COP, LOOK, LISTEN ISSUE 1 | 12 NOV 24

Welcome to the first edition of COP, LOOK, LISTEN 2024, your regular bulletin analysing the state of climate communications during COP29. It’s brought to you by Climate Action Against Disinformation, a coalition of over 70 organisations fighting climate dis- and misinformation worldwide.

COP29, the “Finance COP,” is underway, with participants strategizing in advance of the Leaders Summit today.

This is the first year that the planet will likely see an average over 1.5 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. It’s the second consecutive conference held in a petrostate and the third in a country with a poor human rights record. The world is “on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster”, but many world leaders have stayed home. And the US has again elected a super-spreader of climate disinformation as president.

But the implications of this COP are, arguably, the most important since Paris 2015, because “climate finance has always been the crux of global climate action”. As multiple experienced observers have pointed out, now is the time for richer nations to signal strong emissions reductions whilst committing to a robust climate finance goal and an adequate loss and damage fund.

We’ll be keeping watch for misinformation, misleading narratives and tactics straight out of the disinformation playbook throughout. For today, we present key findings from our new report.

FINDINGS OF THE DAY

For the fourth year running, CAAD has found a digital information landscape dangerously polluted with climate misinformation. In our report, launched on the first day of COP, we found that Big Oil and Big Tech are facilitating an ongoing reframing of extreme weather events, as well as ready solutions to the crisis, turning both topics into fodder for opposition to climate action.

Extreme Weather, Extreme Content: How Big Tech Enables Climate Disinformation In a World on the Brink

Our key findings:

• Opposition to renewables: Despite having years to clean up their platforms, Big Tech continues to allow a small number of “super-spreaders” to pollute their platforms with debunked claims attacking renewable energy and electric vehicles. Many claims are uncannily similar to ones seen during COP26, three years ago. Increasingly, renewable energies are also framed as a tool for social control.
• Weaponising wildfires: Disinformation operations are exploiting extreme weather events to fuel opposition to climate policies, and recently, have led to threats of violence against emergency response personnel. Content actively seeks to decouple extreme weather from its environmental drivers.
• Fossil fuel advertising on Meta: Fossil fuel companies continue to use digital advertising to launder their image. Eight fossil fuel advertisers paid just one platform, Meta, at least $17.6 million for over 700 million impressions over the past year. See our greenwashing tracker below for some examples.

Data access in dire straits

Given the extreme nature of the weather events the world is experiencing, tracking and dissecting trends at scale and in real time is more important than ever. But production of this report was more of a struggle than ever, because of a steep decline in researcher access to data, and, it pains us to say, a slow and haphazard response from platforms to new EU legislation.

If you cannot diagnose a problem, you cannot hope to fix it.

This is not an unsolvable problem

A host of initiatives and legislations like the UN Global Principles, the Global Digital Compact and the EU Digital Services Act demonstrate that we know which levers exist and how they can improve our information ecosystem.

However, such levers must focus on the profit motives for content creators that disinform, the tech platforms who take a cut, and, crucially, the polluters who, year after year, rake in revenue exploiting this system. We cannot fixate on mitigating post-by-post, but must address the systems behind them and the actors they reward, whether corporate, state-sponsored, political or individual.

CAAD’s policy asks, when enacted, can solve a big portion of the climate misinformation problem on social media platforms.

GREENWASHING TRACKER

Welcome back to our regular feature, the greenwashing tracker! The abundance of deceptive promotions by the fossil fuel industry is a lot to get your head around. We’ve got you covered. Today we bring you four examples right from our Extreme Weather, Extreme Content report, all promoted on Meta between January 1 and October 24, 2024.

Together with scorecard after scorecard on these corporate entities’ lack of progress on climate change, these advertising examples demonstrate that fossil fuel companies and their front groups are more interested in greenwashing than meeting their net zero commitments.

Found something particularly interesting? Send it our way at [email protected]

ExxonMobil’s promotion of fossil-fuel oriented solutions

Why invest in renewable energy when you can keep investing in fossil fuels and claim it’s sustainable? ExxonMobil claims world leadership in carbon capture, but where do they really stand out? Of the four fossil fuel entities covered in our report, they look to be the leader in this form of greenwashing. ExxonMobil spent over $900,000 on Social Issues, Electoral and Political ads with on Meta in the first 10 months of 2024, garnering over 22 million impressions.

See the ad on Meta’s ad library.

BP’s “And, not or” 1 year anniversary

Last year we spotted a raft of ads during COP28 from BP with the slogan “and, not or”. This refrain perfectly encapsulates the messaging we see from fossil fuel adverts every day—presenting fossil fuels as an essential and even low carbon component of the energy transition, especially to bolster economies during difficult moments. So far this year, BP spent even more than ExxonMobil on Meta advertising (over $1.1 million), much of it greenwashing via its UK and US brands, for a total of over 75 million impressions.

See the ad on Meta’s ad library.

Front group pushes hard advocacy messaging

The biggest spender of all entities we tracked by quite some margin in our Extreme Weather, Extreme Content report was industry front group Energy Citizens. The group spent nearly $5 million in the time period measured. The content portrays fossil fuels as an essential source of energy for security and independence. A message that we often see going hand in hand with a softer stance in emphasizing fossil fuel-oriented approaches to the green transition.

See the advert on Meta’s ad library   

Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future and the AI revolution

Targeting younger audiences on average, this front group for the fossil fuel industry has spent more modest sums this year, but at a highly efficient price, gaining more than twice the amount of impressions per $ spent than any other entity studied. The group frames fossil gas (which it refers to as “natural gas”) as a partner to renewable energy, especially in fuelling the “AI revolution.”

See the advert on Meta’s ad library.

GOOD TO KNOW

A lot of speculation has been circulating regarding Trump’s victory in the US and its implications for COP. But so far, at least, we’ve not seen any major disinformation that would derail the talks. We’ll keep you posted.

Buckle up, there’s a lot of information out there. The beginning of COP usually sees a spike in climate coverage worldwide. With it comes a torrent of misinformation, conspiracy theories, greenwashing and junk science. Here are some essential resources for the deluge to come.

– Backgrounder on climate dis- and misinformation.

– Journalist field guide on navigating climate misinformation in reporting.

– CAAD’s key policy asks for social media, search engines, ad tech providers and publishing companies.

– Briefing on a potential fossil fuel advertising ban.

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 team members on the ground in Azerbaijan who are available for interviews and side-events.