Speaker 1: Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. A new report
Speaker 1: was released recently from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and
Speaker 1: the twenty plus member Coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation. It's
Speaker 1: called Deny, Deceive and Delay, and it documents and responds
Speaker 1: to climate disinformation from the COP twenty sixth summit to today.
Speaker 1: It also offers some suggestions for countering disinformation policies that
Speaker 1: could help and messaging frameworks that might be helpful. Today,
Speaker 1: I'm joined by Jenny King, who was the lead author
Speaker 1: on the report, to walk us through some of the
Speaker 1: findings and what to make of them.
Speaker 2: That conversation's coming up right after this quick break.
Speaker 3: So I'm curious to hear maybe a little bit about
Speaker 3: the process first, how you started looking at this issue
Speaker 3: and how you kind of honed in on these super
Speaker 3: spreader accounts in the first place.
Speaker 4: Sure, my organization ISD has traditionally looked at the evolution
Speaker 4: of extremist and conspiracist ideologies and the roles that they
Speaker 4: are playing in undermining democratic processes and norms and ultimately
Speaker 4: fueling haide speech and violence. And over the years we've
Speaker 4: developed a very large portfolio in lots of different vectors
Speaker 4: of disinformation, because obviously, disinformation is a key tool used
Speaker 4: by both extremist and conspiracist movements and also used in
Speaker 4: the effort to drive polarization in a number of societies,
Speaker 4: and so working on climate change might seem like a
Speaker 4: slightly left field choice. But the reason why we became
Speaker 4: so interested and decided to build out an entirely new
Speaker 4: portfolio of work in this space is because we noticed
Speaker 4: that a lot of the communities we have been monitoring
Speaker 4: for a number of years were beginning to espouse anti
Speaker 4: environmental stances, and that there seemed to be a growing
Speaker 4: confluence between the kinds of anti government, anti elite, broad
Speaker 4: culture wars, and identity politics framing that you would find
Speaker 4: in other really important issue sets like migration or sectional
Speaker 4: reproductive health rights or hate speech incitement to violence, and
Speaker 4: what was happening around climate change, and that to us
Speaker 4: felt like an extremely concerning shift in the evolution of
Speaker 4: rhetoric around this particular issue, and so we decided to
Speaker 4: get into the weeds of why that was happening, who
Speaker 4: it was being driven by, where it was taking place
Speaker 4: across both social media and legacy media outlets, and more importantly,
Speaker 4: what could be done about it, And over the past
Speaker 4: eighteen months or so, our efforts have then broadened out
Speaker 4: into the formalization of this coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation,
Speaker 4: which involves over twenty organizations globally that work either in
Speaker 4: the counter disinformation space or in the climate science, climate policy,
Speaker 4: and climate advocacy spaces, and that the combination of those
Speaker 4: two sets of expertise has given us a really unique
Speaker 4: lens in trying to understand what are the tactics at play,
Speaker 4: not anymore really to deny that climate change exists, but
Speaker 4: to make sure that meaningful policy is never implemented, either
Speaker 4: at the dotstick or the multilateral level.
Speaker 3: Do you think that there's any indication that this is
Speaker 3: part of the sort of pivot to ecofascism.
Speaker 4: You are certainly seeing the growth in eco fascist rhetoric,
Speaker 4: or at least the mainstreaming and the normalization of those
Speaker 4: kinds of ideologies, and of course that fits with the
Speaker 4: fact that racist rhetoric and particularly phobic and anti migrant
Speaker 4: rhetoric has become so mainlined in a lot of political discourse,
Speaker 4: particularly across Europe, across North America, across Asia Pacific. And
Speaker 4: it's really worth noting that both the christ Church shooter
Speaker 4: in New Zealand who committed mass atrocity against Muslim citizens
Speaker 4: and the recent mass shooter in Buffalo who murdered a
Speaker 4: number of African American citizens, that both of them, in
Speaker 4: their online manifestos explicitly associated their own personal stances with
Speaker 4: eco fascism and the idea that the only way to
Speaker 4: solve environmental issues is by reducing population size, stopping the
Speaker 4: spread of certain communities around the globe, and also linking
Speaker 4: that to other extremely dangerous and harmful conspiracies like the
Speaker 4: Great Replacement, which you claim that there is a white
Speaker 4: genocide being enacted by some shadowy cabal of elites around
Speaker 4: the world. It's certainly a growing body of content. I
Speaker 4: wouldn't say that it's necessarily the narrative which is driving
Speaker 4: most of the high traction discussions across social media, but yes,
Speaker 4: I would say that far right political movements in general
Speaker 4: are certainly engaging with environmentalism in many cases through the
Speaker 4: lens of their other ideologies, which are you know, exclusionary, nativist, isolationists, etc.
Speaker 3: Right right, Okay, So I'm curious how these sixteen accounts
Speaker 3: that you highlight in the report what you were looking for.
Speaker 3: That made it clear that, Okay, these people are really
Speaker 3: like central hubs of this stuff.
Speaker 4: So what became very acute to us as a new
Speaker 4: trend is the fact that a large amount of online
Speaker 4: discourse is being driven by actors who we are referring
Speaker 4: to as non climate influencers. And by that what I
Speaker 4: mean is that these are accounts or individuals for whom
Speaker 4: climate has never been a key part of either their
Speaker 4: brand or their public outputs in the past. So they're
Speaker 4: not the historic deniers that have been active in this
Speaker 4: space and determined to maintain the status quo for decades.
Speaker 4: These are people for whom environmentalism as part of their
Speaker 4: public platform is potentially relatively new, and that rather than
Speaker 4: being a preoccupation in and of itself or them having
Speaker 4: a particular interest in that as an issue, it has
Speaker 4: become symbolic or indicative for them of broader societal trends,
Speaker 4: in particular the woke, agender and identity politics, and therefore
Speaker 4: it provides a very useful vector for them to get
Speaker 4: other worldviews, other incendiary and sensationist ideas into the mainstream
Speaker 4: and to galvanize an audience against climate action. What we
Speaker 4: began to see is if you looked at keywords that
Speaker 4: very clearly situated climate within that culture wars frame. It
Speaker 4: was people like Jordan B. Peterson, who boasts a followership
Speaker 4: of over ten million across his digital footprint if you
Speaker 4: combine his Facebook into Twitter, spreadit and his TikTok et cetera,
Speaker 4: or other people that broadly sit in They often refer
Speaker 4: to themselves as the quote unquote intellectual dark web that
Speaker 4: suddenly they had moved into the climate space, and that
Speaker 4: they clearly saw it as being a very useful framing
Speaker 4: mechanism for the discussions that they wanted to have about
Speaker 4: power and states of stimulations and infringemental civil liberties and
Speaker 4: other perceived grievances.
Speaker 3: So I know that there's been a debate within the
Speaker 3: climate movement for quite a while about whether or not
Speaker 3: climate should be connected to other social justice issues or
Speaker 3: this idea of like, look, climate is an intersectional issue.
Speaker 3: You don't necessarily get climate crisis without massive power and
Speaker 3: balance that precedes it in all these other ways. And
Speaker 3: I don't know how people can sort of take this
Speaker 3: in from me and use it without being like, Okay,
Speaker 3: we need to start talking about those things because the
Speaker 3: rail is going to weaponize it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a really valid point, and I think to
Speaker 4: some extent, you know, the way that you're seeing is
Speaker 4: being co opted and weaponized within the culture wars in
Speaker 4: a more far right media ecosystem is sort of the
Speaker 4: reverse side of the coin of the climate justice movement,
Speaker 4: which is doing absolutely essential work in pointing out the
Speaker 4: intersectionality the inequities in our approach to the climate response,
Speaker 4: whether that's within countries or between the global North and
Speaker 4: the global South, etc. My own personal take on this
Speaker 4: is that it's absolutely not about saying, oh, we need
Speaker 4: to disentangle climate from other contentious issues because they're holding
Speaker 4: climate back and we want to be as far removed
Speaker 4: from these other major battles of our time, like reproductive
Speaker 4: health rights or migration. And it's more pointing out the
Speaker 4: cynical and in many ways disingenuous use of moral panic
Speaker 4: in other areas to drive opposition to climate action. So
Speaker 4: it's about pointing out and being really explicit in saying
Speaker 4: these actors are using racist rhetoric around Black lives matter,
Speaker 4: or the enormous moral panic that we're seeing in society
Speaker 4: around the trans community, as a point of entry to
Speaker 4: mobilize outrage and grievance in relation to climate change, right,
Speaker 4: And that is a deliberate tactic and it's part of
Speaker 4: their playbook, and it needs to be consciously challenged.
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask you about the free speech stuff
Speaker 3: because I feel like this comes up all the time,
Speaker 3: and I really appreciated how it's dealt with this report,
Speaker 3: because I know in the US in particular, really any
Speaker 3: time you try to say anything about how disinformation needs
Speaker 3: to be dealt with, you immediately sort of get this, Well,
Speaker 3: we don't want to censor people, we don't want to
Speaker 3: infringe on free speech rates and all of that. But
Speaker 3: I know this media exception thing shows up even in
Speaker 3: really tiny ways, like when Twitter tried to say they
Speaker 3: weren't going to allow political ads, the oil companies immediately
Speaker 3: just started working with media outlets to get their ads
Speaker 3: kind of smuggled in through media accounts. Anyway, So yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm curious, like what kind of of pushback you see
Speaker 3: using this kind of free speech argument.
Speaker 4: I fully anticipate that the what the pushback is on
Speaker 4: the horizon, and any time that you try and draw
Speaker 4: parameters around what isn't missed or disinformation. You are always
Speaker 4: going to have a body of people that claim this
Speaker 4: is about censoring certain opinions from public discourse, and I
Speaker 4: hope that the report is very clear in saying that firstly,
Speaker 4: this is not necessarily about content removal or even deplatforming,
Speaker 4: and that is very often the first line of attack
Speaker 4: that you get from actors in this space who are
Speaker 4: exercised about cancel culture and who try to distract from
Speaker 4: the entire conversation by saying or they're trying to read
Speaker 4: everybody that they disagree with out of the Internet. We
Speaker 4: don't advocate for that at any point in this report,
Speaker 4: except where accounts are actively violating the platform's terms of service,
Speaker 4: which they define and they are perfectly within their rights
Speaker 4: to do as private companies, and we do encourage that
Speaker 4: if they're going to have those community guidelines in terms
Speaker 4: of service in place, they should be enforced. Otherwise they
Speaker 4: are somewhat meaningless and don't produce the kind of value
Speaker 4: sets and architecture for their products and services that they intend.
Speaker 4: But beyond that, what we're trying to emphasize is that
Speaker 4: there are so many mechanisms at our disposal, both as
Speaker 4: a society as regulators and policymakers, and as tech companies
Speaker 4: that can help to reduce the prominence and the impact
Speaker 4: of these patently misleading and false claims without telling people
Speaker 4: you're not allowed to have these opinions and you're not
Speaker 4: allowed to say them anywhere on social media. To me,
Speaker 4: it's a false dichotomy, and it's used deliberately to make
Speaker 4: this a question about censorship rather than a question about
Speaker 4: algorithmic amplification, arout gaming of social media, about the monetization
Speaker 4: of myths and disinformation, about the opaqueness of the ad
Speaker 4: tech industry, and all these other solvable problems. And I
Speaker 4: guess the neatest way to summarize how I feel about this,
Speaker 4: and I guess what is maybe more of a European
Speaker 4: approach enshrined in things like the Digital Services Act, is
Speaker 4: that freedom of speech is a fundamental pillar of liberal
Speaker 4: democracies and we should preserve it at all costs. And
Speaker 4: of course America has historically taken a more absolutist view
Speaker 4: or purest view of what free speech entails. But free
Speaker 4: speech is not the same as freedom of reach right
Speaker 4: and your own ability to espouse an opinion. However, extreme However,
Speaker 4: unpalatable is totally different from being able to mobilize the
Speaker 4: biggest megaphones that exist in the modern world to get
Speaker 4: those opinions out to millions or hundreds of millions of people.
Speaker 4: And I think that we need to draw a clearer
Speaker 4: delineation between those two things.
Speaker 3: There's something happening here where corporations have for a long
Speaker 3: time been on this path of continuously broadening their free
Speaker 3: speech rights, and that there's another kind of effort perfectively
Speaker 3: arguing to blur the line between fraud and free speech
Speaker 3: in a very concerning way. I'm curious what you think
Speaker 3: about how this plays into some of the organizations or
Speaker 3: corporations that might be funding and supporting disinformation, given that
Speaker 3: they kind of operate in a slightly different legal framework.
Speaker 4: There are two elements of the way that corporate entities
Speaker 4: seem to be interacting with this issue across the digital
Speaker 4: ecosystem and not just social media platforms. The first is
Speaker 4: the ability of what we would call carbon majors, So
Speaker 4: these are the one hundred companies that are responsible for
Speaker 4: around seventy percent of historic carbon emissions. Their ability to
Speaker 4: use products and services online to spread their greenwashing narratives
Speaker 4: and to mislead the public about what the viable solutions
Speaker 4: to let's say, mitigation and adaptation of climate change are
Speaker 4: going forward. One of our partners called ecobotnet, did a
Speaker 4: study in the first nine months of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 4: and they found that just sixteen companies had posted seventeen
Speaker 4: hundred adverts to Facebook, which had garnered one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty million impressions and more importantly, had generated nearly five
Speaker 4: million dollars worth of revenue for the parent company Meta.
Speaker 4: And that business model needs to be called out and
Speaker 4: it needs to be undermined. We should not continue to
Speaker 4: allow actors who we know have been bad faith and
Speaker 4: indeed who are being asked to testify at congressional hearings
Speaker 4: in the US or hopefully in the hearings in the
Speaker 4: EU on their historic role in causing issues in the
Speaker 4: information space and delaying action and progress on climate Who
Speaker 4: shouldn't allow them to continue spreading content with impunity and
Speaker 4: using the huge amounts of financial resources at their disposal
Speaker 4: to get undue oxygen. But that applies also to their
Speaker 4: known front groups and lobbyists, many of whom have very
Speaker 4: clear affiliations with industry and who have been exposed or
Speaker 4: detailed by investigative journalists to date. The other side of
Speaker 4: this is the monetization that exists through the broader ad
Speaker 4: tech system online and the fact that many outlets who
Speaker 4: have a well known track record of spreading myths and
Speaker 4: or disinformation or active propaganda and hate speech are still
Speaker 4: able to generate revenue through adverts that appear on their
Speaker 4: websites or on their channels, and historically brands have claimed
Speaker 4: that they were ignorant of that fact or of where
Speaker 4: their adverts were appearing. So you know, if you had
Speaker 4: something from to take a completely random example, you Unilever
Speaker 4: that was appearing next to a bright art article calling
Speaker 4: climate change of hopes, they might have said, because we
Speaker 4: have so little sense of what happens in between us
Speaker 4: using an ad tech system and where the final product
Speaker 4: ends up, we didn't know that this was happening. I
Speaker 4: think now it's probably fair to say that it's either
Speaker 4: wilful or woeful ignorance on behalf of the private sector,
Speaker 4: and that there is also a lot of lobbying and
Speaker 4: advocacy that can and is being done by organizations like
Speaker 4: check my Ads, The Conscious Advertising networks sleeping giants. That
Speaker 4: is saying you hold enormous leverage, financial leverage in this system,
Speaker 4: and if you are more stringent in the parameters of
Speaker 4: where you do and do not want your adverts to
Speaker 4: appear on what you think is acceptable, you have the
Speaker 4: opportunity to pull the rug out from under this entire
Speaker 4: kaya business model of disinformation and propaganda. And there was
Speaker 4: one study done last year which estimated that two point
Speaker 4: six billion dollars a year is spent advertising on some
Speaker 4: of the worst perpetrators of missing disinformation. That's not sustainable
Speaker 4: going forward.
Speaker 3: That's really interesting. I know, we definitely saw this culture
Speaker 3: war messaging around gas prices and the Russia Ukraine war
Speaker 3: here in the US. In that Influence Map study, I
Speaker 3: think they found that one of the top three messages
Speaker 3: was this like, you know, climate policy is something that
Speaker 3: only elite, woke liberals want and it's the thing that's
Speaker 3: driving up gas prices and whatever. But I'm wondering if
Speaker 3: you have a sense of when exactly that messaging framework
Speaker 3: started to appear and if there was any kind of
Speaker 3: catalyst for it, or if it just sort of has
Speaker 3: slowly started to bubble up as a dominant message.
Speaker 4: I think over probably the last decade, we have seen
Speaker 4: a broader societal and global level shift from what's often
Speaker 4: referred to as identity based polarization, so we hold polar
Speaker 4: opinions or stances on a particular issue, through to effective
Speaker 4: or identity based polarization, which is we might actually agree
Speaker 4: on the topic, but because I call myself X and
Speaker 4: you call yourself why, and we associate with different tribes,
Speaker 4: I automatically view myself in opposition and antagonism to you.
Speaker 4: So I think that that's something which is well beyond climate.
Speaker 4: It's applying to almost every aspect of public life, but
Speaker 4: has unfortunately also seeped into and ended up dominating the
Speaker 4: discussion around environmental issues. I see have only been doing
Speaker 4: research in this space for eighteen months, But one really
Speaker 4: acute example that I can give which shows how there
Speaker 4: is a lot of opportunism by adversary actors or those
Speaker 4: who oppose climate action, which is to piggyback on whatever
Speaker 4: else is happening in the news cycle in order to
Speaker 4: insert their pre existing world views and stances. And one
Speaker 4: that we saw in the last couple of years is
Speaker 4: that right from the beginning of the COVID nineteen pandemic.
Speaker 4: In March twenty twenty one, there were a number of
Speaker 4: individuals who were trying to land the idea of climate
Speaker 4: lockdown as a conspiracy, including a couple of actors associated
Speaker 4: with the Heartland Institute, where I'm sure many of your
Speaker 4: listeners will unfortunately be aware of the central hub and
Speaker 4: historic hub of climate denial climate skepticism, both in the
Speaker 4: US and transnationally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember seeing like Steve Molloy, for example.
Speaker 4: So Steve Manoy, you know, was really committed. He was
Speaker 4: putting out to meet right from marchway twenty one. And
Speaker 4: unfortunately for Steve Malloy, he does not boast a great
Speaker 4: organic reach on Twitter.
Speaker 3: I'm going to make him cry when he listen to this.
Speaker 4: Sorry, really know that the data speaks to itself. He
Speaker 4: was getting two or three or retweets. However, by September
Speaker 4: twenty twenty one, an article was released by a very
Speaker 4: renowned economist called Marianna Mattakato which was looking at environmental
Speaker 4: issues in the context of COVID nineteen and saying the
Speaker 4: kind of mobilized systemic global response that we've had around
Speaker 4: this pandemic, why are we not replicating that sense of
Speaker 4: urgency to climate change which poses an existential threat. And
Speaker 4: the article mentioned the language around climate lockdown, but not
Speaker 4: as something that in any way should be advocated. In fact,
Speaker 4: what the article was saying is if we don't take
Speaker 4: the necessary mitigation and adaptation steps, we may end up
Speaker 4: in a position where we don't have other options like
Speaker 4: we've had with the pandemic. And this was the point
Speaker 4: where the conspiracy went from being something on the fringe
Speaker 4: that was really not gaining traction and was absolutely failing
Speaker 4: to become a phenomenon into something that was turbocharged into
Speaker 4: the mainstream and has now become a central conspiracy in
Speaker 4: a number of anti climate movements. And the reason, in
Speaker 4: part is because so many of these conspiracies rely on
Speaker 4: a perceived reactionary dynamic with the mainstream media. So they
Speaker 4: saw this as perfect evidence. This provided the fodder or
Speaker 4: the grist to the mill for them to say, see, look,
Speaker 4: they've said the quiet part out loud. This pandemic is
Speaker 4: just a test bend for the kinds of green tyranny
Speaker 4: that is just looming on the horizon. And if you
Speaker 4: think that the kind of infringement on your civil liberties
Speaker 4: that are happening now are bad. You should see what's
Speaker 4: going to happen when the great reset happens for climate change,
Speaker 4: and what was so depressing to watch happened in real time,
Speaker 4: and IC have produced a whole report that really forensically
Speaker 4: tracks the evolution of this conspiracy, of the way that
Speaker 4: it moved then from being on the fringes driven by
Speaker 4: a small set of actors, to being taken up by
Speaker 4: the right wing media ecosystem Fox News, etc. And where
Speaker 4: it eventually ended up was in the QAnon telegram groups
Speaker 4: and the anti vaccination groups and the anti loocko on
Speaker 4: telegram groups, because it absolutely fit the same rhetorical and
Speaker 4: narrative frame, which is, you know, there are a group
Speaker 4: of people who are trying to take away your fundamental
Speaker 4: freedoms and change your life beyond all recognition. And it
Speaker 4: doesn't matter whether it's around public health or around environment.
Speaker 4: This needs to be opposed at all costs. And so
Speaker 4: it was such a neatly articulated case study of piggybacking
Speaker 4: on the news and exploiting the fact that people have
Speaker 4: real and genuine trauma in related to the pandemic. It's
Speaker 4: been an unbelievably distressing and difficult time for people around
Speaker 4: the globe, and lots of people do have legitimate grievances
Speaker 4: around the ways that their government have managed this pandemic
Speaker 4: and the kinds of measures that have been instituted, and
Speaker 4: they have cynically used that trauma to suddenly turn people
Speaker 4: against climate change as an issue and against climate action
Speaker 4: as a policy platform.
Speaker 3: It's so interesting just the flow of information and the
Speaker 3: way that it moves. I have seen a tendency to
Speaker 3: silo climate disinformation out as like a a separate thing,
Speaker 3: even from the government here. It's like they'll have all
Speaker 3: these hearings about disinformation in general that's very focused on
Speaker 3: like electoral politics and social media platforms and whatever, and
Speaker 3: then they'll have this separate side thing for climate disinformation.
Speaker 3: I'm just curious what you think about that. Why so
Speaker 3: many of the folks who have focused on disinformation kind
Speaker 3: of see climate as a whole separate thing.
Speaker 4: I think one of the reasons is that, up until now,
Speaker 4: there has been a very poorly defined taxonomy of harm
Speaker 4: for climate disinformation. What I mean by that is that
Speaker 4: in other areas like public health or electoral integrity or
Speaker 4: you know, extreme hate speech. There is a clear through line,
Speaker 4: or a clearer through line between a piece of content
Speaker 4: online and the imminent harm that it can pose in
Speaker 4: the real world. If somebody spreads information about a supposed
Speaker 4: cure for COVID nineteen and people take it and end
Speaker 4: up in a and E, that poses a real present
Speaker 4: danger for individuals and for society. If people spread false
Speaker 4: and misleading claims about an election being stolen, it can
Speaker 4: lead to an insurrection at the capitol, and so on
Speaker 4: and so forth. And where bad actors in the climate
Speaker 4: space have been very clever is in keeping it abstract
Speaker 4: enough that it feels like it can't be acted upon
Speaker 4: because it doesn't have that through line to real world harm.
Speaker 4: But I don't think that we can justify that anymore
Speaker 4: because the IPCC themselves, for the very first time this year,
Speaker 4: in their three thousand plus plage report on Climate Change
Speaker 4: in Mitigation, explicitly said that misleading content, including from industry
Speaker 4: actors and those with vested interests, had actively provided a
Speaker 4: block to achieve in climate action in line with the
Speaker 4: goals of the Paris Agreement and with scientific consensus. So
Speaker 4: if you view as we all should, based on the
Speaker 4: scientific evidence that climate change is a ever present threat
Speaker 4: and indeed already having devastating impacts for communities all around
Speaker 4: the world, including in America. You know, we're not just
Speaker 4: talking about the global self here, we're talking about communities
Speaker 4: on your doorstep. Then we should be taking this content seriously.
Speaker 4: So I think that's one of the reasons why it
Speaker 4: ends up being separated slightly, is that disinformation has been
Speaker 4: hard enough to mobilize a systemic response around in the
Speaker 4: first place, and people have been trying to focus on
Speaker 4: what they see as quote unquote the lowest hanging fruit,
Speaker 4: which is content that clearly has the potential for incitement
Speaker 4: to violence or causing harm at personal and a societal level.
Speaker 4: The other reason is that I just don't think anyone
Speaker 4: was talking about this issue in a mainstreamed way as
Speaker 4: part of the climate response until maybe a year ago.
Speaker 4: And I'm relatively new to this space, and I'm not
Speaker 4: saying that climate organizations have not been banging the drum
Speaker 4: about nihilism since the eighties, but more that it wasn't
Speaker 4: necessarily a mainstream media conversation or something that was being
Speaker 4: talked about within the political architecture. And indeed we've heard
Speaker 4: that from stakeholders and organizations like the unfrical C who
Speaker 4: run the climate summits in saying, you know, this really
Speaker 4: was not on our radar until a year ago. That's wild,
Speaker 4: and we're so glad that it is now, because of
Speaker 4: course we were kind of obliquely aware of the problem,
Speaker 4: and we know that there have been people that have
Speaker 4: been trying to push this but actively drawing the link
Speaker 4: between the information ecosystem public mandates and the ability to
Speaker 4: achieve strong nationally determined contributions and multilateral climate agreements, I'm
Speaker 4: not sure that that equation had ever been completed.
Speaker 3: Well, I think also, I mean, just speaking from my
Speaker 3: own experience, the mainstream media is very hesitant to cover
Speaker 3: this because they've been so comple listed in it. I
Speaker 3: wrote something for the washi In Post a few years
Speaker 3: ago about how the fossil feel industry had a real
Speaker 3: hand in creating false equivalents in general across the board,
Speaker 3: and my editor just sort of surgically removed any reference
Speaker 3: to anything that the Post themselves had also done in
Speaker 3: the past. So I don't even know if it's like
Speaker 3: cognizant or intentional, but they're very hesitant to run anything
Speaker 3: that you know, might implicate some of their own coverage.
Speaker 4: There is also a lot of cognitive dissonance or disparity
Speaker 4: within publications to this very day. Yes, I know, you
Speaker 4: can have outlets whose main editorial stance is absolutely recognizing
Speaker 4: the climate crisis, trying to put out nuanced journalism that
Speaker 4: talks about the level of urgency and the kinds of
Speaker 4: good faith debates that need to happen in order to
Speaker 4: implement climate policy that is appropriate for a given country. Who,
Speaker 4: at the same time will allow the fossil fuel industry
Speaker 4: to take out entire page adverts or and this is
Speaker 4: really really key, will allow climate deniers to post things
Speaker 4: in their editorial and their op ed pages right, And
Speaker 4: the amount of disparity that you see between breaking news
Speaker 4: coverage or sort of general reporting versus the op ed
Speaker 4: pages is absolutely staggering. My colleague Phil, he has absolutely
Speaker 4: dogged on this. The man is a machine. He has
Speaker 4: a running spreadsheet that looks at every single op ed
Speaker 4: on climate that has run in the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 4: from the nineteen nineties to now. And this figure is
Speaker 4: something like, I apologize if I slightly miscreat this, but
Speaker 4: in the ballpark of there have only ever been around
Speaker 4: ten op eds and that entire time that actually acknowledged
Speaker 4: the link between fossil fuels and climate changes are phenomenon.
Speaker 3: Wow, I wish I could say I'm surprised. You know.
Speaker 3: The sad thing about the Wall Street Journal too, is
Speaker 3: that pre Rupert Murdoch, they were like the biggest pain
Speaker 3: in the oil industry's ass. I mean, Mobile Oil in
Speaker 3: the eighties actually banned the Wall Street Journal from getting
Speaker 3: their press releases or talking to any of their executives
Speaker 3: because they were so mad about how critical the Wall
Speaker 3: Street Journal was being of the oil industry.
Speaker 4: And now you know, at Cock twenty six, what did
Speaker 4: they do. They gave Beyond Longblog his own special column,
Speaker 4: and even exactly in that column there was an editor's
Speaker 4: note that talked about how pure Lomborg was a neutral
Speaker 4: adjudicator in this discussion and was providing data based journalism
Speaker 4: in order to help the public navigate this really complex topic.
Speaker 4: I mean, you just as fair, because the thing is
Speaker 4: they are seen as a credible outlet, and you know,
Speaker 4: in so many other aspects of their reporting, they are
Speaker 4: the work that Jeff Orowitz and this team have done
Speaker 4: on social media platform accountability and the Facebook files absolutely
Speaker 4: extraordinary and very relevant to the report that we've just released.
Speaker 4: You know, we cite them a number of times, but
Speaker 4: we also have an entire section of the report that
Speaker 4: profiles the Wall Street Journal and the role they're playing
Speaker 4: in climate skepticism. So it's not consistent.
Speaker 3: Both your Lumberger and Michael Schollenberger have this thing, and
Speaker 3: the Canada Greenpeace guy Patrick Moore Patrick Well, to me,
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh my god, this is just right out
Speaker 3: of the right wing playbook too, of like the reformed environmentalist.
Speaker 3: They love a black man who hates civil rights too,
Speaker 3: or a woman who's anti abortion, But in climate in particular,
Speaker 3: it does seem to lend this kind of credibility. And
Speaker 3: I think that the message of like, oh, sure it's
Speaker 3: a thing, but it's not that bad, it's way more
Speaker 3: harmful than saying, oh, it's not happening at all.
Speaker 4: Of course, And think how successful that is and how
Speaker 4: powerful that can be as an argument for a couple
Speaker 4: of different reasons. The first is that these people absolutely
Speaker 4: lean into and create them brands around the idea that
Speaker 4: they are sober rationalist intellectuals and that they don't come
Speaker 4: with any sort of agenda on climate, but that they
Speaker 4: are fiscal pragmatists is very often kind of language that
Speaker 4: you'll see being used, and that they are neutral commentators
Speaker 4: on what is happening in the climate policy space, which
Speaker 4: is somewhat difficult to pass when you look at the
Speaker 4: fact that they also run organizations called things like the
Speaker 4: Co two Coalition, which claim that carbon should be celebrated
Speaker 4: because it enhances our lives and has improved the environment.
Speaker 3: Grows more appliance.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's also really interesting to see that this veneer
Speaker 5: of academical or scientific credibility, which is touted by by
Speaker 5: all three of the names that you've mentioned, but Patrick
Speaker 5: Moore in particular always harks back to his previous affiliation
Speaker 5: with Greenpeace.
Speaker 4: But Greenpeace themselves have put out an absolutely unequivocal statement
Speaker 4: that both fact checks the level or that the role
Speaker 4: that More played within the organization decades ago, but also
Speaker 4: have completely distanced themselves from his current stances and outputs
Speaker 4: on climate. And yet you know, he relies on the
Speaker 4: fact that people won't do their due diligence, and all
Speaker 4: they'll see is, oh, this is a person who says
Speaker 4: he used to be the co founder of Greenpeace, so
Speaker 4: I should trust what he says. It's a very savvy
Speaker 4: way of gaming the media landscape. It allows them to
Speaker 4: get continually platformed in the mainstream media, which is infuriating
Speaker 4: in the extreme because I don't know how many more
Speaker 4: times we need to document their financial or other affiliations
Speaker 4: with historic polluters, denialists, other unsavory and unbalidable characters. But
Speaker 4: clearly that efforts is not over. What we need to
Speaker 4: remove is basically the social license for these people to
Speaker 4: use or try and claim association degree movements when they
Speaker 4: are entirely going against the current scientific consensus. And what
Speaker 4: bodies like the IPCC and the un tricle C that
Speaker 4: I will size are bodies that almost every country around
Speaker 4: the world have signed onto and who have to approve
Speaker 4: the reports and the documents that come out. So these
Speaker 4: are not isolated bodies associated with one particular country. And say,
Speaker 4: why are we still treating these people as if they
Speaker 4: are credible spokesman. They're not, And every time that they
Speaker 4: appear in public life, we need to have some sort
Speaker 4: of counter effort that just re emphasizes look what these
Speaker 4: people were saying ten years ago. They were denialists, They
Speaker 4: now realize that denihalism is not a very useful tactic
Speaker 4: in public life, so they've shifted to delayism. Don't take
Speaker 4: them at their word. These people are committed to maintaining
Speaker 4: the status quo, and they will use whatever argument seems
Speaker 4: to have traction at a particular point in time, and
Speaker 4: they are lurking on the margins constantly for those points
Speaker 4: of entry provided by as I said before, the news
Speaker 4: cycle or the particular hot button issue or corese celebra
Speaker 4: at any given time to remake in a different form
Speaker 4: the same arguments that they've been using for fifteen years.
Speaker 3: In Schellenberger's case, and that now I'm seeing Mark Morano
Speaker 3: do this to this thing of calling themselves journalists now
Speaker 3: as a way to legitimize themselves. And I wonder if
Speaker 3: that's something that you've seen either amongst some of these
Speaker 3: other actors or in other realms of disinformation.
Speaker 4: Yes. Absolutely, And this is part of the reason why
Speaker 4: we cautioned against these all out media exemptions being enshrined
Speaker 4: in tech regulation, because very often the definitions of what
Speaker 4: isn't journalism are quite blurred, and some of the policy
Speaker 4: that we are seeing being debated, for example, the online safety.
Speaker 4: But in the UK I think could pose a large
Speaker 4: number of issues in people calling themselves citizen journalists and
Speaker 4: therefore under the wording of these policies claiming exemption from
Speaker 4: any kind of content moderation or punitive action against their
Speaker 4: accounts and when they violate terms of service. So again,
Speaker 4: it's a tactic, partly as a way of laundering their
Speaker 4: image and making them seem more credible, but also it's
Speaker 4: kind of casting their minds ahead to how can we
Speaker 4: avoid any scrutiny for what we're doing in the future
Speaker 4: by using the language of being a media outlet or
Speaker 4: being a journalist to escape repercussions for our actions.
Speaker 3: That's so interesting. I do sometimes wonder if some of
Speaker 3: these contrariants do they even have a driving political ideology
Speaker 3: or is this just like a handy way to make money.
Speaker 4: That's kind of the million dollar question, isn't it. I'm
Speaker 4: not sure I have the answer. I feel as though
Speaker 4: if you look at some of these actors, it's difficult
Speaker 4: to make the argument that they are not entirely cynical
Speaker 4: and just using whatever tools are at their disposal to
Speaker 4: create the most incendary and sensationist content drive as much
Speaker 4: traffic as possible to their channels and to their products
Speaker 4: and their services, and therefore generate as much revenue as possible.
Speaker 4: But I do also believe that some of these people
Speaker 4: have completely drunk the call aid, whether it's their cooler
Speaker 4: or others, and do honestly believe that climate changes, I
Speaker 4: don't know, not a problem, or that the fossil fuel
Speaker 4: industry is going to solve it all with unsubstantiated technologies
Speaker 4: like carbon capture and storage, and that none of us
Speaker 4: need to worry because if we leave the free market
Speaker 4: to solve the issue, we'll be fine.
Speaker 1: That's it for this time, Thanks for listening, and we'll
Speaker 1: see you next week.