A conservation charity known for its anti-renewables stance has made submissions to federal and state inquiries that name non-existent government authorities and a nonexistent windfarm, and cite scientific articles that the supposed publisher says don’t exist, a Guardian Australia investigation has found.
Two US-based academics and experts said Rainforest Reserves Australia’s (RRA) claims in submissions about their work were “100% misleading” and “absurd”.
In comments sent via RRA, the organisation’s submission writer has admitted using AI to help write more than 100 submissions to councils and state and federal governments since August 2024, and to also using AI to answer questions from the Guardian.
RRA came to prominence opposing a small number of windfarm projects in north Queensland, but has become more vocal against renewable energy generally and is a popular voice among conservatives and rightwing media.
The Nationals leader, David Littleproud, last month celebrated RRA analysis on the extent of renewable energy installations around Australia. An open letter criticising the Australian government’s focus on renewable energy coordinated by RRA, which is based in far north Queensland, has been signed by several notable Australians, including the energy entrepreneur Trevor St Baker, Dick Smith, the Indigenous advocate Warren Mundine and several nuclear energy advocates.
The Guardian is not suggesting the analysis or open letter were developed using AI.
‘100% misleading’
RRA made a submission to the Senate inquiry on misinformation and disinformation in the climate change and energy debate.
The submission said Australia’s climate and energy policy was being “undermined by a persistent failure to confront misinformation” and plans to reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions relied on “incomplete science, policy capture, and the systematic omission of ecological costs (Brulle, 2014; Oreskes and Conway, 2010)”.
Prof Naomi Oreskes is a Harvard science historian and an expert on science misinformation who co-authored the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, which the submission cites.
“Merchants of Doubt does not support that claim,” Oreskes said, and “net zero” was not discussed in her book.
She said: “It is true that no technology is 100% impact free. But some technologies are far worse than others, and the passage cites my work in a way that is 100% misleading.”
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The same submission points to two publications from Prof Bob Brulle of Brown University – an expert on the global network of groups working to slow action on climate change. The submission said Brulle’s work supported a claim that advocacy for renewable energy was often “devoid of underlying context”.
“While the citations are real, neither paper remotely addresses the issues that the [submission] discusses,” Brulle said.
“The citations are totally misleading. I have never written on these topics in any of my papers. To say that these citations support [RRA’s] argument is absurd.”
RRA also made submissions to a Senate inquiry into Pfas chemicals and a NSW parliamentary inquiry on Pfas in waterways. Both claimed solar panels and wind turbines were releasing so-called forever chemicals into the environment.
The submissions cited two papers from the Journal of Cleaner Production as evidence, but the Guardian could not find the papers.
A spokesperson for the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, said: “These references appear to be hallucinated and do not exist – we have not found any articles with those titles published in Elsevier journals.”
Nonexistent windfarm
RRA’s website says its submissions are developed by a volunteer, Anne S Smith who, the charity says, “continues to call for policy grounded in truth, science, and stewardship not ideology”. Smith is described on the RRA website as a volunteer and an environmental research strategist.
In two submissions published on its website, both with the same date, RRA opposed a windfarm development in Queensland called Moonlight Range that was ultimately rejected by the state government.
One submission, authored by Smith, refers to a report from 2023 produced by the “Queensland Environmental Protection Agency” – an agency that has not existed since 2009.
It also refers to the “Australian Regional Planning Commission” and the “Queensland Planning Authority” – neither of which exists.
The other submission, which does not name an author, claimed “case studies from the Oakey Wind Farm in Queensland” had reported “widespread contamination” at the site. But there is no windfarm in Oakey and the cited “Oakey Wind Farm Contamination Report” does not exist.
Some properties in the town were contaminated by Pfas chemicals used in firefighting foam at a defence base.
Dr Aaron Snoswell, a senior research fellow in AI accountability at the Queensland University of Technology’s GenAI Lab, put a small sample of the submissions through checking platforms – which also run on AI.
“Looking at some of these documents, there were large portions of text that the platforms were very confident were AI generated,” he said.
He said inconsistencies in references “is a classic mistake that’s made by AI systems”.
The use of AI was not in itself a problem, he said, but AI-generated work needed to be double checked.
Cam Walker, the campaigns coordinator at Friends of the Earth Australia, reviewed the RRA submissions and said they contained “fabrications that corrupt the evidence base that decision-makers and communities rely on”.
“We’ve found multiple submissions across different renewable energy projects, all authored by the same person from RRA … all showing the same pattern of fake citations,” he said.
“When you cite a government department that was abolished 16 years ago, or reference reports that don’t exist, that’s not community representation. It’s a misrepresentation.”
He said Friends of the Earth had “genuine concerns about ensuring renewable energy is planned properly” but the submissions from RRA “poisons the well for legitimate environmental concerns”.
Guardian Australia’s questions to RRA were forwarded to Smith, who sent a 1,500-word response that she later acknowledged had been generated with the help of AI.
For the submissions, she said she had used “a range of analytical tools including AI-assisted literature searches, data synthesis, and document preparation” and were “entirely under my direction”.
She claimed the citation of Oreskes and Brulle was fair.
She claimed one of the papers in the Elsevier journal had become “inaccessible” and suggested this could be because “they contain findings that challenge dominant policy narratives”.
Referring to the findings of nonexistent or long-closed organisations was “entirely appropriate”, she said, and the citation relating to Oakey windfarm was “misattributed” but was “intended to illustrate a real and serious issue”.
She said the claims from Friends of the Earth were “inflammatory, politically motivated, and does not reflect the reality of our work”.
When the Guardian asked RRA if the responses to its questions had been generated using AI, Smith responded “Yes” in an email, and added it was “the most efficient way to review everything properly and provide you with an accurate and timely response. All of the information and conclusions are mine the tool simply helped me work through the material quickly.”
