#climate misinformation

the term was actually coined by the company BP (British Petroleum) in order to shift the blame of climate change from big corporations to.... you! it's your fault the world is burning!!

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

America’s electric utilities were aware as early as the 1960s that the burning of fossil fuels was warming the planet, but, two decades later, worked hand in hand with oil and gas companies to “promote doubt around climate change for the sake of continued … profits,” finds a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The research adds utility companies and their affiliated groups to the growing list of actors that spent years misleading the American public about the threat of climate change. Over the past half decade, oil companies like BP and ExxonMobil have had to defend themselves in court against cities, state attorneys general, youth activists, and other entities who allege the world’s fossil fuel giants knew about the existence of climate change as far back as 1968, yet chose to ignore the information and launch disinformation campaigns. Recent investigations show the coal industry did something similar, as did fossil fuel-funded economists.

But while the role Big Oil played in misleading the public has been widely publicized, utilities’ culpability has largely flown under the radar. So researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara began collecting and analyzing public and private records kept by organizations within the utility industry.

The authors analyzed public reports authored by utility companies or their affiliated groups between 1968 and 2019, as well as collected documents from watchdog groups. They found 188 external and internal documents referencing climate change from utility companies, research groups, trade associations, and other organizations closely linked to the industry. Two of the affiliated groups, the Edison Electric Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute, which authored or distributed most of the documents in the study, are the utility industry’s main trade group and research arm, respectively.

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

A new report finds that views of climate misinformation posts on Facebook are reaching an average of 818,000 to 1.36 million views daily.

This estimate is up to 13 times more than the number of views that legitimate posts in Facebook's own Climate Science Center receive.

The report, On the Back Burner, examines 48,700 posts by 196 accounts from January to August 2021. The results confirm what many people already knew or suspected — that Facebook is allowing misinformation to easily be digested, shared, and added to.

Stop Funding Heat, an organization behind the report (along with Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of activists), also found that Facebook isn't just a platform for misinformation. The social media giant also allows these misinformation campaigns to run as sponsored posts.

In the research, the team found 113 advertisements with an estimated 11.7 million to 14.1 million views. These sponsored posts contained phrases such as "climate change is a HOAX." Facebook has reportedly known about the posts since 2020, but both paid and organic climate misinformation content continues to spread.

Facebook's parent company, now called Meta, has adopted third-party fact-checking practices since 2016 in order to remedy the long-standing issue of spreading misinformation on the platform. Yet only a small percentage, just over 3%, of the posts evaluated in the study were reviewed by Facebook's third-party fact checkers.

Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:

The public relations giant Edelman vaulted to the top of its profession with clever campaigns that burnished the images of leading corporations. Now, under fire for its work on behalf of fossil fuel companies, Edelman is scrambling to bolster its own reputation.

On Wednesday, more than 450 scientists called on public relations and advertising firms, including the prestigious Edelman, to stop working for oil and gas companies. The firms’ ad campaigns for these companies, the scientists said, “represent one of the biggest barriers to the government action science shows is necessary to mitigate the ongoing climate emergency.” A group of 100 activists and former Edelman employees partnered with Clean Creatives, a campaign pressuring PR and ad agencies to quit fossil fuels, to issue the same demand.

The question for the PR and ad business is whether this emboldened coalition of academics and advocates can turn fossil fuel companies into social pariahs — a sort of New Tobacco.

Major financial institutions are trying to walk a similarly fine line. Last year, the asset and risk management firm BlackRock threw its considerable weight behind the election of three dissident directors at ExxonMobil, which on Tuesday said its own operations would reach net zero by 2050. In December, however, BlackRock was part of a multibillion-dollar deal to buy pipelines from Saudi Aramco. On Tuesday, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink said his firm, which has $10 trillion under management, would not become the “climate police” or divest itself of fossil fuel firms.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

Documents obtained by congressional investigators show that oil industry executives privately downplayed their companies’ own public messages about efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and weakened industry-wide commitments to push for climate policies.

Internal Exxon documents show that the oil giant pressed an industry group, the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, to remove language from a 2019 policy statement that “could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris Agreement goals.” The Paris Agreement is the landmark 2015 pact among nations of the world to avert catastrophic global warming. The statement’s final version didn’t mention Paris.

At Royal Dutch Shell, an October 2020 email sent by an employee, discussing talking points for Shell’s president for the United States, said that the company’s announcement of a pathway to “net zero” emissions — the point at which the world would no longer be pumping planet-warming gases into the atmosphere — “has nothing to do with our business plans.”

These and other documents, reviewed by The New York Times, come from a cache of hundreds of thousands of pages of corporate emails, memos and other files obtained under subpoena as part of an examination by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform into the fossil fuel industry’s efforts over the decades to mislead the public about its role in climate change, dismissing evidence that the burning of fossil fuels was driving an increase in global temperatures even as their own scientists warned of a clear link.