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COP LOOK LISTEN ISSUE 10 | 21 NOV 25

Climate Disinfo Digest Issue 21 November 2025

Hello and welcome to what is officially the last day of COP30 – though, as always, the gavel may have weekend plans of its own (and it looks like Lula’s COP of Truth could come true as information integrity is currently in the current Mutirão draft text, potentially a huge win, pending the final drop). If anything substantial breaks, you’ll be hearing from us again (trust us, we’re as curious as you are). Now, on to the main course.

In the month leading up to COP30, in Belém, Brazil, Big Oil cranked up its Google Ads in the country by 2,900%, as a last minute cash dump aimed at smothering public demand for climate action, according to a new report released today by CAAD and the Climainfo Institute, with some help from C3DS.

It found 665 ads from Brazil’s state-owned Petrobras, and over 10,000 ads from Saudi Aramco over the course of 2025 so far, while BP increased its number of google ads by 1,369.2% in October.

“Oil companies have intensified their presence on Google Ads precisely in the months leading up to COP30.” says Climainfo researcher Renata Albuquerque Ribeiro, who led the analysis. “They know this is a decisive moment in which countries will define the next steps in the energy transition. Countries must take advantage of this strategic moment to design and approve a roadmap towards the end of fossil fuels.”

Of course, Big Carbon doesn’t just burn through oil – it burns through big bucks buying friends, making it harder to convince everyone to finally cut them off. And the problem isn’t only digital; it’s deeply local and personal. As one of the researchers behind another new report, from Klimakultur put it:  “What really stood out to us was how personal and local many of these fossil-fuel sponsorships are. Young children at LEGO competitions with Equinor logos on their team shirts, or community events in small coastal cities, truly are the frontline of climate disinformation. How do you build resistance to something involving your teachers, parents, neighbours — people and institutions you trust? Understanding the local context of petroganda in Norway or Brazil is essential if we want to build awareness and engagement. We hope this report can be a small contribution to that.”

Together, the two reports offer a roadmap for decoding, and ultimately defanging, the wave of oil-funded petrogranda stretching from Norway to Brazil.

FINDING OF THE DAY

As Big Carbon buys ads on google and sponsors fun in-person events in the real world, it’s also distributing disinformation digitally through podcasts. While radio and TV broadcasts are relatively regulated, podcasts, being online, have little to no such information integrity standards, and it shows.

In a March report, Media Matters for America identified the top 10 podcasts with the largest following across streaming and social media platforms, and aside from What Now? with Trevor Noah, the rest were reliably right-wing: Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, Theo Von, Charlie Kirk, Nelk Boys’ Full Send Podcast, Candace Owens, and Dr. Phil.

Climate disinformation is frequently found on these podcasts, and it’s not coincidental, or driven by popular demand, as four of those 10 podcasts/personalities have been backed by major fossil fuel funding: Ben Shapiro , Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, and Candace Owens.

Expanding on this past research, CAAD conducted a year-over-year analysis with the the peer-reviewed CARDS LLM from our friends at C3DS of Exeter Uni, comparing the content of the episodes published by these top 10 podcasts  from January – November 12, 2024 to the content during the same time period 2025, just after COP30 kicked off.

We found a steady rise in what’s been called the “new climate denial,” disinformation about solutions, scientists, and praise for fossil fuels.<> As the public largely recognizes the scientific consensus on fossil fuels causing climate change, narratives attacking solutions are becoming more useful to gain public traction for climate inaction. 

With nearly a third, 461, of the total 1,564 false claims, the most “new climate denial” claims so far in 2025 came from Ben Shapiro, whose Daily Wire was launched with at least $4.7 million in fossil fuel funds.

The most frequently found false claims were that “climate solutions are harmful,” which the CARDS model identified some 404 times, while the next most common, at 305 claims, was that “climate solutions are ineffective.”

The fastest growing category was in claims that climate scientists, governments, and proponents of climate action are alarmist.  Those shot up roughly 138%, from 95 to 226, making it the third most common false claim.

Claims that climate impacts will not be bad (and might even be beneficial) rose from 105 to 168 detected claims (an increase of roughly 60%) while the claim that “we need fossil fuels to meet energy demand” increased by 44%.

Claims arguing for the necessity and continued use of fossil fuels increased by roughly 20%, appearing at least 213 times and rounding out the four most-frequent false claims.

The overarching disinfo trend is clear: “climate solutions won’t work” is the denial machine’s go-to strategy in 2025.

The most dramatic increase was seen in the “climate scientists, governments, and proponents of climate action are alarmist,” narrative, which did not appear frequently in the legacy disinfo documents CAAD analyzed earlier this week. But it’s a familiar tactic in right-wing media, which often leans on anti-establishment posturing and ad hominem attacks to target anyone prominent in the climate space.

While official industry documents and political speeches try to keep things respectable, the fossil fuel-funded online influencers face no such constraints. They get far more traction with simple and incendiary messages that often flirt with or celebrate harassment and violence against climate activists and scientists, as we’ve documented for years.

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