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Yesterday we gave you a glimpse of CAAD’s COP30 report, featuring what Oii has to offer in terms of the up-to-date documentation of Brazil’s digital disinfo. One of Oii’s debunking pieces from June is suddenly relevant again: the false claim that trees in the Amazon were cleared to build a road for COP30. The road has been planned for years, but the lie was resurrected on Sunday, this time pushed by familiar CAAD characters: Marc Morano, Fox News, and the current US President.
In recognition that disinformation works to keep us perpetually chasing lies instead of making progress on policies the liars want to block, today we’re going old school. DeSmog’s taking us all the way back to the 1990s to revisit the history of Big Carbon’s efforts to sabotage climate action around the world– even before the days of social media and AI.
Fun fact: pretty much every time we call someone out for lying about climate change, on purpose, for money, it’s because we can link to DeSmog for the receipts. And not just "receipts" in the online sense of providing evidence for a claim, but in actual documents like copies of checks, for example, that Exxon sent to the right-wing Atlas Network nearly thirty years ago, to fund the group’s efforts to turn Latin America against climate action.
The pair of stories published on the DeSmog and Guardian websites last week, reveal “a pretty ugly history,” said Center for Climate Integrity’s Kert Davies about how “Exxon seemed to think that if you could make developing nations, and all nations, sceptical that climate change was a crisis then you’d never have a global climate treaty.”
But still looking pretty crisp? Copies of Exxon’s check number AC0539609, made out to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation on 02-27-98, for precisely 50,000 DOLLARS AND 00 CENTS. What did that cover? Well, it turns out that our 2022 research finding, that a lot of Spanish-language climate disinfo was translated from English, was no coincidence!
“The checks Exxon wrote to Atlas financed activities ranging from Spanish translations of English-language books denying the reality of climate change, to flights to Latin American cities for U.S. climate deniers” Desmog reported. “They funded public events that enabled those deniers to reach local media and network with policymakers, as well as Atlas Network partner reports warning of dire economic consequences from climate policy.”
And, of course, they wanted to keep it a secret, according to records of one meeting in the year 2000. “The objective is to help, but not be known for its help,” the company indicated, ever humble and not at all trying to avoid accountability for sowing deception to protect its profits.
But of course Big Oil is not the only Big Liar out there wrecking our climate, so DeSmog’s also got the goods on Big Ag: an explainer on 8 of the greenwashing terms you need to look out for at COP30. Because they’re a major cause of climate change, industrial agriculture companies try to position themselves as a solution to it, much like the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to present itself as a saviour while continuing to cause the problem.
So we’ll need to be careful to distinguish genuinely improved agricultural practices, and business as usual hidden behind the latest green buzzwords, whether that means calling agriculture “regenerative” or “tropical,” and be wary of the industry’s efforts to co-opt phrases like “bioeconomy” while issuing bland platitudes about how “we feed the world.”
But wait, there’s more! Keep an eye on DeSmog’s COP30 coverage for forthcoming pieces on Big Ag’s big presence in Belém, as well as stories exposing how, for example “Soap Opera-inspired Clean Energy Ads Helped Shell Boost Petrol Sales in Brazil.”
Stories like that are why Clean Creatives and their influencers (representing an audience of over 24 million) issued a call yesterday for the UN and COP30 to drop PR giant Edelman, if it doesn’t drop Shell as a client.
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