‘Powerful Actors’ Are Spreading False Information About the Climate Crisis, Making It Harder to Address: Report

Unchecked climate misinformation has been turning crisis into catastrophe, according to a new report from the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE).

In its review of 300 studies, the report — Information Integrity about Climate Science — found that climate action was being delayed and obstructed by misleading information from fossil fuel companies, some nation states and right-wing politicians, reported The Guardian.

“The human response to the climate crisis is being obstructed and delayed by the production and circulation of misleading information about the nature of climate change and the available solutions,” the authors of the report wrote. “The findings indicate that powerful actors — including corporations, governments, and political parties — intentionally spread inaccurate or misleading narratives about anthropogenic climate change. These narratives circulate across digital, broadcast, and interpersonal communication channels. The result is a decline in public trust, diminished policy coordination, and a feedback loop between scientific denialism and political inaction.”

The researchers found that climate denialism has been channeled into campaigns that focus on discrediting solutions to the climate crisis, like false claims that the recent blackouts in Spain were caused by renewable energy.

False narratives are made worse by online trolls and bots, according to the researchers. The report also said political leaders, regulatory agencies and civil servants are being targeted more frequently to delay climate action.

“It is a major problem,” said Dr. Klaus Jensen, a professor in the Department of Communication at University of Copenhagen who co-led the report, as The Guardian reported. “If we don’t have the right information available, how are we going to vote for the right causes and politicians, and how are politicians going to translate the clear evidence into the necessary action? Unfortunately, I think the [bad actors] are still very, very active, and probably have the upper hand now.”

Jensen said the world has roughly five years to reduce emissions by half and until mid-century to become carbon neutral.

“Without the right information, we’re not going to get there. So the climate crisis being translated into a climate catastrophe is possible, unless we handle the climate information integrity problem,” Jensen said.

Elisa Morgera, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, said last week in her report that countries need to “defossilise” their information systems following decades of misinformation disseminated by the fossil fuel industry.

Morgera said states should “criminalise misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry” and “criminalise media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies,” reported The Guardian.

The Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change is an international effort led by the UN. UN Secretary-General António Guterres in June 2024 called for fossil fuel company advertising to be banned, referring to the firms as the “godfathers of climate chaos.”

The IPIE report is an assessment of the producers of climate misinformation, its impact, how it gets propagated and how to fight it.

The report found that a “dual deception” had been committed by the fossil fuel industry by denying the existence of climate change, obstructing climate action and obscuring its responsibility while greenwashing to try and make itself appear environmentally sustainable.

The report said climate misinformation had also been promoted by other sectors, including electricity companies in the United States, airlines, animal agriculture, fast food and tourism.

“Individual politicians have also been found to disrupt information integrity about climate science. Based on a network analysis of 7.3 million tweets, one study identified U.S. President Donald Trump as the key influencer of the network, whose logical fallacies, unfounded claims, and cherry-picking of findings were heavily retweeted by other users. Other research on denials, outright lies, and conspiracy theories about climate change has further suggested that Trump, rather than being an exceptional case, could be considered a prominent instance of a wider problem of political figures with climate-contrarian views being elected to top positions,” the report said.

Jensen said the issue went far beyond social media.

“Alliances of industry and conservative thinktanks actually target misinformation at the key people who will be making decisions. Those links are particularly worrisome because it’s something approaching a conspiracy,” Jensen said, as The Guardian reported.

In Europe, the report said rightwing populist parties were “actively contravening climate science,” including Vox in Spain, France’s National Rally and AfD in Germany. The report’s authors added that conservative or rightwing media outlets prioritize and amplify conspiracy theories, denial and skepticism regarding climate change.

Measures to battle climate misinformation include requiring that fossil fuel companies make standardized emissions declarations and regulations to improve content moderation by social media companies, such as the EU Digital Services Act.

Jensen said there have already been some lawsuits against those spreading climate misinformation. Jensen added that additional research was needed as so far studies had been focused mostly on Western nations and English-language misinformation, with only one study out of 300 focused on Africa.

“A great divide between what humanity knows and what the present human cohort does is manifest, maintained and deepened by the ways in which information about climate change is produced and circulated through contemporary media and other channels of communication. This crisis of information integrity is intensifying and exacerbating the climate crisis,” the report concluded.