Criminalize Fossil Fuel Disinformation, Says UN Rapporteur

The latest report from Elisa Morgera, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, is an extraordinary document that every member of the CleanTechnica community should read. We know that is a challenge in our online digital world that moves at the speed of TikTok, but if you are interested in a document that pulls together all the information currently available about the impact of the fossil fuel industry on our planet, our environment, our political structures, and our health, this is it.

The report combines all the wisdom of Tony Seba, Mark Z. Jacobson, and Project Drawdown to explain why the need to transition away from fossil fuels is urgent, and it does something else. It calls for prohibiting fossil fuel companies from lobbying or advertising. That’s pretty radical. It goes on to call for making the spread of climate disinformation a crime.

Whoa! That’s something many of us would like to see happen. If someone holds a gun to your head, that’s a crime. Why shouldn’t lying about the immense damage caused by burning fossil fuels be as well? Here is the summary to the report:

The present report clarifies States’ international human rights obligations and businesses’ responsibilities to phase out fossil fuels and related subsidies within the current decade. The interlinked, inter-generational, severe, and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle, coupled with six decades of climate obstruction, compel urgent defossilization of our whole economies, for a just transition that is effective, human rights based and transformative in protecting the climate, nature, water and food on which life and health for present and future generations depend.

A Right To Life

Morgera is a professor of global environmental law at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She argues the threat from fossil fuels is a right to life issue, because the harm done by them endangers the existence of the human species. It doesn’t get much more basic than that. She claims the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and other wealthy fossil fuel nations are legally obliged under international law to fully phase out oil, gas, and coal by 2030 and to compensate communities for the damage done to them by fossil fuels.

Fracking, oil sands, and gas flaring should be banned, as should fossil fuel exploration, subsidies, investments, and false tech solutions that will lock in future generations to polluting and increasingly costly oil, gas, and coal, according to a report by The Guardian.

“Despite overwhelming evidence of the interlinked, intergenerational, severe and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle … these countries have and are still accruing enormous profits from fossil fuels, and are still not taking decisive action,” Morgera wrote. “These countries are responsible for not having prevented the widespread human rights harm arising from climate change and other planetary crises we are facing — biodiversity loss, plastic pollution and economic inequalities — caused by fossil fuels extraction, use and waste.”

The Guardian adds that the report focuses on the mountain of “evidence about the severe, far-reaching, and cumulative damage caused by the fossil fuel industry — oil, gas, coal, fertilizers and plastics — on almost every human right including the rights to life, self-determination, health, food, water, housing, education, information and livelihoods.”

Defossilize Knowledge

Paragraph 72 of the report is the beginning of Morgera’s boldest calls to action. It states:

In order to support an informed, transparent and participatory process for defossilization, States also need to “defossilize” information systems, to protect human rights in the formation of public opinion and democratic debate from undue commercial influence and from information distortions arising from the operationalization of the fossil fuel sector’s playbook over decades, considering fossil fuel companies’ historical and current access to influential media and their economic power over influential actors.

States should:
(a) Inform the public about the fossil fuel industry’s deliberate contributions to the planetary crises and about their human rights impacts over decades;
(b) Ensure that accurate, science-based information is made available to the public on defossilization plans, including the underlying economic and technological assumptions, fossil fuel subsidies inventories, emissions embedded in fossil fuel exports, and plans for the decommissioning of infrastructure;
(c) Avoid loopholes in responsible decommissioning, and require independent verification of defossilization and decommissioning plans, and of their implementation;
(d) Ban fossil fuel advertisements, promotion and sponsorship, including cross-border advertising;
(e) Ensure access to comprehensive education on the human rights risks of fossil fuels, and on the benefits of fossil fuel-free production, consumption and lifestyles;
(f) Prohibit lobbying by the fossil fuel industry;
(g) Require private financial institutions and universities to disclose publicly, including on social media, funding amounts, donations and any conditions from the fossil fuel industry;
(h) Criminalize misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry, including failure to disclose corporate lobbying activities or to provide remedies for harm;
(i) Criminalize media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies;
(j) Criminalize attacks against environmental human rights defenders, including from judicial harassment tactics, in addition to enhancing environmental human rights defenders’ protection and access to justice and effective remedies.

Political Will

That is quite a list. Is any of it feasible? The answer is that of course it is, given the political will to do so. An example of how difficult that would be arose just a few days ago. In the fight over clean energy incentives that are targeted by the Big Beautiful Bill working its way through Congress, a new voice for the fossil fuel industry has emerged.

Alex Epstein is an author and founder of a think tank that argues fossil fuels are crucial for human prosperity. According to the New York Times, he has been making the rounds in Washington to press the argument for the permanent elimination of all clean energy subsidies by 2028. He claims the benefits of coal, oil, and gas outweigh the negative effects of climate change and calls wind and solar subsidies “immensely harmful” to the US power grid and “a cancer we have to get rid of” (emphasis added).

In a recent interview on Epstein’s podcast, Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, said wind and solar jobs made the United States “weaker” and likened subsidies that create such employment to the drug trade. Mr. Epstein agreed, calling them “fentanyl jobs.” This is the kind of insanity that Morgera is talking about when she suggests criminal penalties for climate disinformation. It is these kinds of bizzaro arguments that give politicians the cover they need to enact policies that degrade the environment and threaten human health.

“Paradoxically what may seem radical or unrealistic — a transition to a renewable energy based economy — is now cheaper and safer for our economics and a healthier option for our societies,” Morgera told the Guardian. “The transition can also lead to significant savings of taxpayers’ money that is currently going into responding to climate change impacts, saving health costs, and also recouping lost tax revenue from fossil fuel companies. This could be the single most impactful health contribution we could ever make. The transition seems radical and unrealistic because fossil fuel companies have been so good at making it seem so.”

Is it time for destroying the environment in the quest for profits to end? Of course it is, because if not now, when?