Of Course "Misinformation" Isn’t the Cause of Climate Change

By Alex Trembath

The world currently produces over 8 billion tons of coal, 35 billion barrels of oil, 115 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer, and 4 trillion cubic meters of natural gas every year. There are over 1.3 million miles of rail lines, 2 million miles of liquid and gas pipelines, and 40 million miles of roads in the world. There are an estimated 800 crude oil refineries, 3000 petrochemical plants, and 35,000 mines. There are about 1.5 billion cars and 1.5 billion cows. A little less than one third of the world’s 36 billion acres of land is used for crop production and ruminant pasture. The world has over 25,000 jet planes and over 100,000 large ships. This infrastructure, serving a global population of 8.2 billion increasingly urban humans, produced about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023, the latest pulse in a cumulative, centuries-long emission of of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, which to date have warmed the planet by about 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. 

These are the material facts of the world’s climate problem. I mention them because some climate activists have identified the chief obstacle to solving it: misinformation. And if that sounds like a non-sequitur, that’s because it is. 

Fortunately, last month, the political scientist Holly Jean Buck deconstructed the misinformation-obsessed climate advocacy framework. In an excellent Jacobin essay, she wrote that, instead of working with communities on the ground to deploy low-carbon technology and infrastructure, “the intellectual wing of the climate movement has decided to wage an information war focused on uncovering what Big Oil knew and policing speech.”

The speech police, predictably, did not appreciate this. Rebecca Leber from the Center for Climate Integrity said Buck’s piece “fundamentally misunderstands climate disinfo.” Drilled reporter Amy Westervelt called it “a mediocre website article.” In a response published by Jacobin, Public Citizen’s Aaron Regunberg implies that Buck is herself a servant of fossil-funded misinformation, writing “It is very much in Big Oil’s interest for climate advocates to, as Buck suggests, stop ‘obsessing over climate disinformation.’” 

The climate activist Genevieve Guenther seemed to take Buck’s essay personally, as her recent book makes precisely the argument that Buck critiques. In The Language of Climate Politics, Guenther argues that “partisans on the right and the left often repeat the same fossil-fuel talking points, and this repetition produces a centrist consensus upholding the status quo, even as global heating accelerates.” To Guenther and her allies, treating climate change as an infrastructural and technological challenge, as opposed to a political and linguistic one, is tantamount to climate denial. After the Jacobin essay was published, Guenther re-upped attacks that she made in her book, in which she called Buck “a [carbon dioxide removal] advocate who uses fossil fuel talking points” and accused her of using “​​clever implicatures to create the false belief that carbon dioxide removal technologies are sure to work.” 

Buck, whose previous position in the DOE’s Fossil Energy and Carbon Management office earned Guenther’s scorn, is now a professor at the University of Buffalo and the author of a book titled Ending Fossil Fuels. The assault on her integrity was so obviously unfair that a number of other advocates and analysts (myself included) came to Buck’s defense on Twitter. And for a moment there, the whole thing may have felt like a narrow argument between Buck, who has argued that carbon dioxide removal is a public good that should be overseen by the state, and Guenther, who says this is a climate denier talking point.

But we shouldn’t let these dramatics obscure the deeper arguments made by Buck who, for her part, did not mention Guenther in the Jacobin essay. Because Guenther’s book, which was endorsed by Michael Mann and Bill McKibben, is indeed only the latest exponent of the vast conspiratorial body of work that Buck rightly criticized.  

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As Ted and I have each discussed previously, the ongoing climate misinformation wars can be traced back to a 2012 workshop organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which wrote the playbook on climate activists’ assault on the fossil fuel industry’s social license. The strategy has since been employed in the ExxonKnew campaign and the InsideClimateNews investigations into Exxon’s internal and public-facing climate science, the global fossil fuel divestment campaigns, climate liability lawsuits now numbering in the hundreds, misleading calculations attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change, and books like Guenther’s, which asserts that the concepts of “growth,” “innovation,” and “resilience” (among other things) are forms of fossil industry propaganda. 

According to this theory of change, if enough climate litigants win civil suits against oil companies (as Our Children’s Trust did in Montana last year), and if enough universities and municipalities divest from fossil fuel companies (as over 1500 institutions had at last count), and if academics “expose” enough decades-old oil industry climate research, and if enough activists use terms like “global heating,” “fracked gas,” and “fossil capital,” the world’s governments will be pressured to do…uh, something…to mercilessly shut down the fossil fuel industries. 

Of course, over a decade removed from the 2012 UCS workshop, and U.S. and global oil and gas production are higher than ever, as is global coal production. The linguistic theory of climate change has failed dismally.

But wait. Doesn’t persistent fossil fuel production suggest the dismal failure of all efforts to decarbonize global energy systems? 

It does not, for the simple reason that there is more than one theory of change. 

As David Roberts inadvertently but helpfully summarized last week, the misinformation-and-propaganda theory contrasts with what we might call the realpolitik theory of climate change:

Of course, fossil fuels are not “intrinsically indispensable.” Nuclear reactors, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, electric heat pumps, electric vehicles, and other technologies offer off-the-shelf alternatives to fossil fuels up and down the value chain. But the theory that Roberts sarcastically offered above—put differently, that fossil fuels are powerfully useful products whose replacement poses engineering and economic difficulties—does explain a number of important realities about the world that the propaganda theory has no explanation for. 

The realpolitik understanding of climate change explains why widespread fossil fuel exploitation began centuries before the purported misinformation campaigns that climate activists obsess over. It explains why the pace of decarbonization has been remarkably persistent over the decades (and was actually faster before climate change became a major public concern). It explains why rich countries, home to the private fossil conglomerates targeted by the climate misinformation police, are actually experiencing declining fossil fuel consumption and emissions. It also explains why poorer countries, which have yet to achieve a material standard of living close to what we in the wealthy world enjoy, account for the overwhelming share of growth of fossil fuel consumption and emissions. It explains why the majority of global fossil fuel reserves, and the vast majority of reserves in low- and middle-income countries, are owned by governments, not corporations like Exxon. 

Of note, it also explains why coal consumption is plateauing globally and on the decline in every rich country. Coal-fired electricity generation faces competition from more technological alternatives than any other fossil fuel application, including nuclear, solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and bioenergy. Perhaps most significantly, coal faces competition from natural gas, another fossil fuel whose newfound abundance has undercut coal markets in the United States and around the world. (Again, the misinformation police have no explanation for this fossil-on-fossil violence.) 

Ridiculously but illustratively, it explains why Legos (yes, Legos) are still made of petroleum and not organic alternatives, as revealed in an excellent investigation into the company’s failed efforts to produce oil-free toy bricks. Decarbonizing Legos, let alone the entire modern global economy, turns out to be difficult. 

This does not mean that climate progress is impossible or that fossil fuels can be replaced “only partially.” Rather, it means that replacing them requires attacking their biogeochemical and engineering advantages, not their linguistic ones. 

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The generous interpretation of the climate conspiracy theorists is that they, faced with the mind-boggling math of decarbonization, have chosen a set of tactics to which they, as mostly academics and journalists, are more comfortable pursuing: PR campaigns against big corporations. As Buck put it in her essay, “if disinformation is the main problem, then the chattering classes are central to the climate fight.”

A more cynical interpretation would be that anti-industrialism is the goal, and that the apocalyptics provided by climate anxiety provide the best fodder for generating wider anti-modernist enthusiasm. Notably, these apocalyptics rely on an understanding of climate science that is completely without empirical basis. We could even call it “catastrophist misinformation,” although it’s really more like willful scientific illiteracy. And yet, many pragmatic climate advocates, who may not think that climate change is caused by oil industry propaganda, appear wooed by these activists who, though perhaps a bit enthusiastic, nonetheless draw more attention to their shared cause. 

So the reaction to Buck’s essay should serve as a cautionary tale to the ecomodernists, climate pragmatists, and other purveyors of climate realpolitik who might otherwise make excuses for catastrophist conspiracy theorists. As this episode reveals, in the view of Guenther, McKibben, Mann, and their allies, the climate problem is not actually carbon emissions. The problem is propaganda, by which they mean, apparently, “growth,” “resilience,” and “innovation.” Any effort to reduce emissions or improve society’s response to climate change that deviates from this terminological campaign is, according to its leaders, definitionally engaged in climate denial. 

I, personally, would advise against making common cause with these people. You wouldn’t want to be the next climate advocate caught saying the wrong thing.