1 . There is a kind of climate pollution that we can’t see clearly. It isn’t in our rivers, lands or skies, it is in our minds. When climate disinformation goes unchecked, it spreads like wildfire, undermining the existence of climate change and the need for urgent action.

Like the biosphere that sustains us, the health of our information ecosystems is vital to our survival. As an artist, I feel a responsibility to create new ways of seeing the disinformation that has come to define the age of fake news.

Social media sites are honed to grab our attention. Using sophisticated algorithms, the corporations behind them decide what billions of people see around the world, dictated by what keeps you hooked, but also by what the companies paying social media sites choose to put in front of you.

Powerful corporate actors deploy clever influence campaigns via ads targeted at specific users based on what social media firms know about those people. Major oil and gas companies have spent billions of dollars over the years persuading consumers about their green proofs, when only 1 per cent of their expenditure in 2019 was on renewable energy. This is known as corporate greenwashing. Still, fossil fuel firms maintain that their climate policies are “responsible” and “in line with the science”.

To expose the scale of corporate greenwashing online, I was part of a team that recently launched Eco-Bot.Net. Co-created with artist Rob “3D” Del Naja of the band Massive Attack and Dale Vince, a green entrepreneur, Eco-Bot. Net’s AI-powered website ran throughout the COP26 climate summit, exposing climate change misinformation by releasing a series of data drops for heavily polluting sectors, including energy, agribusiness and aviation.

Academic definitions of climate disinformation and greenwashing were used to unearth posts across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and visualize them on our website. Eco-Bot.Net then flagged greenwashing ads and posts on the original social media site with a public health warning.

By digging into our data, journalists have already revealed that companies are targeting specific demographics in order to influence public perceptions about climate change – and even alter government policy.

One data drop focused on the 100 biggest fossil fuel producers, companies that have been the source of 71 per cent of global carbon emissions. It found that 16 of these companies ran 1705 greenwashing and climate misinformation ads globally on Facebook and Instagram this year. In total, they spent more than £4 million creating influence campaigns that generated up to 155 million impressions.

Social media companies could end most of the harms from climate disinformation on their platforms if they wanted to. Flagging systems were swiftly introduced to warn users of posts containing disinformation about covid-19. The scientific consensus on human-caused global warming has been resolute for decades, so why can’t a similar flagging system be implemented for related disinformation?

It is true that Twitter and Facebook have both introduced climate science information hubs, but these are little more than PR exercises that fail to directly tackle climate disinformation on any kind of scale.

This epidemic of climate change disinformation on social media is eroding collective ideas of truth. In this post-truth age of disinformation, we hope that the public, the press and policy-makers will be able to use our data findings to see what is hidden by what we see online.

For the first time, we can witness the regional scale of corporate greenwashing. The era of climate denial and delay is largely over — except, as Eco-Bot.Net has revealed, on social media.

2 . Throughout history, many species of animals have been threatened with extinction. When Europeans first arrived in North America, more than 60 million buffalo (水牛) lived on the continent. Yet hunting the buffalo was so popular during the 19th century that by 1900 the animal’s population had fallen to about 400 before the government stepped in to protect the species. In some countries today, the elephant faces a similar challenge, as illegal hunters kill the animals for the ivory in their tusks.

Yet not all animals with commercial value face this threat (威胁).The cow, for example, is a valuable source of food, but no one worries that the cow will soon be extinct. Why does the commercial value of ivory threaten the elephant. while the commercial value of beef protects the cow?

The reason is that elephants are a common resource, while cows are private goods. Elephants wander freely without any owners. The hunter has a strong motivation to kill as many elephants as he can find. Because illegal hunters are numerous, each has only a slight motivation to preserve the elephant population. By contrast, cattle live on farms that are privately owned. Each farmer makes great effort to maintain the cattle population on his farm because he harvests the benefit of these efforts.

Governments have tried to solve the elephant’s problem in two ways. Some countries, such as Kenya and Uganda, have made it illegal to kill elephants and sell their ivory. Yet these laws have been hard to put into effect, and elephant populations have continued to dwindle. By contrast, other countries, such as Malawi and Namibia, have made elephants private goods and allowed people to kill elephants, but only those on their own property.

With private ownership and the profit motive now on its side, the African elephant might someday be as safe from extinction as the cow. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out the problem with common resources: “What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.”