Attacks on renewable energy are proliferating on YouTube

The nature of climate misinformation on Google-owned YouTube is evolving, according to a new report. Videos espousing climate denial are declining across nearly 100 YouTube channels, while videos attacking solutions such as wind and solar are proliferating.

The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) identified 96 YouTube channels that frequently disseminate what it described as misleading climate talking points, including the channels for libertarian think tank the Heartland Institute, conservative nonprofit PragerU and controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson. An AI model trained on climate denial, backstopped by human checks, was then used to review the transcripts of some 12,000 climate-related videos posted since 2018.

About half of the videos were found to contain climate misinformation or disinformation, and each claim was sorted into five broad categories: