Greta, Kamala, and the rising tide of climate misinformation
In this space each week, triplecheck will share information on the climate misinformation we’re seeing online – what’s going viral, how many people are seeing it, and who’s responsible for moving it. triplecheck was initiated by the Climate Action Campaign and was created to develop innovative tools to help fight misinformation.
This week, approximately 6 million people were exposed to misinformation about climate change (5/24 to 5/31). A video of Greta Thunberg from the UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019 and a January 2021 video of Sky News host Alan Jones attacking her as being “uninformed, disinformed, [and illiterate] resurfaced and reached more than 5 million human users on Twitter and 26,000 likes on Facebook. Content attacking Vice President Harris for touting clean energy use by the military reached more than 2.2 million human users on Twitter. And a series of tweets blaming clean energy initiatives in California for rolling blackouts in the state by climate denier Michael Shellenberger reached more than 500,000 users.
Oh, Michael Shellenberger. First of all, he’s wrong about the impact of California’s clean energy initiatives: state officials stated in August of 2020 that the use of renewable energy had nothing to do with electricity outages in California last summer.
Second of all, Shellenberger is frequently wrong about lots of different things. His recent book, Apocalypse Never, according to one reviewer, was "riddled with errors," and an essay he wrote for Forbes summarizing the main points in his book was tagged as having low scientific credibility by Facebook fact checkers. Shellenberger also called the mainstream environmental movement "anti-human" and "an infectious disease" in interviews.
In the aftermath of the riot on January 6, Shellenberger tweeted that QAnon activist Jake Angeli Chansley, the bare-chested man wearing horns and a fur vest who was part of the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol Building and assaulted police officers, was a paid actor and possibly a climate activist. His tweets have since been deleted, but you can see screenshots of them here in this post on Heated. This was part of a larger theme being pushed by the right (which has been widely debunked) that "antifa" and paid actors were actually responsible for the riot; online content linking Angeli to climate activists was also debunked.
Shellenberger is a perfect example of a “contrarian” author or scientist, and those voices are integral to the spread of climate misinformation. A 2017 study found that although climate journalists consistently dismiss climate change denial, they still give “substantial media attention” to contrarians like Shellenberger, who consistently challenge mainstream science and present it as part of a balanced debate. That faux search for “balance” is why Congressional Republicans still ask him to testify on clean energy and climate change issues, and why his testimony largely goes unchallenged.
The tide of climate misinformation is rising, and these examples demonstrate the need for behavior-focused engagement and how it can support traditional fact-checking efforts that expose the lies behind these campaigns.