From Denial to Deregulation: Climate Disinformation’s New Playbook

Climate disinformation in Europe has evolved. For years, the dominant challenge was outright denial and disinformation with claims including climate change wasn’t real, wasn’t caused by humans, or wasn’t serious. Researchers, fact-checkers, and platform integrity teams built sophisticated tools to detect and debunk these claims. This work mattered, and it still does.

However, the battleground has shifted. Across the EU, the most effective climate-hostile messaging no longer denies the science. It attacks the policy.

The shift in action

Consider the difference between two types of messaging. A traditional climate denial post might claim that global warming is a hoax or that CO2 is good for plants. These claims are factually false and relatively easy to identify and counter.

Now consider messaging from far-right accounts in Germany, which frames the same policy terrain very differently: energy costs are destroying businesses, climate regulation is killing competitiveness, and the green transition is an elite project imposed on ordinary people. The solution offered is deregulation, cheaper fossil energy, and national economic sovereignty.

This second type of messaging does not need to deny climate science. It validates real concerns that people already hold, such as rising energy bills, job insecurity, and frustration with top-down policy. It then redirects those concerns toward a specific political endpoint: the rollback of climate regulation.

ENERGY COSTS OLD PLAYBOOK: DISINFORMATION "Climate change is a hoax invented to justify higher taxes on ordinary people." Factually false claim. Detectable. Debunkable. NEW PLAYBOOK: PERSUASION "Germany goes bankrupt. Every 20 minutes a company dies. The green agenda is destroying our economy. We need cheap energy and lower taxes, not more climate regulation." Not necessarily false. Validates real concerns. Redirects toward deregulation. © Ripple Research

Why detection alone is not enough

This evolution creates a problem for the disinformation field. Most detection tools and frameworks are built to identify false claims. But the claims in this new wave of climate-hostile messaging are not necessarily false. Energy costs have risen. Some industries have struggled with transition costs. People do feel squeezed.

What makes this disinformation is not the falsity of the claims but the strategic manipulation of their framing: the selective use of real grievances to manufacture consent for policy outcomes that serve fossil fuel interests and far-right political agendas.

AUTOMOTIVE REGULATION OLD PLAYBOOK: DISINFORMATION "Electric vehicles are worse for the environment than petrol cars when you account for battery production." Misleading claim. Cherry-picked data. Detectable. Debunkable. NEW PLAYBOOK: PERSUASION "Brussels bureaucrats are banning the cars you can afford and forcing you into electric vehicles you can't. This isn't about the climate. It's about control. Scrap the 2035 ban." Not necessarily false. Validates affordability fears. Redirects toward scrapping regulation. © Ripple Research

The European context

This matters urgently in the European context. The European Commission’s 2026 work programme has been described as the most deregulatory in EU history. Omnibus proposals are weakening sustainability reporting, due diligence requirements, and environmental protections. The EU Emissions Trading System faces pressure from industry and member states pushing to water it down. Environmental NGOs, climate networks, and civil society groups are sounding the alarm.

This is precisely the policy environment that climate-hostile persuasion is designed to enable. When far-right parties and fossil-aligned interests frame climate regulation as economic self-harm and elite imposition, they are not just winning arguments. They are building the political conditions for deregulation.

The Dutch farmers’ protests of 2022-2023 offered an early case study. Our research with the Changing Markets Foundation showed how far-right narratives hijacked legitimate agricultural grievances to mobilise opposition to the Netherlands’ nitrogen policy. The protests were real. The frustrations were real. But the framing, and the political endpoint, were strategically manufactured.

We are now seeing this pattern replicate across European climate and energy policy

AGRICULTURAL REGULATION OLD PLAYBOOK: DISINFORMATION "Nitrogen has no real impact on the environment. The science is manipulated to justify land grabs from farmers." Factually false claim. Conspiracy framing. Detectable. Debunkable. NEW PLAYBOOK: PERSUASION "Family farms are being shut down to meet targets set by people who have never worked the land. Farmers feed the nation. Instead of regulating them out of existence, we should be backing them." Not necessarily false. Validates livelihood fears. Redirects toward dismantling environmental policy. © Ripple Research

What comes next

If the disinformation field remains focused primarily on detection, it will continue to miss the most consequential forms of climate-hostile communication. The shift from denial to deregulation requires a corresponding shift in how we think about intervention.

That means developing frameworks that start not with what is false, but with what is persuasive. It means understanding the concerns that audiences already hold and building counter-narratives that validate those concerns while redirecting them toward climate-positive outcomes.

In our next post, we introduce one such framework: Meet-and-Move.