If you go on the website for the Environmental Protection Agency and look at the causes of climate change, it looks like this. You're told there are both human and natural causes of climate change, but that natural variations in the climate don't explain the rapid warming we've seen since the 1950s. And you can tell this was written by scientists because it uses phrases like it's extremely likely, over 95% certain that human activities have been the dominant cause of climate change. And there's citations and evidence for everything except that is what the website looked like last month. This month the American government has made a few changes. This is what the website looks like now. The section around human causes of climate change has entirely disappeared. And the section about natural processes is the entire article. The US government does not want you to know that human activities like burning fossil fuels are changing our climate. Except they've done a really botched job. Even on this page, they couldn't be bothered to delete the sentence highlighting that recent climate changes cannot be explained by natural causes alone. What could those other causes be, US government? And on the sidebar here, all of the other pages are at the time of recording unchanged. They still contain references to anthropogenic climate change. Someone high up clearly just went, "We have a page about the causes of climate change. Delete the section about humans."
And while this is the most brazen example of this behavior, if you've been paying any attention to what the US government has been doing in the climate space over the past year, this should not be surprising. We have a video coming out at the end of this year reviewing all the climate news from this year with a section on Trump. But a potted summary of what his administration has done so far includes withdrawing the US from the Paris agreement again, laying off climate scientists and meteorologists, opening up large territories for oil and gas drilling, terminating 20 billion in grants for climate projects, torpedoing international negotiations on a carbon tax, and releasing a widely derided report on climate science to justify all of the above. and just this week announcing they were closing the internationally respected National Center for Atmospheric Research because it was quote one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.
2.00
And it would be very easy to just make a video comparing the before and after of the EPA website and how this fits in with the Trump administration's broader war on climate science. But I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to talk about what the US government is doing with misinformation more broadly and if you live in America, what you can do to prevent them from succeeding…..
02.58
So, first of all, let's be really explicit here. The US government is trying to control what information the public has access to for political ends. Specifically, in this case, they don't want the public to be worried about the environmental impacts of burning fossil fuels because the people selling those fuels spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting this government elected. This web page may as well be hosted by Exxon. But it isn't the only example of this.
The government is doing something similar in the healthcare space with RFK Junior's assault on vaccines and specifically their connection with autism. This is a government website from the CDC opening with the claim vaccines do not cause autism is not an evidence-based claim. And we've talked about the deliberate creation of ignorance or doubt on this channel before, but in an industrial context. We know the tobacco industry did this. Obviously, the fossil fuel industry is continuing to do this, but also other industries like the food industry.
3.45
Say the line, Bart, you should read Merchants of Doubt. Yeah.
Or more recently, Industrial Strength Denial by Barbara Freeze. In fact, there's a whole field called agnotology that studies the deliberate creation of misinformation and specifically culturally induced ignorance or doubt.
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AI Overview: Agnotology is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly how it's created, spread, and maintained, often through the deliberate publication of misleading or inaccurate information, like the tobacco industry obscuring smoking risks or climate change denial. Coined by Robert Proctor, it explores why we don't know things and how ignorance can be a product of political and cultural struggles, a deliberate tactic, or even an accidental result of complex learning. Key aspects of agnotology:
Intentional ignorance: It examines how powerful groups create doubt to sell products or influence policy (e.g., "Doubt is our product" slogan from tobacco companies).
Cultural & Political Roots: It shows ignorance isn't just a lack of knowledge but a historical and political construct.
Examples: Climate change denial, military secrecy, and the manufactured controversy around scientific topics are classic examples.
Contrast with Epistemology: While epistemology studies knowledge, agnotology studies the opposite—the production and persistence of ignorance, notes.
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Recently, a lot of researchers' attention has been paid to how governments themselves engage in creating ignorance and doubt. Notably, Russia and to a lesser extent, China have run defensive and offensive disinformation campaigns to influence the citizens of other countries, increasingly using tools like generative AI to create false information and false identities of users of social media platforms to widen social divides and stoke civil unrest. Basically, everyone agrees that this is happening and has varying degrees of effectiveness.
It likely contributed to the UK's decision to leave the EU in 2016, for example. And for a time, people started listening to misinformation researchers about these problems. In 2024, the World Economic Forum named disinformation the top global risk to the progress of human development. In the aftermath of the Covid19 pandemic, political pressure convinced social media companies to dedicate spending resources to limit the spread of false information on their platforms, develop new features, and even provide some limited support to fact-checking organizations. Except for the second time of this video, that used to be the case in America. Because under the second Trump administration, war has been declared on truth itself.
They've defunded scientific research across everything from engineering to medical research to climate research on claims that it was woke. They have bullied both private and public universities to abandon their status as independent bastions of free thought and sign contracts to push the administration's ideology. and they have repeatedly worked to remove actual experts from the government, installing their own political appointees to dismantle every department and institution from the inside out. All of these things are a systematic attack on scientists, scientific practitioners, and their work.
They're not just attempting to spread misinformation, but censor, silence, and dismantle the very institutions that produce real information in the first place. And you're probably already aware of this, but what many people don't know is that the Trump administration is also going after agnitologists, people studying how to stop the spread of false information, misinformation researchers, content moderators, and fact checkers.
6.05
Ian Campbell: Earlier this year, they cancelled over a billion dollars in misinformation research grants and also permanently closed many research funding sources that misinformation researchers relied on. For example, they closed the US Department of Defense's Manurva program, which used social scientists to, you know, combat foreign misinformation and other threats to national security. The biggest one was that cut to existing misinformation grants.
In fact, so many people like me who are at more of a junior level just we- we can't have careers in this anymore. It's not funded anymore.
S: Can you tell me about the industrial censorship complex? Cuz that's the term they've been using. They've been holding congressional hearings about this, right?
I: They've come up with a novel legal strategy which in normal times would just be laughed out of question. any sort of content moderation on social media, any kind of investigative journalism that is engaging in fact-checking or checking whether something's true or not. Misinformation research or interventions to stop misinformation, fact-checking in general, that's censorship.
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KE Blogger: That’s Orwellian
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In fact, it's infringing on the First Amendment rights of- I'm checking my notes here- the government itself, people in government, our elected representatives. That's the exact opposite of what the First Amendment is about, which is about the government not telling anyone else what they can and cannot say. It's specifically a protection against the government censoring other people, not the other way around, which is kind of ridiculous if you think about it.
I was literally talking to another misinformation researcher who was visiting and the very first question they had to me when I mentioned, "Oh yeah, I work on misinformation interventions was, "Oh, have you been subpoenaed yet?" Because they had been.
S: Speaking as someone on the outside, while the actions of this second Trump administration have undoubtedly been damaging, far more concerning are their efforts to remove the checks and balances on their behavior in general. In this instance, removing funding for misinformation research and checks on social media platforms makes future disinformation campaigns run by the government or I'd like to point out other governments far more likely to succeed. Incidentally, attacking misinformation researchers, especially those around the topic of elections, was a key part of Project 2025, which was effectively the agenda for the second Trump administration. They told us their plan and of course lied about it being their plan. Everything they're doing has been done before by previous governments and even by them before. It's autocracy.
And it's worth being explicit that this administration is doing this because it consolidates their power and in particular it makes contesting future elections much easier. We're a long way from the 2028 election, but that's obviously where a lot of this focus on misinformation is heading.
In a way, their attack on climate science was the canary in the coal mine. It's the highest profile example of how this administration is operating. Control the flow of information, remove experts, and ultimately cause extensive harm to the country. So, what if anything, can you do about this?
[KE: Everything scientists predicted about global warming/ climate change since the 1970s is coming true, only faster] [However, I don't think anybody predicted this scary stifling of information by the US govt]
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