It’s RIP to a pioneering initiative in fact-checking, right at a time when exposing and countering misinformation, disinformation, and their various related concepts is more important than ever.
Especially when it comes to the climate crisis and the energy transition.
Last Friday, ABC News reported on the final sign-off of RMIT ABC Fact Check after 11 years and more than a few fact-checking controversies.
It’s caused to reflect on the information challenges we face today, with social media giants withdrawing from carrying “real news”, traditional mainstream media weak and frequently compromised, politics moving into “Trumpian untruths” overdrive, and artificial intelligence (AI) enabled “deep fakes” just the latest alarming trend.
For my own part, at a professional level, I’m making this area a core focus of both my journalism here at The Fifth Estate and a new associate role that I’ve taken on as an Industry/Professional Fellow with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), operating out of the influential and successful Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF).
The unifying theme I’m pursuing is that the renewables-led energy transition needs new “info-structure”, information infrastructure, as well as all manner of enabling technologies and physical infrastructure like transmission lines, wind towers, solar panels, batteries, pumped hydro and more.
If you want to see some proof points of what I’m talking about, look no further than the current political and public debate around the prospect of civilian nuclear energy for Australia, into which I’ve been doing an investigative deep-dive via The Nuclear Files series in The Fifth Estate.
It’s also useful to canvass some definitions of what we’re up against with the “information wars” that are coinciding with the “culture wars”, the “climate wars”, and the descent of much public debate into “anti-wokism”, and “climate denialism” – which has now evolved a new mutation, “renewable energy denialism”.
Here’s a working list, almost certainly incomplete and always debatable, that I’m using:
Misinformation – is false or inaccurate information, such as getting the facts wrong (which could be inadvertent)
Disinformation – is false information that is deliberately intended to mislead, such as intentionally misstating the facts
Malinformation – is true information that is spread with the intent to harm someone’s reputation or cause other forms of harm
Propaganda – is information, especially of a biassed or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view
Influence-peddling – is the use of position or political influence on someone’s behalf in exchange for money or favours
Greenwashing – is a form of advertising or marketing spin that deceptively uses green PR and green marketing to persuade the public that an organisation’s products, goals or policies are environmentally friendly
As you can see, “intent” is a critical element. And make no mistake, there is plenty of well-resourced, well-funded and well-coordinated intent, and I’d say malintent, driving the misuse of information in regard to climate action and the energy transition.
Some of it is ideological, and some are simply misguided, propelled by genuinely held but mistaken or contestable beliefs and scientific understandings. Ultimately, however, it is best to follow the self-interest trail, whether political or dollar driven, and especially look to the fossil fuel sector and the last stands of coal, gas and oil as clean electrification takes over.
Focusing on the mis/disinformation space has already led me to interesting discussions and thoughts.
Lina Buttgereit, a young German academic working from the Netherlands, and who recently spent a few weeks with the UTS School of Communication, is doing a PhD around how we “perceive” misinformation. A key learning is that people like us frequently overestimate our own capacity to detect and counter misinformation.
As in we think, often mistakenly, that while “other people” may fall prey to misinformation, we ourselves are too switched on and too savvy to fall for it ourselves.
Over coffee with Lina, we flipped that conversation to politics, which was on her radar because of the current resurgence of the Far-Right in Europe, on my mind because of the nuclear versus renewables debate here in Australia, and on both of our agendas with the US Presidential elections coming up this November.
The sad truth that we hit on is that we automatically make allowances for politicians descending into deliberate untruths and misleading public positions because: “That’s just politics, isn’t it?” We actually expect them to lie and mislead.
That’s not good enough, of course.
Recently, on social media, I highlighted an example of political mis/disinformation in action. It involves the nuclear debate and no lesser a figure than the Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, the alternative prime minister of Australia, who is building an identifiably fictitious and ill-sourced claim that the “government’s plan” for its renewables-led energy transition will cost a mind-boggling $1.3 trillion.
And then claiming that his nuclear-led counterplan, cost details of which are yet to be released to the public, would “cost a fraction of the government’s $1.3 trillion plan”. The Albanese government, meanwhile, citing the Australian Energy Market Operator and its ground-breaking Integrated System Plan (ISP), puts the real cost at circa $122 billion, roughly a tenth of what Dutton claims.
If you dig in, no one is comparing apples and apples, yet the consequences of voters being misled on this, of all issues, could be devastating for the immense economic, social and environmental challenge that Australia faces to meet its global commitments to achieving net zero for carbon emissions by 2050, and as close to 100 per cent renewable energy as we can get.
You can see my whole post on the matter here. But suffice it to say that I’m a bit old-fashioned on this stuff, and I actually expect that politicians, and especially the leadership class of politicians, will do some hard work to avoid misleading people (voters).
If they don’t, and the fish rots from the head, then we are in for a mis/disinformation free-for-all, which is pretty much what we are seeing now,
If you’d like to know more about my “info-structure” work with ISF and UTS, please email me at Murray.Hogarth@uts.edu.au.
