Fighting Climate Disinformation Is an Urgent Priority

I live in Rhode Island. Drive through any coastal community in our state, and you will see lawn signs opposing the latest offshore wind turbine project. Show up to a town council hearing on these projects, and you will hear residents arguing not just that climate change is a hoax but that wind turbines kill whales (they don’t) and all manner of other specious claims — disinformation directly funded by the fossil fuel industry.

When I was a state legislator, I experienced the overwhelmingly powerful effects of climate disinformation on an even more regular basis. Every time climate advocates fought the proposed expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure in our state, from new pipelines to a massive gas power plant, we came up against the same (now discredited) propaganda: natural gas is “clean energy,” and investing in this “bridge fuel” would actually lower our state’s carbon emissions. This disinformation made it much harder to persuade potential legislative allies to support all manner of supply-side and demand-side climate initiatives.

So when I first saw the headline of the Jacobin essay that has been making the rounds in climate circles this week, “Obsessing Over Climate Disinformation Is a Wrong Turn,” in which author Holly Buck argues that fighting climate disinformation is “a strategic dead end” — I thought I must have misread it.

There are so many examples like those I’ve experienced of how climate disinformation is — in real, concrete, practical terms — helping the oil and gas industry block and delay what Buck describes as “the actual work of climate action, which, at the end of the day, is remaking physical systems to replace the 80 percent of fossil energy that now powers our lives with clean…