Deny, Deceive, Delay: Demystified
Exposing the Climate Disinfo Illusions Big Tech Creates For Big Carbon
Today the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition publishes Deny, Deceive, Delay: Demystified How Big Carbon uses disinformation to sabotage climate action, and how we stop them. It covers the Brazilian disinformation environment leading up to COP30, and then steps back to explain the history of climate obstruction, and why despite the 89% global demand for climate action, UN negotiations have failed to deliver. Spoiler alert: they’ve been sabotaged by Big Carbon, who turned to Big Tech to upend the post-Paris Agreement consensus.
How did we get here? And why does it feel so hopeless? “Deny, Deceive, Delay: Demystified exposes Big Carbon and Big Tech’s grand illusion that makes us underestimate public support for climate action,” according to CAAD communications co-chair Philip Newell, “making us feel like the battle is over, despite the fact that not only is it still happening, but we may just be winning, because progress that is being made all over the world. CAAD’s grown from a handful of us to over a hundred organizations around the world, with members achieving policy wins from fossil fuel ad bans on the local level to national efforts addressing greenwashing to international wins like getting information integrity on the COP30 action agenda. And we’re just getting started.”
After four years of monitoring disinformation around the annual UN COP negotiations, CAAD’s pre-COP30 report represents a turning point in the struggle to confront climate disinformation. No longer is CAAD a relatively lone player in monitoring COP climate disinfo, as we’ve been working with FALA, who will be providing COP30 climate disinfo updates in Oii, their Brazilian-focused climate disinfo newsletter. No longer is CAAD a relatively lone voice in the climate disinfo research realm either, as two major academic assessments of climate disinformation were published in 2025, one from the Climate Social Science Network, and the other the International Panel on the Information Environment. And no longer is CAAD a relatively lone voice in calling for solutions, as none other than the UN Secretary General has taken to calling on us all to “fight mis-and disinformation, online harassment, and greenwashing.”
That call is being answered, as Brazil has put information integrity on the action agenda at COP30, and worked with the UN, UNESCO, CAAD and others to establish the Global Initiative on Information Integrity on Climate Change.
During COP30, CAAD will produce regular disinformation bulletins on the information environment, which you can sign up for here, as will FALA, here!
Download Deny, Deceive, Delay: Demystified How Big Carbon uses disinformation to sabotage climate action, and how we stop them here. PT version also available here.
