Imagine if you could walk from your house to anywhere you need to go in less than 15 minutes: the pharmacy, the bakery, the gym, and then back to the bakery. In a certain, conspiratorial corner of the internet, this urban planning concept of “15 minute cities” takes on a shadowy, sinister sheen. Conspiracy theorists call for COVID restrictions and point to efforts to create walkable cities as steps toward “climate containment.” They warn of a plot by the World Economic Forum to restrict, capture and surveil people’s movements in their neighborhoods.
“They want to take your cars away,” claims Clayton Morris, a former Fox News host, in a YouTube video that has been viewed 1.7 million times.
YouTube is riddled with bogus claims like this, so this is the place to document the evolution of arguments against action on climate change. A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit organization based in London and Washington, DC, that works to stop the spread of disinformation, analyzed 12,000 videos from channels that spread lies about climate change on YouTube over the past six promoted year. Over that time, the reality of climate change long predicted by scientists has become increasingly difficult to reject. The report, released Tuesday, found a dramatic shift from “old denial” arguments — that global warming is not real and not caused by humans — to new arguments aimed at undermining confidence in climate solutions.
“The success is that science has won this debate about anthropogenic climate change,” says Imran Ahmed, the nonprofit’s founder and CEO. “The opponents of action have shifted their focus.”
The report suggests that, rather than doing a victory lap, climate advocates may want to focus on defending climate policy and renewable energy as necessary and effective. As the world has been besieged by intense heat, widespread wildfires and catastrophic floods in recent years, YouTubers promoting disinformation have increasingly embraced “new denial” narratives, such as that solar panels will destroy the economy and the environment, or that the United Nations ‘s intergovernmental panel on climate change is a “fraud.”
“What this does is create a group of people who believe climate change is happening but believe there is no hope,” Ahmed said. People are starting to watch YouTube at a young age – in 2020, more than half of parents in the US with a child 11 years old or younger said their child watched videos on the platform daily. New polling from the center, released alongside the study, found that a third of American teenagers say climate policies are causing more harm than good.
Six years ago, these “new denier” claims made up 35 percent of the denier’s arguments on YouTube; now they make up 70 percent of the total. The fastest growing claims were that the climate movement is unreliable and that clean energy won’t work.
To get this data, the Center for Combating Digital Hate analyzed video transcripts from nearly 100 YouTube channels spouting climate denial, using an artificial intelligence tool to categorize the arguments.
One popular source is the channel of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and culture warrior with 7 million followers. In an interview with Alex Epstein, the author of The moral case for fossil fuels, Epstein makes the case that climate advocates cannot be trusted. “Listening to a modern environmentalist is like listening to a doctor who’s on the side of germs, someone who doesn’t have your best interests at heart,” Epstein says in a video titled “The Great Climate Con” which has been viewed a million times. times, echoing a point once made in the 1990s by economist George Reisman in an article titled “The toxicity of environmentalism.”
The report also points to the libertarian think tank The Heartland Institute and the media company BlazeTV, created by former Fox News host Glenn Beck, as prominent sources of lies about climate change on YouTube. Videos of PragerU, a right-wing media outlet also known for spreading disinformation, painting solar and wind power as dangers to the environment and comparing environmental activists to Nazis. Despite what the name might imply, it is not actually a university, it also offers no degrees.
John Cook, a researcher at the Melbourne Center for Behavior Change in Australia, has documented a similar increase in attacks on climate solutions by conservative think tanks and blogs. “It’s amazing to see misinformation on YouTube moving so quickly,” Cook said in an email. “The future of climate misinformation will be focused on attacking climate solutions, and we need to better understand those arguments and how to counter them.”
Some research has shown that climate disinformation is compelling: A recent study in Nature Human Behavior found that it often more convincing to people as scientific facts. And once people are hooked on a fake, they find it hard to let go. That’s why it’s so important to stop disinformation at the source, according to Ahmed. “The key right now is to ensure that we don’t flood our information ecosystem with nonsense and lies that make it harder for people to figure out what is true or not,” he said.
Together, the YouTube channels focused on by the center received 3.4 billion views last year. And all those views mean there’s money involved: The report found that YouTube potentially earns up to $13.4 million a year in ad revenue from channels that post climate denial.
Google, which owns YouTube, has promised in 2021 to prohibit advertising on its platforms alongside content that contradicts the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring and caused by humans (although it is not enforced it well). To counter the latest wave of disinformation, the Center to Combat Digital Hate recommends that Google also ban ads on content that pushes misinformation about climate solutions, so YouTubers won’t be incentivized to publish more of it. (Content creators who partner with YouTube receive a share of the advertising revenue.)
“If it wasn’t profitable, would so many people see it as a business to produce bullshit?” Ahmed said. “We ask platforms not to reward liars with money and attention.”
