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If this were just a climate crisis, we would fix it. The technology, money and strategies have all been at hand for some time. What stifles concrete steps is a problematic overlap: the climate crisis running headlong into the crisis of knowledge.

Understanding the Knowledge Crisis

An knowledge production crisis is a breakdown in how information is created and shared. It’s about what we know and how we acquire that understanding, our shared truths and what we identify as false. We confront, alongside a global threat to our life-support systems, a international risk to our knowledge-support systems.

Looking Back: No Golden Age of Common Understanding

First, we must acknowledge that these systems were never strong. No perfect period existed of shared information, no time at which the data most people received was largely unbiased and truthful. In recent centuries, Western nations have formed a broad consensus around obvious untruths: such as the view that royalty represented national interests, that females weren't fit for public roles, that Black and Brown people were inferior beings, that empire was a force for good. A vast infrastructure of persuasion was constructed around these beliefs. Common understanding is continually influenced by authority.

Democratic Promise

Democracy's pledge was that the everyone's conditions would gradually get better as knowledge spread: we would convert our gathering understanding of the world into societal advancement. For some time, in some places, this happened. But that era now appears to be concluding.

Fundamental Problem: Wealth Control of Media Platforms

The fundamental problem is this: that the majority of channels of information exchange are owned or influenced by extremely wealthy individuals. When democracy poses challenges wealth constantly seeks to address, propaganda is part of the solution. Like the kings and empire-builders of the past, they utilize their media to project the claims that suit them and suppress the claims that don’t. This means boosting right and far-right movements, which defend wealth and power against those who wish to redistribute them.

Changing Information Environment

Across America, we witness a rapid and extreme hardening of this stance, as political allies acquire traditional news outlets – it seems obvious that the result will be ever more extreme criticisms on anyone who challenges wealthy interests.

Billionaires have also pumped money into digital platforms, including the online shows that now surpass conventional broadcast journalism. As an illustration, two fracking billionaires have invested substantially into various platforms to expand the influence of these channels.

False Climate Narratives

Of the world’s top digital programs, research indicates show many have spread environmental misinformation. Popular hosts have frequently asserted that the Earth is cooling, drawing on research that says the opposite.

Recent investigations into digital networks found that profiles were fed a glut of particular narratives, a significant portion was extreme. Analysts conclude this pattern from algorithmic engineering, and that this slant must be approved by top management.

Systematic Misinformation

Separate studies found the spread of misinformation is most associated with politicians on the radical right: mainstream or leftist representatives are far less likely to circulate untruths. The radical right leans heavily into environmental skepticism and obstruction of environmental measures: this is why it is sponsored by energy corporations.

Journalistic Cooperation

Wealthy entities have willing workers even in news organizations that don't belong to the ultra-rich. Academic analysis records how specialists became collateral damage in journalistic attacks against public figures. This method is grimly familiar to climate scientists: treating scientific consensus with opinions from funded advocates. Little effort is made to examine the connection among different perspectives, their backgrounds, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority.

National Media Issues

This also describes certain broadcasters' understanding of “balance”. While they no longer provide space for complete environmental rejection, regularly they break their own editorial guidelines by hosting certain thinktanks without disclosing who funds them. Shouldn’t we be allowed to know whether or not they are sponsored by energy corporations?

Media executives have told presenters to stop making informative programs about environmental technologies, on the grounds that discussing this technology meant “entering disputed territory”. Why are these technologies controversial? Because industry associations hired PR firms to make them so. These firms boasted that they set out to “generate anger”. The media, even national networks, were all too happy to comply.

Results and Ramifications

None of this has forced any media executives to step down. Nor did content choices designed to “build confidence” with particular constituencies. Nor did consequence for distorting public officials through modified conversations or manipulated visuals. It's difficult to recall of an instance on which any executive has had to resign for misrepresenting a progressive figure. But the appeasement of the right never ends, and nor will it ever be satisfied.

International Consequences

Amid this information environment, it's understandable that governments are retreating from climate action. International reviews have found that “inaccurate or misleading narratives” in the media about climate breakdown create “a vicious cycle” between rejecting evidence and government paralysis. The results can be seen at international climate talks, where delegates remark on a “reduction in enthusiasm” among wealthy countries.

Final Analysis: Deliberate Attack

This wasn't accidental. It’s the product of a deliberate and systematic assault on information by some of the richest people on Earth. Preventing climate breakdown means protecting ourselves from the storm of lies.