Follow The Money: Who’s driving climate disinformation?
Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast
Persephonica
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the very moment we need clarity and trust, information integrity is being polluted. Disinformation is profitable and the impact on truth is dangerous. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the discourse around climate.
This week, Outrage + Optimism steps into the murky, fast-moving world of climate disinformation. Not simply misunderstanding and confusion, but the deliberate shaping of narratives to delay action, fracture trust, and profit from doubt.
Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson explore why disinformation is accelerating just as the climate stakes are rising, how it feeds on human psychology, and why the erosion of shared facts may be one of the greatest barriers to collective climate action.
Paul brings us a conversation from COP30 with Jake Dubbins, a leading voice at the intersection of advertising, climate and human rights. Together they unpack how fossil fuel advertising, opaque algorithms and the attention economy are shaping what we see, what spreads, and what stalls climate action. And they examine the newly launched Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change, a first-of-its-kind effort at the international level.
But can governments, platforms and advertisers clean up a poisoned information space without sliding into censorship? And where should the line really be drawn between free expression and preventing harm?
Learn more:
🛡️ Read the Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change
📊 Explore the OECD report on disinformation and misinformation
🔍 Find out about the Conscious Advertising Network and Climate Action Against Disinformation
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
Join the conversation:
Instagram @outrageoptimism
LinkedIn @outrageoptimism
Or get in touch with us via this form.
Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Assistant Producer: Caillin McDaid
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to outrage and optimism. I'm Tom Rivikarnik. I'm Cristiano Fierrez. |
| 0:06.7 | And I'm Paul Dickinson. Today we're going to look at the world of disinformation around climate, |
| 0:11.2 | and we bring you a conversation with Jake Dubbins. Thanks for being here. |
| 0:16.5 | Okay, for instance, this is a topic we have been wanting to cover for a long time. And sadly, |
| 0:38.3 | as time goes on, it has becoming no less relevant, in fact, more. And that is the murky world of disinformation on climate change. Now, we should start off by just saying there are two terms that often get confused. One is misinformation and the other is disinformation. Misinformation is when somebody doesn't understand something and they need education and being informed in order to understand something better. Disinformation is actually |
| 0:44.2 | the willful misleading for a specific objective. So this episode is about disinformation. And Paul, |
| 0:51.3 | we're largely going to be looking to you to take us through some of this. |
| 0:54.4 | You did the interview. Maybe we can just start off. Obviously, we're all going to chip in and |
| 0:57.8 | provide perspectives. Why is this such an interesting topic to you? Well, I think I start off with |
| 1:02.8 | just the scale of it. I mean, for example, there are actually limits on things like political |
| 1:07.8 | spending. But when commercial organizations want to use their budgets, |
| 1:13.3 | their huge budgets to communicate with us, they are underneath. There is no limits for them. |
| 1:18.4 | I used to know that, you know, half a trillion was being spent on advertising a year or 600 billion a year. |
| 1:24.8 | It turns out that in 2025, $1.14 trillion of being spent on advertising |
| 1:30.4 | to change our minds, which is an absolutely vast sum of money. And so I guess that it's the scale, |
| 1:38.9 | fundamentally, it's the scale of this and how it manifests across all the new and ever consuming media that made me think, |
| 1:47.0 | and I know we agree on this, all of us, but this is such a critical issue. |
| 1:50.6 | Christiana, any thoughts on this? |
| 1:52.3 | Well, I just wanted to go back to your definition, Tom, because they're not completely separate. |
| 1:58.3 | Yeah, yes, true. |
| 1:59.9 | I think if we start with disinformation, which, as you correctly say, is basically an intent. |
| 2:06.3 | It represents an intent to lead to false conclusions. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Persephonica, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Persephonica and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.