Speaking for the Smoke: Political Elites and the Amplification of Climate Misinformation

A recent IPIE report underscores a critical shift: climate disinformation is no longer confined to the digital fringes but increasingly originates from within the political mainstream. Political elites –especially in fossil-fuel aligned, populist, or authoritarian regimes – play a central role in amplifying and legitimizing misleading climate narratives. This paper investigates how such elites across diverse political systems contribute to the global circulation of climate misinformation. While prior research has focused on either grassroots dissemination through social media users, influencers, or lobbying networks, systematic attention to the communicative role of elected officials remains limited. Drawing on a global dataset of approximately 32 million tweets posted over five years by politicians from all major parties in 26 countries, the study explores which types of political actors spread climate misinformation, and how this varies across regime types, regions, and ideological orientations. It further examines what kinds of narratives elites deploy to delay climate action – ranging from outright denial and strategic disruption to culture war framings and economic fear-mongering. Combining computational text analysis with qualitative human coding, the paper develops a comparative framework mapping patterns of elite misinformation across democratic, hybrid, and authoritarian contexts, and traces temporal surges around key political and environmental events such as COP meetings, IPCC report releases, and extreme weather crises. By bridging political communication and environmental sociology, the study conceptualizes elite misinformation as both symbolic power and policy obstruction. The findings reveal how climate disinformation functions as a tool of political legitimation – and where international governance and platform interventions might most effectively curb its spread.