This year's pivotal UN climate summit in Brazil faces a tidal wave of fake news and disinformation that aims to deflate any unified front on a rapid energy transition away from fossil fuels.  

COP30 comes at a time when US president Donald Trump, the leader of the world's largest historical carbon polluter, has launched an unprecedented assault on climate and renewable energy programs. 

Since coming to office in January, Trump has used social media to amplify lies about wind energy, for example, claiming that turbines cause cancer and kill whales. He has issued executive orders committed to "unleashing" fossil fuel energy that he calls "affordable and reliable," while falsely claiming that "ideologically-motivated” renewable energy results in job losses and higher energy costs that "devastate" consumers.  

Such disinformation ignores the reality that emissions from burning coal, gas and oil are changing the Earth's climate and leading to increased drought, flooding, storms, and deadly heat.  

It also directly contradicts the fact that rapidly growing solar and wind energy capacity has provided the world's cheapest electricity for some time. For every dollar of investment, clean energy also provides three times as many jobs as the fossil fuel industry.   

Trump echoes classic climate deception 

"The Trump administration is employing a well-worn disinformation playbook, resurfacing outright denial tactics that were the fossil fuel industry's favored approach in the 1980s and 1990s," said Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director of the Climate & Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a US-based science advocacy nonprofit.  

Appropriating tobacco industry deception tactics regarding the health impacts of smoking, oil, gas and coal companies are "manufacturing uncertainty about climate science and blocking climate, clean energy, and clean transportation policies," she added. 

UN climate summits have been a major focus of fossil fuel companies looking to delay the energy transition. Last year, one analysis said more than 1,770 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan — outnumbering all but three country delegations.  

In 2023, researchers revealed that fossil energy companies paid Meta — which owns social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — up to $5 million (€4.3 million) for climate disinformation ads in the lead-up to COP28 in the United Arab Emirates.  

Four of the world's largest oil and gas majors — Shell, ExxonMobil, BP and TotalEnergies — accounted for 98% of that advertising spending. 

Tackling disinformation through transparency 

Amid fears that the world has missed the Paris Agreement target of limiting planetary warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, a coordinated pushback against attempts to sow doubt and delay climate action is emerging. 

The Brazil-led Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change will, for the first time at any UN climate summit, be part of the official COP30 agenda. The scheme aims to fund research, investigative journalism and climate communications campaigns that counter contrarianism and amplify climate science – and solutions. 

"We must fight the coordinated disinformation campaigns impeding global progress on climate change, ranging from outright denial to greenwashing to harassment of climate scientists," said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in November 2024 when the initiative was launched at the G20 summit.

"When governments continue to expand fossil fuel production, even while publicly committing to net-zero goals, it is essential that civil society around the world join forces to ensure the availability of accurate, consistent, reliable, and transparent information to publics and policymakers," said Ece Elbeyi, consulting scientist at the Scientific Panel on Information Integrity about Climate Science, a Swiss-based global science organization.  

By bringing together researchers and media professionals, the COP30 information integrity initiative exemplifies "the sort of civic engagement that is needed" to combat disinformation, she told DW. 

Meanwhile, the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition (CAAD), a global climate watchdog, is asking media and Big Tech to screen "harmful false content" about the climate for their audiences, and to be transparent about the source of any disinformation to ensure "transparency and accountability," noted Philip Newell, CAAD's communications co-chair.  

But climate lies, most lately emanating from the Trump administration about the cost and job creation potential of renewable energy, are being replicated in the media globally.

"The return of Trump to power in January triggered a spike in unchallenged climate disinformation in French media," noted Eva Morel, secretary general of climate NGO QuotaClimat. A report on climate disinformation that was co-authored by QuotaClimat showed that instances of climate deception in French media tripled in the first eight months of 2025.

An 'unprecedented opportunity' to counter fossil fuel deceit

Transparent and rigorous climate science communication matters at a time when nations are set to produce over double the fossil fuels in 2030 that would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5C. As reported in the latest Production Gap Report that monitors the "misalignment" between planned national fossil fuel production and actual global production levels.  

If COP30 hopes to help bridge this misalignment, it needs to take an "unprecedented opportunity" to facilitate "coordinated global action to tackle disinformation," said Mulvey.  

"Exposure of the fossil fuel industry's deceit and underhanded tactics is one of the best strategies we have," she said of using information integrity to embolden the push for a rapid energy transition.   

Eliesio Marubo, activist and legal counsel for Union of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil's Javari Valley, said that climate disinformation needs to be called out for what it is at COP30: "I don't like the term 'fake news,'" he said, adding that the term "ends up legitimizing something that isn't news at all. I prefer to call it what it really is: a lie."  

Edited by: Tamsin Walker