Welcome back to the final COP, LOOK, LISTEN of 2023. Before leaving you to well-earned breaks and festivity, here’s our round up of headlines from the summit, plus what to expect next year.

In the last 3 weeks, CAAD’s Intelligence Unit published: “Deny, Deceive, Delay Vol. 3” (covered here by the New York Times); eleven COP bulletins; and two Special Editions looking at attacks on activists and the false solutions lobby. While not quite as catchy as “five gold rings”, we hope they have proven useful in unpacking and navigating the threat posed by climate mis- and disinformation. 

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The Big Picture

Fossil fuels were finally included in COP’s final text (30 years in the making), but the ‘phase out’ language supported by the US, EU and over 100 other countries was nixed by several petrostates. Instead, we make do with more ambiguous wording on a ‘transition away’. We must fight to ensure that ambiguity does not breed further inaction.

Fossil gas - so successfully branded “natural gas” by industry PR - also features in the text, inserted under the cloak of so-called “transition fuels”. For now, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) remains anchored to “hard to abate” sectors, but the real battle on that could lie ahead. Keep a weather eye on the next round of Nationally-Determined Contributions (NDCs), expected from late 2024.

Analysis of the outcome has been covered expertly elsewhere - check out E3G, Carbon Brief, CAN International and the closing statement from Small Island States for a range of perspectives.

For our part, here’s a few key takeaways to keep in mind ahead of COP29:

• The President, Azerbaijan, gets ⅔ of its national revenue from oil and gas and has been accused of opaque lobbying activity, especially in the EU.

• With fossil fuels (hopefully) on death row, industry efforts will only intensify and be backed by both state and non-state actors. 

• Two billion people will head to the polls in 2024, with many political actors using climate as a weapon to divide, enrage and mislead in elections. 

• Prepare for a year where battles over financing, logistics and timelines look set to dominate, and where information warfare responds in kind.

The fight is far from over.

COP28 Review

Fossil fuel lobbying is at an all-time high. COP28 granted access to a record 2,456 lobbyists - easily outnumbering delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations put together (1,509). At least 475 of this group were pushing Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), while 160 had known ties to groups with a history of climate denial. The agribusiness lobby had 340 delegates, with another 100 in Dubai as part of national delegations. Influential blocs like OPEC felt emboldened to refute the science and actively asked their members to weaken the final text. The far-reaching African Energy Chamber also issued a letter before COP, using various climate misinformation tropes in its wording.

Petrostates try to control the narrative. Before COP, we revealed how Russian state media play both sides on climate to fit the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests in English, French, Spanish and German. As for this year’s host, multiple instances of suspicious social media accounts have been documented on X and Reddit promoting UAE-aligned talking points. Once again, the official COP app posed a major security risk, with capabilities to enable sweeping and invasive permissions on peoples’ devices. Not to mention questions raised by the sheer amount of CCTV cameras at the venue.

Industry PR is going ‘Gen-Z’. The PR playbook is evolving with social media, including a push to reach younger, diverse audiences. Ahead of COP28, oil companies were paying influencers to plug their products across Instagram, TikTok and other sites, as well as gaming platforms like Twitch. The fossil fuel industry is also woke-washing more than ever; paying lip service to progressive values and rhetoric without changing their business models.

False solutions take centre stage. Chevron’s TikTok account has pushed ‘educational’ videos to over 180 million viewers, promoting technologies like CCS and “renewable fuels” that collapse under scrutiny. Our Special Edition exposed a raft of ads on social media promoting CCS across the US, UK and Canada, paid for by oil and gas companies. These ads were well outside the scientific scope of “hard to abate” sectors. Meanwhile, if you search for “climate” or “carbon capture” on search engines like Google and Bing, expect to be frequently served ads from the fossil fuel lobby before any credible/scientific source.

Big Tech turns a profit from misinformation... Unfortunately, platforms impose few (if any) limits on fossil fuel advertising via their products and services - even if the content is outright misinformation. Worse still, they make money in the process. This summit, we shone the spotlight on Google in particular, identifying close to 5,500 fossil fuel ads live on its revamped Ads Transparency Center. When looking up key climate terms on Google and Bing’s search engines, paid-for greenwashing was also rife. Beyond social media, we found industry sponsorship across news coverage of COP28, popular podcasts and other entertainment. Can’t we listen to “This American Life” in peace?!

...while their policies and enforcement are weak. We first shone a spotlight on platform failings during COP26. Since then, progress has been tepid at best. #ClimateScam continues to prosper on X, while TikTok is emerging as a climate conspiracy rabbit hole. Both Meta and Google rake in millions from paid-for content, but their Ad Libraries are a confusing mess. Ad tech providers are also allowing websites to monetise climate denial and misinformation via their services, despite policies that claim the opposite.

Assessing platform harms is increasingly difficult. Access to data was already a challenge, but 2023 has seen a worsening environment for transparency and research. X (formerly Twitter) used to be a sector leader, but now charges upwards of $40,000 a month for an API offering less data than before. Reddit and Meta made changes that added complexity but reduced usability. TikTok finally released an API this year, but currently limits access to academic bodies in the US and EU. Early reviews of the system are also troubling. The EU’s Digital Services Act is hoping to change the game, alongside other regulatory efforts worldwide, but it remains to be seen how proactively platforms will engage. We anticipate many will simply accept financial penalties or drag out legal battles. This predicament leaves researchers with a tough choice: risk breaching platforms’ Terms of Service, or discontinue such important work altogether. 

The ‘outrage merchants’ were distracted, but not for long. In recent years, online grifters have used COP as a rallying cry. During the summit, they drive engagement for divisive, conspiratorial and outright false framing on climate change. This year was different - well-worn narratives around meat and jets were posted (and swiftly fact-checked), but at a far reduced scale than before. There was gleeful speculation about John Kerry and a fart sound, which became a multi-day story in the ‘denial sphere’. Otherwise, it seems the attention economy has pivoted to Israel-Gaza and anti-LGBTQ content for now. But do not expect this to last. See our picture gallery below for representative examples of this content.

Watch out for Big Ag. Though this year’s COP mostly focused on fossil fuels, other industries were hidden in plain sight. Efforts to address livestock emissions and land use are already subject to widespread lobbying and influence campaigns. A pre-COP preview from the FAO on meat consumption was used to drive ‘green tyranny’ content, while bad actors attempted to seed similar narratives throughout the summit.  As we have seen with transport and urban planning this year, vital policy debates are being subsumed into the ‘culture wars’ and proving popular across disparate groups. Our hunch is that the battle over food may be about to take centre stage.

Forewarned is forearmed. COP can be a tough sell for communicators. The summit barely registered on TikTok this year, while in the US, corporate broadcast networks aired just 11 minutes of coverage in the opening 4 days. These information gaps are filled by vested interests, from petrostates and industry lobbyists to online pundits and contrarians. The climate sector must focus on inoculation (“pre-bunking”) before climate misinformation sets in. Learning about framing and reframing, while balancing the severity of the climate crisis with positive narratives, will help encourage worldwide support for climate action. Carbon capture, for example, is one to get ahead of. The technology could appeal to a public desperate for ‘good news’ stories on climate, even though the evidence is shaky at best. To give science a fighting chance, campaigns must bring people, not just policies, into the heart of climate action.

GOOD TO KNOW

This year’s bulletins have mostly avoided the ‘outrage economy’, in part because its key figures rely on attention and antagonism with groups like CAAD. They were generally less prolific this summit, but can nonetheless achieve eye-watering reach and traction across social media. Below is a small sample, with an extensive dataset available on request. Unfortunately, these narratives continue to be mainstreamed in public life and resonate across a range of audiences - as such, we cannot turn away.

To see quotes from CAAD members on what we found during COP28, click here.

And that’s a wrap! Thank you for reading, we wish everyone a peaceful, joyous break -  see you in the New Year. 

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