Is Big Tech Fueling the Climate Disinformation War?

Energy Gang

Wood Mackenzie

Tech News, Environment, Sustainability, Innovation, Renewable Energy, Technology, Alternative Energy, Energy, News, Cleantech, Wind Energy, Business, Climate Change, Solar Energy

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2019

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As we reckon with the dark side of Silicon Valley’s tech giants, there’s more scrutiny into how these companies are assisting climate denial and obfuscation.

We’ll look at a few different stories:

Climate and clean energy are getting disadvantaged by Facebook and Twitter’s different policies on political ads: how do we define issue ads and political speech?

Google, Facebook and others are getting called out for their support of groups that spread extreme climate denial: How much criticism do they deserve?

And Amazon, Microsoft and Google are building the digital backbone of industries that are wrecking the planet. How should we think about their role and culpability?

In the second half of the show, we’ll discuss America’s withdraws from the Paris climate treaty. With U.S. global leadership in shambles, who’s going to fill the gap? And how could elections change things?

Finally, how California’s wildfire crisis is stoking the state’s distributed generation market. We’ll look at the business impacts.

Recommended resources:

Heated: Exxon Climate Ads Aren’t Political, According to Twitter
Vox: Watch AOC Ask Mark Zuckerberg if She Can Run Fake Green New Deal Ads
Guardian: Google Made Large Contributions to Climate Deniers
Guardian: Facebook Video Spreads Climate Denial to 5 Million Users
GTM: Power Shutoff Disruption ‘Resets’ California’s Residential Market
Jigar Shah/Timothy Hade Op-Ed: It’s Time to Evolve California’s Electrical Grid

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Energy Gang is brought to you by Sungrow. Sungrow is the leading solar inverter supplier by volume in the world.
0:06.0	It's now leading in the Americas as well, with more than 3 gigawatts shipped in the last two years.
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0:17.1	tech companies. Find out more about their innovations in both solar and storage at
0:21.9	Sungrowpower.com. From Green Tech Media this is the Energy Gang. Weekly debates and discussions on the fast-changing
0:36.9	world of energy. I'm Stephen Lacey. I am a contributing editor at GTM and your host.
0:42.1	Welcome to the show.
0:43.7	This week is Big Tech fueling the Climate Disinformation War.
0:47.5	As we continue to reckon with the dark side of Silicon Valley's tech giants, there's more scrutiny into how these companies are assisting
0:54.2	climate denial and obfuscation and building the digital backbone of industries that are wrecking
0:59.7	the planet.
1:00.7	How much criticism do they deserve? Where does their culpability lie? It's a murky subject.
1:07.0	Then, Trump makes it official. America is leaving the Paris Climate Agreement with U.S. global leadership in shambambles who's going to fill the gap
1:14.3	and how could elections change things. Finally California's wildfire crisis is
1:18.5	stoking the state's distributed generation market we'll look at the business impacts.
1:23.0	Jigger, you're out in California this week, an early morning recording session out there in San Francisco.
1:29.0	Good morning. How's everything going?
1:31.0	It's good, it's good. It was a nice flight and the embassy suites is
1:36.4	treating me well. How do things feel like post-wildfire chaos?
1:48.0	Uh, I think it still feels pretty uncertain, right? I mean in general,
1:52.2	there's a cloud now hanging over people in terms of, you know, PGEN saying it could take 10 years to fix this problem.
	...

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