On Friday a coalition of environmental and tech accountability organizations sent an open letter to leadership of Facebook, Twitter, and other major social media platforms, calling on them to protect their users from the fossil fuel industry’s false advertising climate disinformation.
“As we approach November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26),” the letter reads, “it’s never been more clear that we are running out of time to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change.” And because “research has outlined that it is far more efficient to prevent the spread of disinformation than to try to correct it afterward,” and “analysis shows the mass of paid and organic disinformation comes from a few bad actors that are well-connected to the oil and gas industry,” the groups are “calling on all big tech platforms to take concrete, transparent steps to eliminate climate disinformation.”
They demand that social media companies adopt policies to “eliminate climate disinformation”, and apply “consistent standards to rapidly deplatform professional climate denial influencers and repeat offenders” while also creating fact-checking policies (that are “protected from politicization by company staff”) and “a ban on paid ads from serial climate deniers, like fossil fuel companies that have systematically lobbied against climate action.”
While any such ad ban might’ve been considered inconceivable by some until recently, Google and Youtube’s recent move to demonetize climate denial and ban denial ads is exactly the sort of thing that’s needed, and of course already has deniers howling. At the Murdoch-owned New York Post, Koched-up and self-ashamed lobbyist Daniel Turner attempted to high-road the issue with quotes from “British philosopher Wittgenstein” that essentially questioned “what is a climate denier?”
Turner then provides exactly the answer in his various claims downplaying the climate crisis, as is his job.
And it’s not like it’s hard to figure out climate denial, either. Take the recent Bjorn Lomborg Faecbook post with 1k reactions, that describes a Nature comment as a study, and more importantly, claims it says electric cars are "net-bad everywhere." Click through to the Nature link he calls a “study,” though, and find out that the comment he cites says "some countries with lots of clean electricity sources, such as Norway, are already at a point at which electrifying a truck has more climate benefits than safety costs.” Oh. So not only is it not a study, it also contradicts his claim that EVs are worse everywhere!
He gets to this twisted point by extrapolating that if EVs are heavier than traditional cars (because of the batteries) then the extra deaths from those EVs hitting and killing people outweigh any climate gains.
(And even though it's not directly relevant here, we'll spin your brain one more time by reminding you that climate deniers supported the previous administration's lowering of fuel efficiency standards because, they said, lighter cars would lead to more deaths.)
Lomborg's claim that EVs are always bad is sophisticated sophistry, while social media is also full of more base denial, like this image post, also over the 1k mark, making fun of liberals for "coal fired electric cars." But obviously grids aren’t all coal these days, and both types of climate denial are refuted by a major report showing that even in coal-heavy grids, a life-cycle assessment shows that EVs are better than traditional gasoline-powered cars, a finding in line with other peer-reviewed studies. (And as of 2020, clean energy surpassed coal power globally, making the argument increasingly less true as the transition continues!)
But by focusing on the fact that EVs are a bit heavier than their traditional competition, Lomborg conveniently ignores the fact that it’s pickups and SUVs that have supersized the definitely-not-compensating-for-anything bigger-is-better auto arms race. If vehicle weight and related safety issues are a concern, the millions of giant SUVs would be a more sensible target than the emerging electric vehicle market. After all, public transit is both safer and cleaner than private cars, so if Lomborg were really all that concerned about any of this, promoting public funding for public transit — not to mention pedestrian and bike-friendly infrastructure — would be his priority.
But those aren't his priority, because his priority is attacking climate solutions. And that's exactly why he's the sort of climate disinformation professional who should be kicked off social media.
