Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage | The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich

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1. Selected sections from this opinion column:

   >If this were just a climate crisis, we would fix it. The technology, money and strategies have all been at hand for years. What stifles effective action is a deadly conjunction: the climate crisis running headlong into the epistemic crisis.
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   >The promise of democracy was that the lives of all would steadily improve as knowledge spread: we would turn our gathering understanding of the world into social progress. For a while, in some places, we did. But that era now seems to be coming to an end.
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   >The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich. If democracy is the problem capital is always trying to solve, propaganda is part of the solution. Like the kings and empire-builders of the past, they use their platforms 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.
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   >Capital has willing workers even in the media that aren’t owned by billionaires. A devastating new article by Peter Coviello, professor of American literature at the University of Illinois, records how he and his former college became collateral damage in the campaign waged by the New York Times against Zohran Mamdani, now mayor-elect of New York City. Coviello explains a process grimly familiar to climate scientists: equating expert opinion with commentary from paid lobbyists. No attempt is made to examine “the relation between those two ‘sides,’ or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority”. If, he argues, you have the money to fund a junktank, it will produce whatever opinion you request, then papers such as the New York Times will balance that opinion against decades of academic study, as if the two things are of equal weight.
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   >In this media climate, it’s not surprising that governments are retreating from climate action. In June, a review by the International Panel on the Information Environment found that “inaccurate or misleading narratives” in the media about climate breakdown create “a feedback loop between scientific denialism and political inaction”. The results can be seen at the current Cop30 climate talks, whose president, André Corrêa do Lago, remarks on a “reduction in enthusiasm” among rich nations.
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   >It didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a deliberate and systematic assault on knowledge by some of the richest people on Earth. Preventing climate breakdown means protecting ourselves from the storm of lies.

   It does feel like we have been swimming upstream for a while, and having to fight against the stream of mis- and disinformation around our worsening climate and some solutions is not an easy task. Unfortunately, given the asymmetry of power, it seems that policymakers have been guided down the wrong paths in recent years.

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