Climate Horizons 18 (DISINFORMATION is a real and growing problem)
News, Views and Solutions in an All-of-the-Above World
Greetings!
We’ve vetted and selected a range of worthwhile climate-related news and information and resources for you.
The primary thread in this issue is climate misinformation and disinformation.
There is no doubt that the fight to meaningfully address our climate crisis is taking place on many different fronts, all at the same time. Unfortunately and increasingly, that means having to deal with and fight back against massive, often very strategic and well funded, media and social media campaigns designed to mislead and confuse the public — voters.
In different sections below, we’ve shared a selection of news and information, including what you — we — can do to fight back.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (January 16, 2024)
CLIMATE CHANGE MISINFORMATION
Climate change misinformation sows skepticism, creating the sense that there is a more extensive debate than there really is. Climate deniers spread baseless, unscientific climate denial harnessing the power of social media platforms.
How social media platforms and content producers profit by spreading new forms of climate denial
Climate deniers can no longer pretend climate change isn’t happening - so they’ve changed their strategy. CCDH’s groundbreaking AI-powered research shows that New Climate Denial narratives that aim to undermine the climate movement, science and solutions, now constitute 70% of climate denial content on YouTube in 2023.
AND:
The narrative shift from “Old Denial” to “New Denial” seeks to undermine the solutions to mitigating the climate crisis and delay political action. A failure to shift our strategies would be enormously damaging.
This report is a call-to-action to the climate change advocates, the funders, the politicians doing the hard work to green our economic models and incentives, to ensure their work effectively counters what our opponents are doing now, not six years ago.
READ OR DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE
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CNN (January 17, 2024)
What is ‘new denial?’ An alarming wave of climate misinformation is spreading on YouTube, watchdog says
If you’ve been on YouTube lately, you might have come across someone claiming wind and solar energy don’t work, that rising sea levels will help coral reefs flourish, or that climate scientists are corrupt and alarmist.
…
Where once climate deniers would outright reject climate change as a hoax or scam, or claim that humans were not responsible for it, many are now shifting to a different approach, one which attempts to undermine climate science, cast doubt on climate solutions and even claim global warming will be beneficial at best, harmless at worst.
AND:
“We’re asking other platforms that claim to be green in one breath not to profit from, to revenue share, and therefore, reward or to amplify clear climate denial content that contradicts scientific consensus,” Ahmed added. “You can’t claim to be green but then be the world’s biggest megaphone for climate change-related disinformation.”
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Grist (January 16, 2024)
How YouTube’s climate deniers turned into climate doomers
A new report documents a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won't work.
A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit based in London and Washington, D.C., working to stop the spread of disinformation, analyzed 12,000 videos from channels that promoted lies about climate change on YouTube over the last six years… The report, released on Tuesday, found a dramatic shift from “old denial” arguments — that global warming isn’t real and isn’t caused by humans — to new arguments bent on undermining trust in climate solutions.
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Independent (January 16, 2024)
Climate misinformation is mutating on YouTube – and the platform is profiting
Researchers analysed thousands of hours of YouTube content from the past six years and found that ‘old’ climate change denial is giving way to a new type of misleading content intended to muddy the waters
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The Guardian (January 10, 2024)
US oil lobby launches eight-figure ad blitz amid record fossil fuel extraction
Campaign pushes idea oil is ‘vital’ to global security and capitalizes on war in Gaza to escalate production, climate advocates say
The American oil lobby has launched an eight-figure media campaign this week promoting the idea that fossil fuels are “vital” to global energy security, alarming climate experts.
“US natural gas and oil play a key role in supplying the world with cleaner, more reliable energy,” the new initiative’s website says.
The campaign comes amid record fossil fuel extraction in the US, and as the industry is attempting to capitalize on the war in Gaza to escalate production even further, climate advocates say.
Launched Tuesday by the nation’s top fossil fuel interest group, the Lights on Energy campaign will work to “dismantle policy threats” to the sector, the American Petroleum Institute (API) CEO, Mike Sommers, told CNN in an interview this week.
RELATED:
CNN (December 9, 2022)
Big Oil has engaged in a long-running climate disinformation campaign while raking in record profits, lawmakers find
Big Oil companies have engaged in a “long-running greenwashing campaign” while raking in “record profits at the expense of American consumers,” the Democratic-led House Oversight Committee has found after a year-long investigation into climate disinformation from the fossil fuel industry.
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NPR News (October 9, 2023)
People working on climate solutions are facing a big obstacle: conspiracy theories
Communities big and small are trying to rein in climate change. But many people working on these climate solutions are running into a big obstacle: falsehoods and conspiracy theories about their work. So what does this mean for fighting global warming?
“Research also shows that funding was allocated to create fake “grassroots” organizations– or front groups – staffed with fake experts, again with the intent of promoting doubt about CO2 and increasing global temperatures. Further, fossil fuel corporations and trade associations hired some of the best PR firms to test, tailor and target messaging they knew would be effective in manipulating public opinion related to climate change.”
— Justin Farrell, Professor of Sociology, Yale University
• SELECTED NEWS and INFORMATION:
A few recent news items, usually in the form of a headline and link, along with a short description or excerpt.
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Bill McKibben: The Crucial Years (January 12, 2024)
Friction is growing
We're reaching the point where the climate crisis slows the machine
But I think we’re very near the point where—thanks to the climate crisis—the economy encounters sufficient friction to slow it, and maybe even to send it in a careening spin. Last week the Wall Street Journal (whose news columns are as useful as their editorial pages are obtuse) published a long piece of reporting with a stark headline: “Buying Home and Auto Insurance Is Becoming Impossible.”
The essay began by describing the way that Allstate—after suffering billions of dollars in losses last year—threatened to stop writing policies in New York, New Jersey, and California. Regulators in all three states, terrified of that possibility, let them raise rates by preposterous amounts.
RELATED:
Clean Technica (January 12, 2024)
Bill McKibben On Global Heating, Capitalism, Insurance, And Social Friction
In his latest Substack post, Bill McKibben delves into the insurance crisis brought on by a warmer climate. He argues that insurance is the lubricant that makes commerce possible. Losing insurance creates friction in the economic system and he warns that friction can lead to a collapse of important parts of local, national, and global economies.
AND:
Bill McKibben says there is no reason to weep for insurance companies. Over the past several decades, they have been one of the principal sources of financing for the fossil fuel industry — the same industry that has pumped billions and billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, leading directly to the very climate changes that are now making large swaths of the world uninsurable.
Not only do they figure out how to charge higher premiums, he says, they have helped create this crisis. “With the biggest pool of investment capital on the planet, they’ve continually helped fund the expansion of fossil fuels, and these same companies continue to underwrite the pipeline projects and LNG export terminals that are doing them in.”
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The Guardian (January 15, 2024)
Azerbaijan appoints no women to 28-member Cop29 climate committee
Campaigners condemn decision as regressive, saying ‘climate change affects whole world, not half of it’
The organizing committee for the COP29 global climate change summit in Azerbaijan in December comprises 28 men and no women, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has announced.
…
In a statement, She Changes Climate said: “This [committee] is a regressive step in the journey towards gender parity in climate; but there is still time for change. We ask for equal representation in the governance of this year’s climate talks, because climate change affects the whole world, not half of it.”
For the second year in a row, the UN’s most important climate talks will be hosted by a petro-state heavily reliant on fossil fuel production. The Cop29 president-designate, who will be responsible for bringing together countries to drive climate action, is Mukhtar Babayev, the minister of ecology and natural resources.
Babayev previously spent 26 years working for the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (Socar). Azerbaijan plans to increase its fossil fuel production by a third over the next decade, the Guardian revealed last week.
RELATED:
Inside Climate News (January 9, 2024)
Activists Call for Process ‘Overhaul’ After Oil Industry Veteran Confirmed to Lead COP29
Azerbaijan named a former state oil executive as the summit’s president, marking the second consecutive year a fossil fuel insider will helm the U.N. climate talks. Climate advocates call it an “enormous conflict of interest.”
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Politico (January 16, 2024)
No more going wobbly in climate fight, Trump supporters vow
For all his bombast, the former president’s agencies hesitated to rewrite federal climate reports or install loyalists atop key science agencies. Some of his allies expect that to change.
Former President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, staffed his environmental agencies with fossil fuel lobbyists and claimed — against all scientific evidence — that the Earth’s rising temperatures will “ start getting cooler.”
Expect a second Trump presidency to show less restraint.
Trump’s campaign utterances, and the policy proposals being drafted by hundreds of his supporters, point to the likelihood that his return to the White House would bring an all-out war on climate science and policies — eclipsing even his first-term efforts that brought U.S. climate action to a virtual standstill. Those could include steps that aides shrank back from taking last time, such as meddling in the findings of federal climate reports.
You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.
— Jane Goodall
• GOOD NEWS and SOLUTIONS:
One or two or a few items that highlight either real and notable progress being made somewhere or information about a few of the many solutions that are out there and available today.
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electrek (January 15, 2024)
Harvard develops a solid state battery that charges in minutes
Researchers at Harvard University have developed a new solid state battery that can be recharged in 10 minutes.
The lithium metal battery researchers developed at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) can also be charged and discharged at least 6,000 times — more than any other pouch battery cell.
The research published in Nature Materials describes a new way to make solid-state batteries with a lithium metal anode. Xin Li, Associate Professor of Materials Science at SEAS and senior author of the paper, said:
Lithium metal anode batteries are considered the holy grail of batteries because they have ten times the capacity of commercial graphite anodes and could drastically increase the driving distance of electric vehicles.
Our research is an important step toward more practical solid-state batteries for industrial and commercial applications.
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Inside Climate News (January 12, 2024)
A Minnesota Utility Is Swapping Coal for Solar. It’s Like Taking 780,000 Cars Off the Road
Xcel Energy is replacing its massive coal plant in Becker, Minnesota, with a 710-megawatt solar farm. It's reigniting debate over what society owes rural coal towns struggling amid the energy transition.
One of the largest coal plants in the country will soon be replaced by the nation’s biggest solar farm. It’s part of a growing trend that climate and environmental justice advocates say is necessary to mitigate the accelerating climate crisis while safeguarding the rural coal communities that have the most to lose from the clean energy transition.
On New Year’s Eve, Xcel Energy shut down one of three power generating units at Sherburne County Generating Station, Minnesota’s largest power plant and among the biggest coal-fired power plants in the Midwest. The utility, which has pledged to generate 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040, plans to shutter the facility’s remaining two units in 2026 and 2030.
The plant, known more commonly as Sherco, has been a cornerstone of Minnesota’s energy mix since first coming online in 1976, capable of producing a whopping 2.2 gigawatts of electricity—enough to power 1.5 million homes.
It’s also Minnesota’s largest source of carbon emissions.
• THINGS YOU CAN DO:
Keeping with the theme of the week, we’re sharing a site from the Union of Concerned Scientists with information and resources about disinformation, and how to recognize and counter it.
“Using these tips, you can stop disinformation’s spread, minimize its damage, and respond to it effectively.”
Union of Concerned Scientists (April 1, 2022)
How to Stop Disinformation
We all have the power to counter and interrupt disinformation
First, the bad news. No amount of finger-pointing is going to help convince someone who’s fallen into the disinformation trap that they’re wrong.
Presenting facts and evidence to counter a lie doesn’t often work, either.
What actually works
What You Can Do about Disinformation
Disinformation is poison in the veins of our society. It undermines democracy, fosters division and hate, and blocks progress on the most pressing issues of our time. The good news is that you have the power to stop it.
Resource Guide
Countering Disinformation in Your Community
…What is disinformation? Lies and misleading information deliberately spread for financial or political gain, usually at the expense of the public good.
• INTERNET RESOURCES & SOCIAL MEDIA CONNECTIONS:
There are a lot of great resources on the web and social media — people, groups and pages. In each newsletter, we suggest one or two you might want to check out (on the web or Facebook or Threads or Instagram or any number of other sites).
Last week, we highlighted DeSmog: “Clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science with award-winning investigative environmental journalism.”
This week, we return to DeSmog and the primary theme of this issue by sharing their impressive Climate Disinformation Database.
In DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database, you can browse our extensive research on the individuals and organizations that have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight global warming.
They aren’t exaggerating when they call it extensive!
Here is an example of an individual: Ryan Zinke was the 52nd Secretary of the Interior of the United States, nominated by Donald Trump and sworn in on March 1, 2017.
Here is an example of an organization: The Heartland Institute is a Chicago-based free market think tank and 501(c)(3) charity that has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change. The Heartland Institute has received at least $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998 but no longer discloses its funding sources.
DeSmog News ON THREADS
DeSmog ON FACEBOOK
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