Disinformation: supply and demand
There is plenty of really, really good work being done in Australia and other parts of the world around the supply of disinformation.
Just like the fossil fuel companies that supply coal, oil and gas, there are shady networks of people who either manually create or use digital machinery (like generative AI) to create a supply of pre-prepared bullshit (or build ‘pipelines’ through right-wing social media sites like Substack or X).
But I think the demand for disinformation is broadly underconsidered. Why do people believe bullshit so readily, even when it’s unbelievable and contradictory?
And most importantly: can we work to reduce demand for disinformation?
In my 2020 book Windfall, I explored both the supply and demand sides. While there was clearly a network of dark-money groups seeding lies in communities, there was also a demand for what they offered, particularly from those communities that were disenfranchised and mistreated by the more powerful parties in the process (like governments and corporations).
The suppliers of disinformation depend on the demand-side effect of angry, disenfranchised people hunting for validation.
Dealing with this means looking at a few problems right in the face. Corporate renewable energy developers are sometimes focused narrowly on profits, shareholders and share price. That means far too often, there are projects that have swapped hands tens of times, companies are hostile towards serious benefit-sharing schemes, and there is little-to-no emotional long-term investment.
A good chunk of the ‘demand for disinformation’ comes from people who’ve been sucked under the wheels of modern climate-solutions-capitalism, and crave aesthetically plausible justifications for the ball of anger in their chest.
There are real and substantial efforts to push in the opposite direction: the Australian Renewable Energy Alliance, for instance, works collaboratively with industry and communities with plenty of success, but also sometimes they probably feel like they’re trying to broom water back into the sea.
There are obvious exceptions to my oversimplified dichotomy. A nice example: the extremely wealthy coastal homeowners who oppose barely-visible offshore wind projects for little reason beyond a mix of boredom and the brain-rot of wealth.
There are also communities that are proactively avoiding the spotlight of disinfo campaigns by simply ensuring they take control of the energy transition from the outset. They aren’t passive victims of disinformation; they become active masters of their own fate. I think that’s cool.
Similarly, there are a lot of folks who are sincerely raising critical and constructive questions about renewable energy roll-out, who end up classed in the same groups as active disinformation campaigns simply because they have the ‘vibe’ of being opposed to renewable energy.
Criticising, analysing and regulating the suppliers of disinformation is very, very vital. I have spent a good chunk of my career pushing on that end of the spectrum.
The demand side is vital too, despite being fuzzier, more complicated and requiring far deeper and more systemic changes to the way wealth, power and prominence get doled out in society. What if the default way we do deal with money and power in the energy transition helps create demand for the toxic bullshit-factory products we are scrambling to push back against? That is bad, but it can also absolutely be countered and rectified to ensure the elimination of fossil fuels keeps pace over the coming decades.
Below is a republication of my submission to the 2025 “Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy”, written on my own behalf. You can read my submission here and other submissions here.
Thank you for the opportunity to submit to this committee. I won’t be addressing all the terms of reference, but I will be touching on several of them, particularly (a), (b), (c) and (d).
The prevalence of disinformation from mainstream media outlets and journalists
My first experience with prominent false information was after I began working at Infigen Energy in February 2010. My work entailed direct engagement with the raw data and characteristics of wind power technology in Australia’s electricity grid (then: 1.5% and now 14.7%). The depiction of wind power in mainstream media was verging on comically wrong. Media outlets issuing glaring mistakes and absurd errors – essentially being a vector for disinformation attacking a safety upgrade to Australia’s energy system – was what inspired me to start my own blog, ‘Some Air’. In 2016, soon before I discontinued the site, I wrote about former MP Craig Kelly’s false statement regarding the ‘payback period’ for wind power:
“Kelly's belief is 597,273 times larger than the actual figure. This would be like estimating that Malcolm Turnbull is 36,433,636 years old, or that Kanye West is 1,027,309.091 metres tall. This isn't the sort of error we make in our everyday life”(I also include in that article an instance of former radio shock jock Alan Jones inflating the price of wind power by 20,297 times on the ABC’s Q&A program).
On my blog, on my former Twitter account, and in published articles for outlets such as The Guardian, I have documented and debunked disinformation with a particular focus on disinformation from the mainstream media. Much disinformation focused on wind power, presenting it as an infeasible option for mass replacement of coal and gas fired power stations.
In my book, “Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil Free Future”, I document the sequence of events around the immediate framing of the 2016 large-scale blackout that occurred in South Australia, beginning with the statements of former ABC News political editor Chris Uhlmann blaming the characteristics of wind power on the night of the blackout, and that framing bleeding into the following days, months and years. I catalogue many instances of blackouts with either diverse or entirely unrelated causes blamed by journalists on wind power or climate policy.
I have recently reported on (and analysed) media and social media responses to several other significant blackouts, including a major blackout that occurred across Spain and Portugal earlier this year. I submitted a complaint to the UK’s media regulator regarding one particularly egregious example, which has been accepted as worthy of investigation but no conclusion has been reached.
Over the years, conservative-leaning media outlets have used fabrications, falsehoods, misunderstandings and months-long campaigns to actively attempt to stifle the deployment of non-harmful climate tech. The key voices issuing this disinformation tend to be limited purely by their imagination: I have never encountered a single piece of disinformation that resulted in consequences for its creators or disseminators. In particular, these media outlets will push back against regulation on the grounds that it sets an alarming precedent for stifling ‘free speech’ for media outlets. This is absurd – freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
There are no regulatory consequences for causing informational harm to Australians, in Australia. There should be, at the very least for the most egregious cases.
Targeting and intimidation
On two memorable occasions, I have been targeted in formal ways by key anti-wind players.
As I cover in my book ‘Windfall’, myself and several other people received defamation threat letters in late 2015. My own threats related to me live-tweeting statements made at the 2014 Senate Select Committee on Wind Turbines. In repeating an apology stated by a prominent university academic on Twitter, I received a defamation threat implying that I had repeated the original statement with ‘malice’ (as opposed to what I was clearly doing: live-tweeting the goings-on of a key inquiry). After six months of deliberation, I ended up having to post a ‘clarification’ on my blog. This period was intensely stressful, costly and time-consuming – all of which is the point of ‘strategic lawsuits against public participation’, or SLAPP suits.
Later in my career, I found myself having to explain several ‘questions on notice’ received by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency during Senate Estimates, issued by Senator Chris Back. The allegations were vague (“Is ARENA aware that the above named person has repeatedly attacked reputable persons who have advocated for the Government’s research into the health impact of wind turbines”), and my name was misspelt as ‘Ketan Yoshi’.
In both instances, it took close to zero effort to initiate the attacks, but the costs in dealing with them were significant, particularly the fuzzier reputational and employment issues. In no way did I have it particularly hard; there are many others who’ve copped it far worse. But I mention these to illustrate how actively fighting against disinformation can be fought using ‘dirty’ tactics, on the basis that those doing the attacks have no burden of evidence before they can cause material damage.
Community benefits, empowerment and backlash
A frustratingly consistent trend not just in Australia but in debates around clean energy infrastructure around the world is the erasure of the behaviour of corporations.
In the media, much of the focus will tend to centre on government policies incentivising renewable energy, and the reactions of the community, when there is friction at utility-scale wind, solar, battery or transmission line projects. In my direct experience, attitudinal characteristics of corporate developers, along with the developmental decisions (such as whether benefits are shared with neighbours or whether neighbours have a say in siting or planning decisions) play a major role.
I recall one specific conversation I had with a wind project developer who’d overseen a particularly successful and broadly welcomed wind power project, which included a generous benefit sharing system for local neighbours.
Over a glass of wine at a clean energy industry event some time in the early 2010s, he pointed out to me that the anti-wind groups simply didn’t bother with his project, because they had no baseline community anger to foment.
This was something I examined directly. Along with Sydney University Professor Simon Chapman, I investigated media coverage of one of Infigen Energy’s large-scale wind projects: the Cherry Tree Wind Farm, in Victoria. We published a paper that showed that the arrival and rhetoric of an anti-wind group known as the ‘Waubra Foundation’ dramatically intensified the pre-existing unhappy sentiment of the local community.
While it was a useful media analysis, we failed to take home the key message – the best tool would have prevention. The disinformation of the anti-wind group only took root because it had fertile ground to grow in. Failures in procedural justice and distributional justice trigger discontent, and anti-wind groups spot that, and move in to exploit it.
It is worth noting that in my experience, the focus on profits and ‘shareholder value’ from within corporate renewable energy developers can be a major impediment to the implementation of generous benefit sharing schemes. Deeper cultural change prioritising long-term thinking and stronger government support are both vital.
I am confident other submissions will address the shady network of funders and dark money that invariably link many anti-wind groups back to the fossil fuel industry.
These groups are information arsonists, whose goal is to set fire to any possibility of healthy deliberation or community empowerment around large-scale energy infrastructure. They wield a shotgun blast of lies and fire wildly into the space. I genuinely disrespect them, not just because they end up supporting fossil fuels, but most importantly because they end up exploiting and disrespecting communities.
When an anti-wind group finds purchase and widespread local support, it is usually because that group provided a framework and terminology to allow a community to express the deep hurt of injustice in language that sounds justifiable: being worried about your health, wanting to save birds, wanting to save whales, wanting to prevent bushfires. Every falsified meme offered up tends to have its own moral weight for this reason. They offer a pressure release valve to members of a community that feels they can’t simply say that they’re being treated unfairly, because the broader social system of capitalism deems that an unacceptable plea.
In conjunction with stricter regulations and scrutiny of dark-money astroturf groups, fairer models of development will be a necessary (but insufficient on its own) part of reducing friction at the sites of large-scale energy projects. It is also a way to broadly reduce the impact of disinformation around clean energy in Australia – not as a direct counter, but as a way to cut off its fuel source, which is frustrated, angry and disenfranchised communities.
Ketan Joshi 