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COP LOOK LISTEN ISSUE 06 | 17 NOV 25

Climate Disinfo Digest Issue 17 November 2025

Good day and welcome back to week two of COP30. You might be seeing a fuller venue than usual and no, your eyes do not deceive you! 531 CCS lobbyists are registered here this week. Outnumbering almost every national delegation. For a technology that has consistently failed to deliver real emission cuts, CCS is getting some remarkable access. 

Now AI hype is giving fossil companies an even bigger stage. With energy hungry data centers booming, they’re pairing AI and CCS to rebrand fossil expansion as “innovation” – a convenient new escape hatch. 

And beyond the venue, the information landscape is being shaped just as strategically. The super-rich are steering climate narratives, muddying public understanding at the exact moment clarity is most urgent. 

COP30 didn’t get here on its own. It’s crowded – and in some cases carried – by forces working hard to slow real progress. If you want a deeper, more academic look at how obstruction has been baked into the UNFCCC process, check out Dr. Danielle Falzon’s comments from last Friday’s press conference. In the words of former Vice President Al Gore in a recent episode of Outrage & Optimism, “The turtle didn’t get there by itself.” 

FINDING OF THE DAY

Today’s analysis comes courtesy of some great work done by Avery Kaplan, and as you’ll notice, features a lot of references to the Union of Concerned Scientists, who are a key CAAD ally in the fight against climate disinformation. For this analysis, we used the peer-reviewed CARDS LLM from our friends at C3DS of Exeter Uni to classify the claims based on its taxonomy of climate denial, resulting in a tally of false claims that can serve as a way to track disinfo narrative utility over time. 

Using CARDS analyses of disinformation narratives present in the July DOE Climate Working Group report, the current U.S. President’s most recent UN speech, and old fossil fuel industry (FFI) deception documents, you can see that the narratives used by certain US officials today are the same that were seeded by the FFI half a century ago. These narratives echo mainly within FFI circles and their disinfo outlets, while the rest of the world moves  toward a less FF-bound, more climate-positive future.

We used the CARDS system to identify the most frequently used of these five narratives in current and past climate disinformation examples, showing that the industry-seeded narratives of decades past are the same ones still being used as excuses for inaction by partisans in power. 

The five main categories of climate disinformation are 1) global warming isn’t happening, 2) that humans aren’t causing it, 3) climate impacts aren’t bad, but 4) climate solutions are bad, and of course 5) you can’t trust climate science or activists. 

First up was the current U.S. administration’s Department of Energy “sham” report on climate change by a handful of contrarians who “cherry-picked,” misrepresented, and otherwise tortured the data so badly it motivated a team of 85 real experts to spend their time debunking it thoroughly. 

The CARDS system identified over 200 instances of disinformation in the report, just across the two top categories. When we ran this material through the CARDS tool, the two dominant denial categories were:

  • “Climate science is uncertain, unsound, unreliable, or biased” (132 claims)
  • “The impacts of climate change will not be bad and might even be beneficial.” (77 claims)

The lie that climate science is uncertain was also frequent in the current U.S. President’s speech to the United  Nations. Described as “something akin to a marketing pitch for American fossil fuels,” The current U.S. Administration’s climate policy stance, which critics say downplays established climate science, stands in contrast to the global move towards clean energy, a position countered by most other world leaders. 

When we ran the transcript of the speech through the CARDS tool, the two dominant denial categories identified were:

  • “Climate solutions are harmful or unnecessary” (25 claims)
  • “Climate science is uncertain, unsound, unreliable, or biased” (7 claims)

Ahead of COP, several world leaders challenged U.S. President Trump’s denialism head-on. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that “climate misinformation today poses a threat to our democracies, to the Paris agenda.” 

Chilean President Boric was even more blunt,  responding to claims that climate change is a hoax: “That is a lie.”

And not a subtle one, because as the CARDS analysis of older, legacy climate disinformation documents shows, these misleading narratives have been around for decades.  

The fossil fuel industry didn’t stumble into climate denial – it engineered it. 

A playbook of denialism tactics was developed in the mid- to late-20th century by fossil fuel enterprises and interests. Importantly, these parties knew “the dangers their products pose to the global climate and understood that climate action would threaten their business models.” With the public still unclear on attribution science, these companies saw an opening – and filled it with doubt. 

A prime example: the American Petroleum Institute’s 1998 “Roadmap” memo. Designed for API’s Big Oil giants like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell, it laid out a strategy to block climate action by flooding the media with false claims, undermining scientific certainty, and making climate policy advocates “appear to be out of touch with reality.”

When we ran this material through the CARDS tool, the two dominant denial categories were:

  • “Climate science is uncertain, unsound, unreliable, or biased” (28 claims)
  • “Climate solutions are harmful or unnecessary” (5 claims)

Next, we tested a series of ExxonMobil op-eds:, a frequent denial monger that published a string of “propaganda” op-eds in 2000, which aimed to “highlight uncertainty regarding impacts and paint Exxon as a key to the solution for global climate change.” 

The text downplays immediate action strategically, using manufactured uncertainty to emphasize the need for more research or development, pushing off climate action until the mythical “right moment” of adequate knowledge (which won’t arrive) or satisfactory technology (which doesn’t exist) comes to be.

Climate science in 2000 was not vague at all. “Scientific evidence of the cause and impacts of climate change was well documented,” accompanied by the release of the 2000 National Climate Assessment and the 2001 IPCC report that corroborated the “new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”

CARDS flagged the same pattern here, same claims, though flipped:

  • “Climate solutions are harmful or unnecessary” (23 claims)
  • “Climate science is uncertain, unsound, unreliable, or biased” (6 claims)

Only when we go all the way back to the  1991 “Information Council on the Environment” (ICE), do we find any difference in the top 2 tier, with content that directly denies that greenhouse gases from humans are causing climate change coming in second, after, again, disinformation about the certainty of climate science from ICE, an organization representing electrical and coal trade interests. ICE’s campaign attempted to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” using various ad formats that presented false science, downplayed the urgency of climate change, and undermined the integrity of climate scientists and academics.

Analyzing ICE’s materials, including responses to people asking for more “facts,” CARDS found:

  • “Climate science is uncertain, unsound, unreliable, or biased” (29 claims) 
  • “Greenhouse gases from humans are not causing climate change” (11 claims)

So yes – we have at least moved past public debates over whether human emissions warm the planet. But if it takes another 30 years to move past the attacks on climate science, and solutions, it will be far too late. 

GOOD TO KNOW

LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS

If you have any investigative leads CAAD should explore, or want to find out more about our research and intel during the summit, please email [email protected]. We also have members on the ground in Belém who are available for interviews and side-events.