Why climate disinformation matters
New reports show just how much influence fossil fuel companies have over how public funds for climate action are spent.
Is combating climate disinformation an essential part of the climate fight, or a “condescending,” “cheap hack” of the elite?
A much-discussed piece by academic and author Holly Jean Buck in Jacobin this week argues the latter. Buck laments that “much of the climate movement” — exemplified in her account by lawmakers leading Congressional hearings, academics convening conferences, reporters covering what a UN official said, and nonprofit organizations founded to track and counter disinformation — is “obsessing” over “an information war focused on uncovering what Big Oil knew and policing speech.” In Buck’s opinion, focusing on disinformation is distracting from the real work of engaging with communities empathetically to understand the challenges of a clean energy transition and to implement funds granted by the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Buck, who previously worked in communications for the Department of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, relies on the valid trope that D.C.-based writers and pundits often misunderstand the real concerns of many Americans. But she uses it to claim that “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.”
From where I sit — albeit as someone covering fossil fuel industry disinformation for a living — that argument is a misrepresentation. Tackling climate deception isn’t about demeaning the real concerns of people who “understand — often in ways office workers like me don’t — the complexity of building out new systems,” or about labeling those people as having been “programmed by a fossil-fueled conspiracy.” It’s about specifically documenting and calling out the spread of falsehoods when they come from the industry interests working to prevent change — both at the national and local level, and often under cover of front groups and powerful institutions. Would calling out the tobacco industry’s disinformation campaigns have insulted consumers’ ability to choose, or stalled public health efforts?
The idea that combating disinformation is “policing speech” and a distraction from real solutions are talking points often used by the fossil fuel industry itself. And it misses a crucial point: that through disinformation, profit-motivated oil and gas companies are helping determine where public funds are directed — often away from renewables, and toward technologies that will further entrench fossil fuels in the decades to come.
Two recent reports help illustrate those stakes, and why tracking and exposing deception is crucial to climate action on the ground.
The victims of misinformation
Buck writes that “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.” But as Genevieve Guenther responded on X, “‘the public’ also includes the chattering classes themselves, who often know little about climate science or solutions, and the mainstream liberals and centrists they educate on the topic. It even involves policymakers, who of course are not climate experts.”
In fact, the power policymakers have in determining how public money is spent makes them a prime target of climate disinformation — and one of the most important audiences for accountability reporting and advocacy.
According to a report released today by research and advocacy group Oil Change International, governments in North America and Europe have spent a combined $30 billion in public funds on carbon capture and fossil hydrogen projects to date. That includes $4 billion spent by the United States and Canada to subsidize carbon capture technology used for “enhanced oil recovery,” the process of pumping carbon under the ground to get more oil.
For years, oil companies have worked to sell carbon capture as a solution to climate change that wouldn’t necessitate phasing out oil and gas, even while they knew internally that the technology would barely make a dent in global carbon emissions in the best-case scenario. According to Oil Change International, their ploy worked.
The report documents how ExxonMobil played a major role in lobbying the U.S. Congress for tax credits and subsidies, switching from carbon capture skeptic — acknowledging that the technology was too expensive, polluting, and energy intensive — to supporter after realizing it could make trillions in revenue while shifting the conversation away from renewables. In 2021, Exxon pushed Congress to fund carbon capture — and the IRA granted $12 billion toward “carbon management research, deployment, and demonstration.” That same year, the company launched its Low Carbon Solutions business. Exxon CEO Darren Woods said on an earnings call that he was “very encouraged” by how the conversation about energy transition was shifting away from “whether or not you're both investing in solar and wind.”
When that wasn’t enough, the company lobbied for higher subsidies — and got some of its demands in segments of a carbon capture bill passed as part of the IRA in August of 2022. In 2023, Exxon told investors it expected “double-digit” returns from its Low Carbon Solutions business. “I am very supportive of the IRA — because as legislated the IRA focuses on carbon intensity and in theory is technology-agnostic,” Woods said at an oil summit this year.
Thanks to the IRA’s changes to the carbon capture tax credit known as 45Q, U.S. taxpayers could spend up to $100 billion on CCS in the coming decade, according to Oil Change International’s analysis. “Exxon and other oil companies worked the U.S. Congress like a well-oiled machine,” the report reads. “They used the American public’s increasing concern about the climate crisis to deliver a massive transfer of taxpayers’ money to corporate coffers.”
Not just NIMBY
In her piece, Buck argues that “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.”
But it’s hard to imagine how that actual work will get done when the transition to wind and solar energy is being undermined on the ground — not by individual concerned residents speaking on their own behalf, but by fossil fuel interests with a major stake in the game.
In July, the watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute published a report compiling more than a decade of research showing how the fossil fuel industry uses dark money front groups, political operatives, and prominent anti-renewable activists to spread disinformation about clean energy — all “at a time when many of these same opponents are escalating their attacks and seeking to derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s historic investment in renewables.”
The sources of funding EPI identified include major industry players like Exxon, Koch, and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. But there’s also a wide network of local efforts such as Citizens for Local Choice, a ballot campaign opposing streamlined renewable energy siting in Michigan, which has received funding from an Ohio gas industry executive. Or the Empowerment Alliance, a dark money group that attacks wind and solar power and has fought to redefine gas as “green energy” in Ohio. Just this week, Energy Network News reported funding ties between the Empowerment Alliance and an Ohio anti-solar energy group posing as a “grassroots” advocate for local farmers.
Dave Anderson, who authored the report, said there is a big difference between community members with valid reasons for questioning renewable energy projects and fossil-fuel-backed campaigns or anti-renewables activists who became paid consultants for the industry. “You start looking into these key actors who've become known for traveling state to state, through vast regions of the country, doing these presentations, attacking wind and solar farms,” Anderson said. “If you push them hard enough, you'll find that they're not just NIMBY activists trying to block a wind farm in their town, they're literally going place to place fighting wind and solar farms all over the country and sometimes world with the support of these outside groups.”
The report was spurred in part by a recent announcement by the State Policy Network, a national nonprofit network of think tanks and advocacy groups funded by fossil fuel interests, that it will work with state lawmakers this year to oppose wind and solar power.
“There's an unprecedented amount of public funding that's going to support wind and solar projects all over the country right now,” Anderson said. “So it's not surprising that you're seeing groups like the State Policy Network saying our specific goal legislatively is now to just block the deployment of wind and solar.”
Where the money goes
Combating climate disinformation isn’t just about tracking how public money is being spent and why — it’s also about deciding who should pay for the damage that disinformation caused.
Because ultimately, your average American isn’t just pondering heat pumps — many are dealing with the aftermath of deadly and devastating floods, fires, heatwaves, hurricanes, and other disasters intensified by the continued burning of fossil fuels. Until and unless fossil fuel companies are held accountable, the damage will continue to get worse — and communities on the front lines will be footing the bill.
It should go without saying that both things are needed. The climate movement can and should expose climate disinformation and work with communities to implement solutions in just and equitable ways. And local journalists can bridge the gap between both, as long as they’re given funding to do so.
Combating deception and pursuing real climate action aren’t mutually exclusive — they’re necessarily intertwined. Who does it serve to frame it any other way?
From Buck's article. "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." The last sentence illustrates perfectly why fighting disinformation is important. The elites are indeed pocketing our money with absurd, bogus carbon capture projects. Some of our lawmakers gobble this stuff up.
Maybe US Government could require Big Oil that the subsidies provided for CCS be in addition to resolving the overwhelming Plastic container problem since both are a matter of pollution. It's time Oil Companies take responsibility for creating the worst invasion of the biosphere ever created.