Last week, we pointed out how disinformation peddlers and outlets sprang into action in the immediate chaos and confusion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, blaming greens from Greta to President Biden for Russia’s aggression.
Since then, Republicans have only further doubled-down on the patently ridiculous notion that climate activists calling for clean energy instead of fossil fuels are responsible for continued reliance on fossil fuels, and thankfully, political journalists are starting to report on it.
Ben Lefebvre and Zack Colman, for example, wrote a piece at Politico taking apart the GOP’s latest disinfo talking points, though really, all you need to read is the headline: Republicans seize on Ukraine to attack Biden's climate policies. But the facts are against them.
Making sure that even non-readers who are skimming headlines are informed that the political propaganda covered is false is one of the most important things journalists can do when covering disinformation, because an order of magnitude more people will skim the headline than will actually click through to read the content.
And they’d miss out, because the Politico piece not only clearly describes how Republicans are trying to “link President Joe Biden’s climate policy and rising gasoline prices to the war in Ukraine,” but more importantly that “their rhetoric largely defies reality.”
Instead of heavily quoting from the disinformation, the piece largely links out to reference it, only including actual quotes between content properly contextualizing it as false or misleading, for example explaining that Biden hasn’t limited oil exports at all, that “the Interior Department processed more oil and gas drilling permits during Biden’s first year in office than the Trump administration did in its final year” and that domestic oil production in the US is “close to where it was before the Covid-era collapse in fuel demand in 2020.”
Politico does quote Republicans blaming Biden’s Keystone XL cancellation for high oil prices, but only to then point out that it “wouldn't be transporting oil now even if Biden had allowed the project to proceed” and just as importantly, “it hasn't stopped shipments from Canada” so that oil is still on the global market.
They even include a reference to how ridiculous it is, writing that “many energy experts roll their eyes at the notion that shifting toward green energy was putting countries at the mercy of producers like Russia.”
Going a step further, they even, somehow, got a quote from the head of Ukraine’s national natural gas company, who told them, “The move to renewables was and is the right thing to do, but it is intertwined with geopolitics. The success of both the climate change fight and containing Russia depends on how the world manages the simultaneous transition from dependence on both Russia and fossil fuels."
In a fair world where Republicans were bound by truth and reality, Politico’s debunking of the myth would put it to rest, and we’d move on to the next good-faith debate. But of course this world is not fair, and no one can stop liars from telling lies.
But you can at least try and balance them with the truth, which is what a recent Bloomberg story by Ari Natter and Jennifer Dlouhy does, reporting on Big Oil’s efforts to exploit the Ukraine war but including some great quotes and analysis to let readers know the reality that, for example while the industry is clamoring for more permits to drill, they're already sitting on around 9,000 unused permits.
API and others were pushing for the Biden administration to lift what few regulations are in place to constrain their pollution before Russia even breached the Ukrainian border. As Collin Rees of Oil Change International told Bloomberg, that industry is “trying to take incredibly cynical advantage of a really tragic situation. That makes it all the more clear we need to break our dependence on fossil fuels around the world and that means more distributed renewables.”
A similar call from the nuclear industry to pad their profits with public funds was described in the Bloomberg story as “shameless opportunism,” by Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Those sorts of quotes are important because they let readers know that the claims are as ridiculously false and self-serving as they seem, there isn’t some secret sophistication, it’s just sophistry.
None of that, unfortunately, comes through in an Associated Press piece by Matthew Daly, which largely and uncritically repeats the oil industry and Republican’s false attacks, and makes basically no attempt to inform readers that the claims are false. The same narratives that Bloomberg and Politico point out are wrong are parroted in the AP, but without any mention that Keystone’s cancellation doesn’t change anything, or that there are plenty of oil and gas leases already available so a moratorium on new leases doesn’t mean a thing for 2021 and 2022.
Given that the AP's recent move to expand its climate reporting with philanthropic funding spurred a flurry of disinformation, they would do well to improve their disinfo reporting before they’re tricked into reporting false attacks on themselves.