Green Energy’s Problems Go Beyond Messaging

By Andrew Follett

Friday, December 05, 2025

 

Environmentalists say they’re losing the fight on global warming due to disinformation from well-funded conservatives, placing the blame for the declining influence of environmentalism on rhetoric, not policy. But blaming messaging difficulties and “conservative misinformation” for the movement’s retreat is exactly backward.

 

The New York Times recently told readers that declining worldwide interest in global warming is due to an alleged shadowy conspiracy by “the oil, gas and coal industries [which] continue to downplay the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is dangerously heating the planet.” The Gray Lady then goes on to complain that Russia, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, President Donald Trump “promote disinformation on social media platforms” that “have long been dismissed as conspiracy theories” and blames this for the failure of a recent global warming summit in Brazil.

 

Yet about the only thing the summit could agree on was hating “climate deniers,” with Brazil’s leftist (and once convicted criminal) President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opening the talks by denouncing obstructionists who “reject scientific evidence and attack institutions,” saying “[t]hey manipulate algorithms, sow hatred, and spread fear” with a disinformation and propaganda. Ultimately, the summit agreed on a separate “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” calling on governments to address the “growing impact of disinformation, misinformation, denialism, [and] deliberate attacks on environmental journalists, defenders, scientists, researchers, and other public voices.”

 

In other words, all the world’s environmentalist-minded politicians could do was make a statement encouraging removing their political opposition from social media . . . and many of the environmentalists among American academics and politicians agreed with them.

 

“In fact, there’s been a quite systematic campaign that’s been sophisticated and extremely well-funded,” Timmons Roberts, executive director of the Climate Social Science Network and a researcher at Brown University, told the New York Times. “They have succeeded at undermining climate action globally.”

 

At least one elected representative agreed.

 

“Now, I think, there is a better understanding of the true nature of the fossil fuel disinformation and corruption campaign,” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said while attending the conference, blaming its meager results on “interference” by a tiny group of bloggers. “We are where we are because we were completely ineffectual in fending off a decades-long disinformation bombardment.”

 

The irony is that environmentalists spend orders of magnitude more on what Whitehouse calls “disinformation and corruption” than their opposition.

 

In terms of expenses, the largest U.S. anti-climate alarmism think tanks are the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute (where I once interned), which spent $8.6 million in 2024, and the Heartland Institute, which spent $3.7 million, according to tax filings. Note that only a fraction of that money is spent on energy or environmental issues; both institutions focus on several additional areas of public policy.

 

In contrast, environmental groups are spectacularly well-funded. Last year, the Sierra Club spent $173 million, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) spent $220 million, and Earthjustice spent $152 million, funding which was almost exclusively dedicated to energy or environmental issues. (A portion of this money represents ill-gotten gains: As I previously reported, a member of the Sierra Club’s four-person board recently pled guilty to stealing $248 million, but the difference is still stunning.)

 

Each of these environmental groups spends well over ten times what they label their “climate skeptic” opposition does, and the spread of the environmentalists’ gospel is also backed by an absurd amount of taxpayer money.

 

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act alone dedicated more than $1 trillion to grants, loans, and tax credits for wind, solar, and other green energy boondoggles between 2022 and 2031, according to estimates by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. And that’s in addition to the already existing tens of billions in previous annual spending.

 

The radical environmental movement’s opponents don’t have big-budget Hollywood stars, movies constantly promoting their agenda, or infamously inaccurate documentaries hosted by former U.S. vice presidents. Instead, this opposition is made up almost entirely of policy wonks on a comparatively shoestring budget, mostly conversing on a handful of blogs.

 

Seems like the well-funded messaging campaign is coming from an entirely different direction, as environmentalists spend orders of magnitude more on propaganda than the “climate skeptics” they blame for their defeats, have lucrative government support, and are vastly better connected.

 

If they’re losing an information war, perhaps that is because they’ve been selling a poor product, rather than just engaging in poor marketing as the Times suggests. The idea that a movement that is the darling of both Hollywood and Madison Avenue is bad at marketing compared to some think-tank wonks is laughable. Despite their immense resources, environmentalists blame their political opposition for their own waning ideological influence because the environmental movement has failed to achieve its goals.

 

The International Energy Agency reports that conventional oil, gas, coal, and other “fossil fuels” still accounted for 82 percent of global energy consumption in 2023, a figure that has remained stubbornly high despite decades of climate policy efforts from these groups and trillions in taxpayer support. The wind and solar power leftists favor generated less than 3 percent of that, as such resources simply haven’t scaled the way environmentalists predicted they would.

 

Environmentalists and their media allies have portrayed wind and solar power as the technologies of tomorrow for over five decades now. The plot of the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun revolves around a fictional economical form of solar power, which is portrayed as cutting-edge and capable of replacing conventional energy. The problem is that the movie came out more than 50 years ago. Disinformation or bad messaging didn’t cause the last five decades of failure of solar power to meet its environmental evangelists’ expectations; physics did.

 

I’ve written before about environmentalists’ endless predictions of global warming apocalypses that never occurred, but suffice it to say that according to them, we’ve had mere years to save the planet for . . . the last five decades.

 

Climate radicals’ opposition didn’t force Dr. Noel Brown, senior environmental scientist who represented the United Nations Environment Programme at a number of major conferences, to tell the Associated Press in 1989 that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels,” that “[s]hifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands,” or that mass famine would occur in Africa if extreme government action was not taken by the year 2000. Obviously, none of those events came to pass.

 

But 25 years after his own deadline passed, Brown still serves on the boards of multiple environmental groups, one of which has an annual budget of $95.3 million. Clearly, Brown stays close to the green in more ways than one, despite his long record of failed predictions.

 

Like many left-wing movements, environmentalism struggles with introspection and course-correction, scapegoating political opposition for its failures. But given how poll after poll shows world public opinion cooling on global warming, the movement should consider that its policies, not its paltry opposition, might be the root of its problems.