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Hello CAADies! Welcome to day 2 of COP31! If you missed out on yesterday’s European Commission event on lessons on countering extreme weather disinformation, you can now LISTEN to the recording of CAAD rockstar Thais Lazzari of FALA and others.
Then take a LOOK below for CAAD’s new report on how Google sold out the climate to fossil fueled advertisers, who have ramped up their ad placement by, like, a bajillion percent in the run-up to COP31. Seriously though, we looked through 45,165 Google ads, and caught BP increasing their ad placements by a mind-boggling 2,509%.
What else is new with Google? Well, when I opened a COP31 promo vid there the other day, YouTube’s auto-created mix of suggested next songs only took five videos before serving up explicit Nazi propaganda, complete with flag and salute. New challenge: 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with extremist content on YouTube. Send in your screenshots! |
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Besides algorithmic radicalization, what else are we in for in terms of disinfo? Well, here are my predictions for the next two weeks, based on reading past editions of COP, Look Listen. You’ll see a “Check” with a link to where they’ve already validated predictions since these were first drafted on Oct 28th...
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Attacks on the cost to build the convention center and host the negotiations ahead of COP31’s official start. Check Turkiye (twice) and check Australia, specifically the cost of coffee, one of many agricultural products getting harder to produce because of climate change.
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Hypocrisy accusations on social media and rightwing propaganda, since people had to fly in, featuring repurposed memes about private jets to recontextualize global diplomacy as elitism, or calling out the host country’s and others' continued fossil fuel exploration (the entire problem climate policy needs to solve). Check and check.
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Culture war narrative across rightwing media as Russia/Reform/MAGA say that climate action is woke (pejorative) eco-imperialism meant to keep people poor instead of fossil fueled despite the fact that fossil fuels cause a “resource curse.”
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Attacks on EVs and activists as fossil funded pundits choose a target to harass, most likely a woman or women, in cartoonish, sexualized, seems-AI-generated and all-around weird ways. Check.
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Fossil-fuel-funded disinfluencers say fossil fuels are inevitable. Canadian check.
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A bot network says dear leader is doing an amazing job, genAI prompt gets left in the text somewhere, the host country denies responsibility. (Someone should check the replies to official COP31 content for overly-fawning replies from an unusually large number of potentially AI-generated accounts…)
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It’s all a failure, what a waste, rightwing media and billionaire-backed propaganda networks bemoan the COP-out of a decision and move on. Check.
With that established, let’s take a LOOK at something new: an original investigation into Big Oil’s Google ad placements. Last year CAAD documented a spike in advertisements on Google from Big Oil, targeting the COP country host, Brazil. This year we can document the pattern more clearly with a full year’s data, amassing 45,165 total ads from Google’s ad repository and finding some real stand-outs.
Check out the report in full here, and get a sense of the scale of content bombarding people online and shouting over anyone’s individual free speech by taking a LOOK at the excerpt below!
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LOOK: PARTY LIKE IT’S 1998% INCREASE IN BIG OIL’S GOOGLE ADS |
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Google Ads: Türkiye and Australia
As COP31 takes place in Türkiye in 2026, the country has seen a 7% rise in inflation as a result of the war in Iran, according to the country’s finance minister. In Australia, inflation rates continue to exceed central bank estimates. Globally, there are significant economic consequences of this conflict as fuel costs continue rising.
At the same time, fossil fuel companies, led by BP, have invested more in advertisement campaigns in these regions before COP31, flooding the Google Ads ecosystem with advertising content.
Ad increases before COP31 in Türkiye
Though COP31 physically takes place in Antalya, Türkiye, Australia will preside over formal negotiations. Just as CAAD documented a spike in Google Ads advertising in Brazil before the COP30 conferences, there was a major increase in advertising in Türkiye before COP31.
In Türkiye, there was a 996% increase in new ads from the 67 oil and gas companies in September 2026, compared with the November 2025 to August 2026 baseline (Figure 5). From the top four companies, there was a 1,998% increase in new ads (353 ads per month, up from 17) in Türkiye in September and October 2026, compared to the baseline.
The largest share of this increase in ads was from BP, which accounted for 77% of new ads in September 2026 and 98% of new ads in October 2026. In the two months before COP31, BP had a 2,247% increase in new Google Ads and a 2,509% increase in running Google Ads in Türkiye.
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Fig. 5
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In contrast to Türkiye, Australia’s data show far fewer new Google Ads than Türkiye’s data — 347 Google Ads compared to 1,398 ads. In October 2026, BP released 80% of Australia’s new Google Ads. Meanwhile, the highest number of running Google Ads in Australia came from Viva Energy, an Australian fuel retailer, with an average of about 185 ads per month from November 2025 to October 2026, followed by Saudi Aramco, which consistently ran an average of 64 ads per month.
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If you have any investigative leads CAAD should explore, or want to find out more about our research and intel during the summit, please email contact@caad.info. We also have members on the ground in Antalya who are available for interviews and side-events.
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