I noted in a previous post that popular understanding of the energy transition is harmed as much by constant minor exaggerations and omissions as by outright lies. Many of the misrepresentations of the MAGA right are characteristically obvious, often parroting Donald Trump’s lies about renewable energy. The admonition of Republicans to not to take him “literally” suggest that they know they are being lied to, but support him regardless.
The disingenuity of right wing media and politicians who know better, but rationalize lying nevertheless, is certainly shameful. But chances are that voters who want to learn about the energy transition online can more easily spot the biggest lies and discount them accordingly. By contrast, subtle spin is harder to detect, and unavoidable if you live your political life online. Even the most conscientious online learners get nudged away from deep understanding by the constant flow of subtle half-truths, mistaken attributions and emotional appeals that trigger false beliefs.
In Climate of Contempt I explain how and why constant, gentle lobbying creates a self-sustaining cycle of innocent-but-motivated reasoning between online influencers and the people they influence. Online, the full truth dies from a thousand little cuts.
So what can you do to avoid being misled?
First, don’t rely on conclusions found in headlines; assume that the full story is more complicated — maybe even different — than the headline implies. Recently my news feed contained a story behind a paywall entitled “LA deaths increase in an all-EV future.” The article reported on a study modeling changes to air quality in New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles under various levels of electric vehicle adoption. Only by reading the article would you find out that more EVs “would improve air quality in all four cities” (my emphasis), including Los Angeles. But it would worsen air quality in some low-income neighborhoods (presumably the point to which the headline refers?).
Another trade press story (again, behind a paywall) from July was headlined “Poll finds strong support for repealing Washington state carbon market,” and the opening sentence stated that “a majority of voters in Washington favor[ed] repeal.” Reading further, we find that the 45% of respondents favored repeal (of course, not a majority of voters), the poll was conducted by a right-leaning polling firm, and that the poll contained a suggestive question (attributing rising gasoline prices in the state to the carbon market) that could skew the poll result. Good for the writer to include those details, but the headline and first sentence were misleading.
Or, from the same outlet, consider this story entitled “Oil and gas industry to press Trump to change Biden’s methane rules.” The body of the story makes clear that the industry is not pressing to repeal the rules becuase “oil and gas industry officials have mostly accepted the idea of their methane emissions being regulated.” What the industry seeks are minor technical adjustments to the rule.
Or finally, consider the difference between two articles covering the bipartisan Senate permitting bill introduced by senators Manchin and Barasso in July of this year. The bill would ease permitting for clean and dirty energy infrastructure alike. Utility Dive chose this headline: “Bipartian energy permitting bill ups FERC’s transmission authority.” The story mentions fossil fuel projects only in passing toward the end of the article, and characterized the bill as an attempt to “bolster the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s authority to approve transmission lines,” noting that “[t]ransmission and clean energy groups said they generally back the bill.” By contrast, E&E News entitled their story “Manchin’s last-ditch permitting bill a win for fossil fuels,” and opened with this description:
In a last-ditch attempt to fortify his legacy, retiring Energy and Natural Resources Chair Joe Manchin on Monday released permitting legislation stuffed with Republican priorities that were quickly endorsed by the oil, gas and coal lobbies.
The E&E story characterizes the benefits to renewable energy permitting as “insignificant crumbs.”
Second, when you see advocacy journalism framing climate policy in terms of good guys and bad guys, think especially critically about what the writer is saying. For example, consider this blog post from the Sabin Center at Columbia University — an excellent source of good information about the energy transition. In an otherwise informative and straightforward briefing on proposed state laws imposing liability for climate harm on fossil fuel extraction companies, the Sabin writers characterized opposition to these bills as “vicious,” linking a February 2024 story from an outlet called News From the States. Those who clicked on that link came to this article: “Bill to Make polluters pay for climate damage runs into Democratic skeptics.” Take a look for yourself and see if you can find evidence of “vicious” opposition in either the original or linked pieces. If you cannot, perhaps the writer engaged in inadvertent editorializing.
Another example, from the Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth, whose coverage of the energy transition I have extolled in this blog. In the June 20, 2024 edition of his “Boiling Point” newsletter Roth takes his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers to task for allowing Phillips Petroleum to advertise in Dodger Stadium. Of course, each fan can make their own decision about this issue (Roth included). And if Phillips funded climate disinformation or ran its nearby refinery irresponsibly (as Roth implies in the piece), I can sympathize with Roth’s position. But then Roth presents a dubious proposition:
If the U.S. had acted decisively on climate in 1988 — when scientist James Hansen told Congress “with 99% certainty” that global warming had begun — maybe we wouldn’t be experiencing such deadly heat waves and destructive storms. Maybe intense heat, wildfire smoke, melting snow and other rapidly shifting weather conditions wouldn’t be making it harder to play sports.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.
What happened is that oil and gas companies waged a successful war to obscure the link between their products and the climate crisis, a plot first widely exposed by Inside Climate News and L.A. Times journalists. What happened is that carbon emissions kept rising, to the point where scientists are now urging us to slash those emissions more than 40% by 2030 — a gigantic lift.
The suggestion that the United States would have more stringent greenhouse gas regulation now (or a milder climate) if it wasn’t for the misinformation campaigns funded by fossil fuel trade organizations is widely held. But it is probably wrong for reasons explained in chapter 3 of Climate of Contempt and in an earlier blog post here.
Third, learn to read with an eye for reporters’ anti-technology-bias or anti-policy instrument-bias. In today’s negatively partisan environment, it can seem important to stop the bad thing you don’t want to happen. That urge can overcome humility about the techno-economic future. In plain English, we don’t know what technologies will be affordable and effective 10, 20 or 50 years hence. Just as Alex Epstein’s certainty about the indispensability of fossil fuels to human flourishing is misplaced, so is the certainty that there will be no useful role for fossil fuels in the net zero future.
Sometimes technology bias is obvious, as when a pro-fossil fuels writer dismisses the possibility of a no fossil fuels future using terms like “the loony left,” or when an anti-fossil fuels writer frames her story about carbon capture projects with terms like “unproven” or a “colossal waste of money.” But often the spin is less apparent.
Consider another story from the same paid energy news service referenced above, on the EPA’s involvement in the Tennessee Valley Authority‘s (TVA) decision to replace a 69 year-old coal fired power plant with a natural gas-fired power plant – “EPA balked at TVA’s fossil fuel plant, then stepped aside.” The writer framed the decision as a setback for both the environment and the Biden EPA, noting that EPA had initially contended that TVA’s environmental impact statement for the plant failed to consider a wide enough range of alternatives (presumably, alternatives that excluded the natural gas plant). But it is certainly possible that EPA may have simply deferred to grid managers on the question of whether the new plant would be necessary to reliable electric service, just as EPA has done before when regulating mercury and carbon emissions from the power sector.[1] And of course, replacing an old coal-fired plant with a natural gas plant represents and environmental improvement in that it will drastically reduce emissions of carbon and more deadly pollutants from that location.
Most of these examples are relatively minor imperfections within larger pieces that are meant to educate. But each one contains subtle spin, and so misleads (incrementally) readers who lack the background knowledge to read them critically. In the climate policy space this sort of spin is ubiquitous. And because it is human nature to accept comfortable news and challenge uncomfortable news, we accept these little moments of spin less critically than we should. We apply higher evidentiary standards to the news we don’t like than the news we like. In the internet age perhaps we ought to reverse those dispositions, because algorithms and social networks are feeding us much more of the latter than the former.
This is part of how the ideological middle gets hollowed out slowly, and the prospects for building a congressional majority for strong GHG limits grow even more dim. Perhaps over time and with experience, consumers of information will develop the habit of detecting spin, double checking narratives that push us in comfortable directions, and generally avoiding moral certainty when thinking about complex, difficult topics like the energy transition. – David Spence
[1] See Policy Statement on the Commission’s Role Regarding the Environmental Protection Agency’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, 139 FERC ¶ 61,131, paras. 1–23 (May 17, 2012); and Carbon Pollution Emission Guidelines for Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units, 80 Fed. Reg. 64,662, 64,662 (Oct. 23, 2015) [hereinafter Clean Power Plan] (to be codified at 40 C.F.R. pt. 60).
