Take a Look at Renewable Energy Misinformation

George Harvey for CleanTechnica, January 2025

I spend about five hours going through news every day, doing research for my blog. Recently, I started seeing multiple instances of posts going online over the course of a day, often over multiple days. One thing that I noticed about this was that the headlines seemed to be anti-renewable. MSN seemed to be doing this in particular. I decided to look into it.

It looked to me like the articles were being reposted from other sources. MSN might have been reposting things from other media sources without fact checking and might have been an unintentional participant in the misinformation.

Getting a bit fed up, I decided to do an experiment. I did a search through Google of the terms “renewable MSN,” limiting the search to news that appeared online over the most recent 24 hours. I did this several times over the course of several days. All but one search returned similar results. The results from the exception looked mostly normal.

As an example, on January 13, I got sixteen results for the “renewable MSN” search. I divided them into those that were positive or accurate on renewable energy and those that were negative and (pretty clearly, in my opinion) untrue. The search results that I call positive were the following four:

1. CT urged to increase renewable energy to cut ratepayer costs

2. 6 Renewable Energy Projects That Are Changing Local Communities

3. Understanding Renewable Energy: Separating Facts from Myths

4. Promising Advances in Renewable Energy Development

Twelve of the sixteen posts were what I call negative. Their titles are as follows:

1. The Renewable Energy Bubble: Are We Headed for an Economic Disaster?

2. The Renewable Mirage: Why We’re Betting on Technologies That Don’t Deliver

3. The Renewable Energy Myth: Why It’s Not as Clean as You Think

4. Blackouts and Grid Instability in Renewable-Heavy Nations

5. How Renewable Energy Is Destroying Natural Habitats

6. The Cost of Going Green: Why Renewable Energy Is Driving Energy Prices Up

7. Top 10 Hidden Costs of Renewable Energy Nobody Talks About

8. Ed Miliband’s ‘obsession’ with renewables as bills reach record high (possibly true, but slanted)

9. The Land Use Crisis in Renewable Energy

10. The Hidden Cost of Renewable Energy Expansion

11. How Renewable Energy Projects Harm the Environment

12. Why Renewable Energy Is Not the Ultimate Solution to Climate Change

That’s three posts of what I believe were misinformation for every one that I can regard as simply reporting news. In general, the posts that were negative were not supported with references, and they were generalized in their statements. By contrast, those that were positive about renewables pretty much stuck to science on climate change and read like normal, thoughtful articles.

Interested in how many posts there were and how often they had been going up, I tried doing searches on some of the titles. In each case, I only got one result, despite the fact that I had actually seen the same title over and over during more general searches made on the same day earlier. I am not sure why this happened, but clearly the search engine had features that enabled it.

Interested in determining how this was happening elsewhere, I did other, similar searches. One example, “renewable ‘Fox News’” returned almost nothing. Others had a few more posts listed, but not enough to draw conclusions.

I don’t believe that MSN was actively trying to deceive people. My impression is the MSN reposts things from other news sites, and they have been doing this unaware that they were being used in a misinformation scam. Maybe I am wrong about this, but I have decided to be very careful about citing MSN as a source of information in any writing I do.

One way or the other, it is clear to me that there are people who have become very effective at creating untruth-drivel and posting it in places where unsuspecting ordinary people would find it. And since it is posted over and over, people start to see it as something that is widely reported.

There are reasons why people believe that climate change is not real, renewables are destructive to the environment, wind turbines kill more birds than they save, solar panels drip poison into water tables, and so on. Not only do they have bad information; they have a huge amount of it. And it can come from sources they regard as neutral.

Clearly some people are actively engaged in lying to all the rest of us. But they are not just ordinary people. They are experts, highly skilled at moving others away from the truth and toward falsehoods that support our being dependent on fossil fuel companies. They act as though they are in a conspiracy to keep us from dealing with climate change. As much as such people should be castigated, I feel sorry for them. I do believe they will be cursed by their own grandchildren.