Climate disinformation in war: why climate became “a later problem”
From a conversation with UN Special Rapporteur Elisa Morgera, Oii examines how geopolitics, power concentration, and disinformation are reshuffling, and delaying, global climate decisions.
In previous editions…
#14 In the run-up to the elections, fake TikTok accounts a re selling forUS$28 in Brazil
#13 Would you pay for a lie?
I In Brazil, today is April Fools’ Day, the day of a familiar ritual: make up a story, trick someone, scare them (the bigger, the better), and then reveal the joke. The problem is the logic stayed. And the joke disappeared.
We’re living April Fools’ Day every single day, at an unprecedented scale: faster, wider, and backed by an entire system that profits from it. But what if truth could also operate as a system?
If disinformation scales,
the response has to scale too.
Today we’re launching 5,000 Acts for Truth, a month-long mobilization to turn visibility into concrete action. Not a campaign, but an experiment: how many people does it take for truth to stop being a reaction and become a movement?
Mapping patterns, translating signals, and making visible what circulates in fragments, that’s our act for truth.
This month, the Integrity Information Observatory for Information Integrity turns one year old. It was born from a simple unease: we can’t solve what we can’t see.
That’s our act for truth: a strategic intelligence infrastructure about information, climate, and democracy in the Global South.
In war, climate became “a later problem”, and that isn’t accidental. It’s disinformation.
If geopolitics has moved to the center of the global debate, it’s because it was, intentionally, moved there.
That might sound counterintuitive, but it starts to make sense when you look at what’s actually being fought over: energy, territory, control of resources. In other words: oil.
This reorganization doesn’t erase the climate problem. It just shifts it, and, in l doing so, creates a kind of comfort zone where structural decisions can be postponed without looking like neglect.
“Geopolitics didn’t replace climate change as a major global risk. It’s the same risk, just being treated as a different problem.”
That framing came through clearly in a recent conversation with Elisa Morgera, the UN Special Rapporteur on climate change and human rights and a professor of international law.
The key is how this shift spreads, and, above all, where it stops landing. From that lens, some implications stop feeling abstract.
1) You can’t talk about fossil fuels without an information battle
The First Conference on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels (called the Santa Marta Conference within the climate space), scheduled for the end of this month in Colombia, puts the phaseout of fossil fuels back at the center. But this conversation arrives loaded.
Decades of manufactured doubt, influence campaigns, and economic narratives shaped what now looks like a technical debate. It isn’t. If you don’t treat information integrity as a baseline condition, you risk legitimizing a playing field that was distorted from the start.
“Climate obstruction has turned into armed aggression. It’s all happening exactly where the biggest oil reserves are. And that also creates chaos to avoid, to distract from the hard decisions about fossil fuels, right? It also creates fear and fatalism. But few people see the connection between climate obstruction and current geopolitics.
For many human rights experts, war becomes ‘other human rights issues,’ and climate ‘is put to one side,’ instead of being understood as part of the main reasons for armed aggression and conflict. There’s some attention, which is very important of course, to wars worsening climate change, but not so much about the obstruction of climate action and the logics of the fossil fuel-based economy being part of the causes.”
Elisa Morgera, UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights
2) COP recognition was a starting point. What comes next?
Including information integrity in COP’s official final text marked a meaningful turning point. What’s at stake now is whether that principle will actually operate inside the process.
Here’s what that means: defining criteria, strengthening evidence, and making visible the influences that still remain diffuse. Without that, the topic risks staying correct, and peripheral.
As Brazil steps into a more central role, it enters tougher terrain: helping shape the quality of the conditions under which consensus is formed.
That inevitably depends on choices that begin now, such as:
integrating information integrity into interim agendas
aligning international positioning with domestic decisions
dealing with “transition” solutions that sound good but barely change the trajectory
In the end, the point is less rhetorical than it seems. Information integrity is now on the climate agenda. The fight now is whether it will be able to change structural decisions, push reforms into practice, and confront ambiguities all the way to COP31, or whether it will only accompany them.
Lies have a price.
Truth is running out of time.
If disinformation operates like a system, the response also has to operate in a network, with responsibility.
5,000 Acts for Truth is a call for concrete action at every scale. Every person counts.
Sometimes that lives in the decisions that shape policies, projects, and institutions. Other times it’s in daily life: the conversation you choose to have (instead of avoid); listening to someone who thinks differently, without judgment; working inside your community to connect climate to real life.
Small gestures are infrastructure too. When connected, they stop being individual and become a system. So the invitation is simple:
What’s your act for truth in the space you occupy?
If you do it, share it with us. Tag #5000AtosPelaVerdade and activate others.
Truth doesn’t scale on its own. It needs a network. It needs us.
Oil: A Toxic Relationship
Sadly, most of us have heard this story before: a woman trapped in a relationship, usually with a deeply unimpressive guy, because she no longer believes she can be independent and happy on her own. He insists she would be nothing without him. He distorts reality and manipulates her perception, eroding her self-esteem and causing her to doubt herself.
This behavior is known as gaslighting. A recent study indicates that this is precisely the strategy that the oil industry has adopted, and they’re no longer making any effort to conceal it.
Researcher Nayantara Dutta and the Clean Creatives team reviewed 1,859 advertising campaign materials from four of the world’s largest oil companies — BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell — published between 2020 and 2024. Their analysis identified a shift in how these major polluters communicate.
Between 2009 and 2020 — as highlighted in a separate study by Tohoku and Kyoto universities in Japan — these same oil giants invested millions in advertising promoting the narrative that they were allies of the planet. Just look at the increase in the use of terms like “climate change,” “transition,” and “low-carbon energy” over this period:
Source: Li M, Trencher G, Asuka J (2022) The clean energy claims of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell: A mismatch between discourse, actions and investments.
How can we know if it’s all talk and no substance? By following the money. According to the researchers, financial analysis from the same period “reveals a continuing business model dependence on fossil fuels along with insignificant and opaque spending on clean energy.”
What the Clean Creatives study shows now is that the oil giants have stopped trying to convince you they’re the good guys. Their new strategy is to insist that life without fossil fuels is impossible (or, in the language of a toxic relationship, “You would be nothing without me.”). The study details many examples, but let’s focus on one particularly illustrative case: a 2022 Chevron campaign that foreshadowed this trend.
The ad is beautifully shot in black and white. A young girl steps onto a bus (probably diesel-powered) on her way to her future (poetic, right?) as a sweeping, emotional soundtrack plays in the background. A calm voice-over begins on an apocalyptic note: “Energy demands are rising, and the effects are being felt everywhere” Then comes the punchline: “we’re increasing production in the Permian Basin by 15%, and we’re projected to reach one million barrels of oil per day by 2025.” The narrator concludes romantically, “it’s only human to tackle the challenges of today to help ensure a brighter tomorrow”
The feeling that the ads convey now is one of “confidence,” “security,” and “stability.” It’s a playbook that aligns with a broader shift among major investment funds, many of which have openly stepped back from their sustainability commitments, as well as with the energy crisis in the European Union following the invasion of Ukraine. Nayantara, who led the study, explained to us that “With the world in crisis, oil companies are preying on fear around energy security and using misinformation to dominate the market. This gaslighting isn’t just a result of geopolitics — it’s also a response to today’s cultural climate which is ready for a fossil fuel phase-out.”
When these companies speak of a commitment to addressing climate change, they often point to false solutions, such as natural gas and carbon credits. In December 2025, Shell’s CEO popped up on Instagram, stating clearly: “One of the biggest contributions we will make to the energy transition is the growth in our LNG portfolio over the coming years..”
Yes, you read that correctly: LNG. Liquefied natural gas. A fossil fuel, composed primarily of methane, one of the main greenhouse gases. This is, in no uncertain terms, “one of the biggest contributions” to the energy transition. They are, quite literally, gas-lighting.
To watch!
The Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation produces a series of mini-documentaries ona YouTube called Vale a Pena Perguntar (It’s Worth Asking). One of our favorite topics, the false dichotomy between climate action and development—that same old socio-environmental disinformation claiming that preservation is the enemy of progress—gets the spotlight in some excellent episodes. It’s absolutely worth watching!
Disinformation is organized, and so is the response
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