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.
An epistemic crisis is a crisis in the production and delivery of knowledge. It’s about what we know and how we know it, what we agree to be true and what we identify as false. We face, alongside a global threat to our life-support systems, a global threat to our knowledge-support systems.
Let’s start by recognising that they were never robust. There was no golden age of public knowledge, no moment at which the information most people received was largely unbiased and accurate. Throughout modern history, European societies have formed a broad consensus around blatant falsehoods: such as the view that the monarch embodied all the interests of the nation, that women were unsuited to public life, that Black and Brown people were inferior beings, that empire was a force for good. A vast infrastructure of persuasion was built around these beliefs. Public knowledge is always shaped by power.
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.
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.
In the US, we witness a rapid and extreme hardening of this position, as Trump’s allies, old and new, sweep up legacy media platforms – it seems obvious that the result will be ever more unhinged attacks on anyone who challenges capital.
The ultra-rich have also pumped money into new media, such as the online shows that now outrank traditional television news. For example, two fracking billionaires have poured $8m (£6m) into PragerU and $4.7m into the Daily Wire, to extend the reach of these platforms.
Of the world’s 10 most popular online shows, a Yale study shows eight have spread climate science denial. Joe Rogan, who hosts one of the world’s most popular shows, has repeatedly claimed that the Earth is cooling, drawing on research that says the opposite.
A new investigation of Elon Musk’s X by Sky News found that every account set up by reporters, “no matter their political orientation, was fed a glut of rightwing content”, much of which was extreme. The experts it consulted believe this pattern could have resulted only from an algorithm engineered for this purpose, and that “an algorithmic bias must be decided by senior people at the channel”. (X, for its part, told Sky News it was “dedicated to fostering an open, unbiased public conversation”.) A separate study found the spread of misinformation on X is most associated with politicians on the radical right: mainstream or leftist representatives are far less likely to spread falsehoods. The radical right leans heavily into climate science denial and obstruction of environmental measures: this is why it is sponsored by fossil fuel companies.
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.
This also describes the BBC’s understanding of “impartiality”. While it no longer provides a platform for outright climate denial, almost every day it breaks its own editorial guidelines by hosting Tufton Street junktanks (which often argue against environmental action) without revealing who funds them. Shouldn’t we be allowed to know whether or not they are sponsored by fossil fuel companies?
The BBC told its presenter Evan Davis to stop making his own podcast about heat pumps, on the grounds that discussing this technology meant “treading on areas of public controversy”. Why are heat pumps controversial? Because the Energy and Utilities Association, which lobbies for gas appliances, paid a public affairs company to make them so. The company, WPR, boasted that it set out to “spark outrage”. The media, BBC included, were all too happy to oblige.
None of this has obliged any BBC executive to resign. Nor did the plan discussed by former director general Tim Davie and former head of news Deborah Turness to alter “story selection and other types of output, such as drama” to “address low trust issues with Reform voters”. Nor did editing an interview with Jeremy Corbyn to produce a misrepresentation far more serious than Panorama’s edit of a speech by Donald Trump. Nor did its mock-up of a Soviet propaganda poster featuring Corbyn, using the classic Stalinist image of a rayed red dawn. I cannot think of an occasion on which anyone at the BBC has had to resign for misrepresenting a leftwinger. But the appeasement of the right never ends, and nor will it ever be satisfied.
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.
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.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
