflames those value conflicts, and further erodes trust in science, policymakers, and media institutions.

I’m a social scientist and have convened focus groups with the public around the country; we talk together about how to reach net zero. Many members of the public question whether net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 is a realistic goal. People are worried about whether renewables can produce enough energy, and what happens to wind turbines and solar panels at the end of their lifespans. They worry about the unintended environmental consequences of building out the renewable grid. They don’t think they can afford electric cars. And often they bring up the idea that addressing climate change is a way of funneling more money to elites while hitting their own pocketbooks.

We need to listen to those concerns and then do something about them — not discount them merely as the product of disinformation. When a focus group participant in West Virginia tells me that solar panels emit radiation that you can measure with a Geiger counter — I do regard that as misinformation. But when someone questions whether wind and solar will be able to power everything? That’s not misinformation but a real concern. It’s also an opportunity to talk about battery storage, or what it would take to build transmission that can move electricity from place to place.

Redefining “Climate Denial”

When the anti–climate disinformation movement redefines all opposition to green transition efforts as “climate denial,” the effect is to cast reasonable disagreements about the best way forward in terms of disputes over the truth.

“Climate denial should be a flexible term designating a broad range of activity,” argues Tad DeLay in his new book, Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change. The report The New Climate Denial uses artificial intelligence to conclude that “old denial” — the idea that global warming isn’t happening and/or that humans aren’t the cause — has shifted to “new denial.” New denial involves narratives that “climate solutions won’t work” or “climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.” The call, then, is for platforms to deamplify this new denial content.

But an example from that very report shows how tricky this is in practice. The report calls out a conversation on YouTube between controversial right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson and Alberta’s conservative premier, Danielle Smith. Smith talks about the challenges for people in the far north when it comes to reliable heating in the winter months, and how difficult the cost of the energy transition will be for people on fixed incomes. These are concerns that I’ve heard from people from Buffalo to Alaska: they aren’t sure that the electrical grid and battery storage is up to the task of replacing gas in home heating yet, and they haven’t heard about a policy design that is going to keep this transition affordable for them.

Calling for algorithmically deplatforming an elected official who is raising concerns that a lot of people have is a bad position to be in. It naturally leads people to feel like they’re not being heard; what’s more, they can see that you’re marking their concerns as denial and moving this into a question of whose reality is true. Many will recognize this redefinition of their concerns — correctly — as elitist dismissal.

The idea that people with concerns about a green transition are just victims of misinformation is fundamentally condescending. For one, most people are not in fact swayed by corporate reassurances. In my interviews and focus groups across the United States, no one has expressed confidence or reassurance in any kind of fossil fuel company claim. Young and old, Republican and Democrat, people are profoundly skeptical of not just fossil fuel companies but of all corporations — they are disgusted with Big Ag, Big Pharma, their water companies, utilities, finance, and pretty much every corporate actor you can imagine.

Second, when people ask questions about the viability of climate action, it’s often because they work in logistics, agriculture, or manufacturing, and they understand — often in ways office workers like me don’t — the complexity of building out new systems. Their skepticism about some of the climate policy responses being proposed stems from their experience with systems and infrastructure as well as from their observations of how industries have behaved in the past. It’s not that they are being programmed by a fossil-fueled conspiracy.

The pandemic showed us the dangers of making everything into a battleground of information and truth claims. Instead of having a real conversation about science, uncertainty, and trade-offs, accusations about disinformation closed down deliberations on how to best respond. The bitter polarization over COVID-19 response measures has made it more difficult to be prepared for the next pandemic, whether that be through conducting rigorous research on the efficacy of measures like school closures or reconsidering biosafety protocols and funding for gain-of-function research.

There is an important lesson here for climate progress. When conflicts over values and distrust of elites arise, we should bring them to light and work through them, rather than simply code them as misinformation and write off the people with these concerns as disinformation victims.

The places where these conversations happen are institutions like schools, libraries, and city halls — generally not on social media. But governments can catalyze and scale these conversations. For example, the United States has had a great opportunity in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, which puts $5 billion of Inflation Reduction Act funds into states, local governments, tribes, and territories for decarbonization planning. In July 2024, twenty-five grants were awarded, but there were 299 applications with a total of $33 billion worth of measures proposed. This means that the funding kick-started a lot of planning, and the coalitions preparing these grants had community and stakeholder engagement to figure out what climate action measures to propose.

The grants may only cut climate pollution by less than 1 percent, but the real value here lies in the chance to set up the social infrastructure for collaboration on climate action. An early estimate said that sixteen thousand stakeholders were reached in this process, generally through the workshops, focus groups, questionnaires, and town halls conducted to inform people about the grants.

This is a tremendous opportunity to link people who may not identify with the “climate movement.” A lot hinges on who is facilitating and guiding this engagement, and on their training and relationships. If we are consulting with stakeholders just as a checkbox exercise to win federal grant funds and assuming the public are disinformation victims, we won’t succeed in winning people over to climate action. But if we come to these meetings not just ready to hear concerns about, e.g., the safety of wind turbines and battery storage — and follow up with the concerned parties with verifiable information about those concerns — but also ready to have more challenging conversations about who is profiting from the transition and how local impacts will be addressed, we have a chance at climate progress.

In general, the people charged with this engagement know how to do this work; they live in the relevant communities and know the constituents. It’s at the level of the national and global climate commentariat where there’s a disconnect.

Resisting the Lure of the Disinformation Frame

Adequately addressing people’s concerns around climate policy starts with recognizing the basic flaws in the mental model of “disinformation.” The underlying idea of contagious disinformation is fundamentally a variation of the long-discredited “deficit model” of science communication. According to the deficit model, people are blank slates who just lack information; to address climate change, people need to consume the right information.

However, decades of social science research have basically debunked the deficit model: as a 2017 National Academies of Sciences report stated flatly, this model is wrong. Audiences often understand what scientists know but don’t act consistently with the science because they are taking into account their own goals, needs, skills, values, and beliefs.

Why would many social scientists who work on climate now embrace a mental model that contradicts a main finding of science communication research? One reason why the focus on misinformation is seductive is that it gives pride of place to those who specialize in communication — rather than those workers and planners who need to transform energy infrastructure, industry, and the built environment. If disinformation is the main problem, then the chattering classes are central to the climate fight.

There are also banal economic reasons for focusing on the battleground of misinformation: It’s expensive and resource-intensive to go out and talk to rural communities about heat pumps. Our universities are too often not training people how to do engagement work with people who are from different backgrounds than them; the large lecture business model of universities doesn’t build the soft skills. And the philanthropists who fund climate action often come from software or finance backgrounds, and are sympathetic to disinformation and the deficit model. These funders don’t have much experience with on-the-ground engagement with climate-questioning populations.

Fighting disinformation becomes a cheap hack for the hard work of listening to people and learning from them. We have to put resources into a different sort of public engagement with climate change, one that sees publics as competent and nuanced rather than as susceptible marks for memes.

Where should those of us who care about climate change look instead for meaningful next steps? It’s good to have some researchers tracking financial flows of fossil fuel lobbying; we need transparency. It’s important to understand how online platforms operate and bring to light the financial incentives for spreading information that isn’t true. But we shouldn’t confuse cheap discursive battles with the actual work of climate action, which, at the end of the day, is remaking physical systems to replace the 80 percent of fossil energy that now powers our lives with clean energy.

There is obviously a relationship between ideas and stories people have and the built environment. This is why the tactics we use for changing those stories matter so dearly. Treating the public as victims of misinformation is condescending and serves to reinforce the idea that coastal elites just want to tell them what to think and how to live. Treating people with climate policy concerns as competent individuals with their own experiences and insights, and having real conversations with them, is what the climate movement needs.