Brazilian president Lula da Silva said Cop30 must be the “Cop of Truth” but in a world of disinformation, greenwashing and faux science, establishing the truth around climate needs more than a slogan.
AI-generated images of whales killed by offshore wind turbines have plagued the wind industry.
False claims that renewables sparked last April’s massive power outage in Spain and Portugal poured doubt on solar energy.
Conspiracy theories that geoengineering caused Hurricane Helene’s unprecedented flooding in North Carolina so as to facilitate a land-grab led to obstruction of emergency responders.
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Sometimes the lie is obvious and the motivation behind it clear but other times the muddle is, as the US president might say, tremendous.
To discredit Cop30 as a gathering of hypocrites, Donald Trump repeated and amplified reports about the felling of hundreds of thousands of trees in the Amazon rainforest for construction of a highway to ferry world leaders to the Belém host city in comfort.
Trump caring about trees was an odd turn of events but it seemed he had a point.
But the highway – an act of environmental destruction though it may be – is a project over a decade in the planning, before Lula and Cop30 were on the scene.
And few leaders will have cruised down its still incomplete carriageways because they flew into the local airport, a few minutes’ drive from the city centre.
There’s some truth in the story but not the whole truth and not only the truth.
“The climate crisis is also an information crisis,” said Thais Lazzeri, investigative journalist and founder of Fala, a Brazilian film production company focused on human rights.
Lazzeri launched the Climate Action Against Disinformation campaign yesterday to urge a fightback against the lies and distortion.
Round one of that fight is already won – “information integrity” made it on to the summit’s agenda for the first time.
Backed by the Brazilian government, the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change launched a declaration calling on governments, the private sector, civil society and academia to counter “the growing impact of disinformation, misinformation, denialism and deliberate attacks on environmental journalists, defenders, scientists and researchers”.
“We live in an era in which obscurantists reject scientific evidence and attack institutions,” said Lula da Silva.
“It is time to deliver yet another defeat to denialism.”
Lazzeri’s campaign has the support of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Climate Social Science Network and scores of other groups.
“Disinformation is not an accident – it’s a business model,” she said.
The launch heard fossil fuel companies didn’t act alone but used and were supported by public relations and law firms, think tanks, trade associations, media and social media.
That last element is of particular concern.
“Governments need to see this as a public safety issue,” said Ben Backwell, chief executive of the Global Wind Energy Council.
“They can’t be saying this is just free speech. The big social media platforms are controlled by five or six people – that’s not freedom of speech.”
Law charity, Client Earth, is also focusing on social media’s role in climate misinformation.
It published a guide for using the EU Digital Services Act to force social media platforms to identify and remove misinformation.
“If the digital services act is well enforced, then the big social media platforms need to put in place specific policies and measures to respond to this,” said Pierre Cannet, the charity’s head of global public affairs.
“The Digital Services Act is a very important legal tool but the truth is, it’s not being used.”
