Climate denial didn’t kill your policy. A Google search with no good answer did.
HOW INFORMATION VOIDS SABOTAGE CLIMATE POLICY BEFORE IT BEGINS
This post is adapted from our recent webinar on climate disinformation, hosted by EU DisinfoLab on 15 May 2025. Watch the full session here.
Climate policies don’t just lose out because of loud opposition; often, they fail because of silence. That’s the part of the story climate strategists don’t talk about enough. When a new policy is being considered or a risk emerges, the public inevitably has questions. If we don’t anticipate and answer them clearly in advance, someone else will, and that someone is often not a scientist or an expert, but a troll, a meme page, or a misinfluencer chasing outrage clicks. The result is an information disorder dynamic that climate communicators and researchers rarely quantify, but see everywhere: a vacuum of credible information gets filled by mis/disinformation, and that misinformation becomes public opinion.
And once that happens, good luck passing your policy.
What exactly is an Information Void?
An info-void is exactly what it sounds like: a gap in public knowledge that forms when the facts people need simply aren’t available or accessible. They Google something straightforward like "progress on climate change" and get half-answers, paywalled studies, technical jargon filled reports or nothing relatable. That’s the void. It often goes unnoticed at first, quietly leaving space for confusion to spread and leaves a vacuum in the conversation that misinformation rushes to fill.
When a massive power blackout hit parts of Europe and officials had no immediate answers, wild theories started filling the silence. With no facts to anchor people, speculation ran rampant in that “information void”.
In short, when people aren’t given an explanation, they’ll come up with their own. Or latch onto the first shiny explanation that comes along.
In climate communication, information voids often form around new policies or scientific findings that aren’t explained in plain language.
For example, a recent European Investment Bank survey found that 70% of Belgian respondents did not know that reducing speed limits on roads helps combat climate change. That’s not a trivial factoid – transport emissions are a huge piece of the climate puzzle, yet seven in ten people had no idea that something as simple as slower driving can cut pollution. This kind of knowledge gap is the perfect breeding ground for misinformation.
If people don’t know what a policy does or why it matters, then whoever speaks first, a lobbyist, a climate change denialist or a TikTok provocateur gets to define the story.
How info-voids escalate into policy collapse
Info-voids matter because they represent the earliest point of failure in the climate communication chain. they are real, recurring vulnerabilities in the climate policy pipeline.
So how do we get from a quiet information void to full-blown climate policy failure?
Over the last few years, our team at Ripple Research has worked with and advised various organizations, including large multilateral UN agencies, on identifying and addressing these info-voids. Here’s what we’ve seen at Ripple Research:
An information void forms. The public lacks clear, digestible information about a climate issue or policy. Questions hang in the air unanswered.
Misinformation rushes in. Memes, fake experts, and partisan media saturate the space. What was once silence is now polluted noise saturating social media, broadcasts and group chats.
Public reaction: Denial, anger, or apathy. The onslaught of misinformation triggers climate backlash pathways: some people go into denial 🙅, others radicalize in anger 😡 (often at supposed “elites”), and many more just throw up their hands and disengage 🗿.
Policy failure becomes more likely. With the public misinformed or divided, support for climate action collapses. Politicians get cold feet; policies get watered down or killed outright.
Notice how subtle this progression is. By the time lawmakers realize there’s a problem, the damage is done. The information ecosystem has been polluted and constructive public discourse is polarized. Let’s unpack these steps with real examples and data.
Consider the urban-planning idea of the “15-minute city”, the idea of designing cities so that daily necessities are within a short walk or bike ride. For a while, most people hadn’t heard much about it. That quiet didn’t last: soon a few conspiracy-minded online accounts and commentators decided to define the term for everyone else. In no time, the 15-minute city concept “got swept into [a] wider ‘climate lockdown’ trend, with conspiracy theorists presenting it as a communist plot to make people easier to control”. An idea meant to reduce traffic and pollution was falsely reframed as a secret government plan to confine citizens in their neighborhoods.
This is a textbook case of misinformation saturating an information ecosystem. And it’s hardly isolated.
For example, our investigation of social media discourse found nearly 948,000 posts containing copious climate misinformation in just a 14-month period (this was around debates on meat and dairy’s climate impact. The pattern extends to energy, cities, you name it). Bogus narratives spread faster than the corrections; emotional outrage outperforms dry facts in the engagement algorithms. Before you know it, the misinformation isn’t lurking in the fringes, it is the conversation.
Once misinformation saturates the environment, the public reaction kicks in and it’s usually destructive. In climate matters, we tend to see three kinds of responses, all harmful: denial, radicalization, or disengagement.
Denial: Fed by a steady diet of fake experts and cherry-picked arguments, some people simply decide climate change is exaggerated or a hoax. On social media, we’ve seen outright climate denialism surge; for example, the hashtag #ClimateScam became a top rallying flag for denialist content. When an info-void is filled by claims that “global warming is a scam,” it’s no surprise that a segment of the audience finds denial comforting.
Radicalization: These groups believe climate policies are part of some nefarious plot against their freedoms or livelihood. They become actively hostile to climate action, sometimes to the point of extremist behavior. A striking example is the emergence of the so-called “Blade Runners” in the UK, vigilantes who vandalized urban traffic cameras meant to reduce emissions. Online misinformation glorified such acts as resistance to tyranny. What began as misinformation about a policy’s intent (“Big Brother is coming for your car!”) ended up fueling real-world property destruction and deeper social divisions.
Disengagement: The third pathway is quieter but just as or even more dangerous in the long run: people throw up their hands and tune out. Faced with constant conflicting claims, some conclude “it’s all propaganda” or “nothing we do can fix this anyway.” This doomerism and cynicism is often by design. As findings from our prior disinformation research point out, manipulative narratives prey on uncertainty, amplifying fear and futility to shape public behavior in destructive ways. The result is mass disengagement, citizens who might have supported climate policies or systemic change simply exit the conversation. Democracy doesn’t usually fail because everyone believed the wrong thing; it fails when enough people give up on believing they can do anything. Climate misinformation manufactures this hopelessness by distorting real concerns into extreme conclusions of either rage or despair.
By the time a society is caught in this triangle of backlash, even modest environmental bills become politically toxic.
A systems-level call to action
Climate policy doesn’t fail in a vacuum; it fails in an information ecosystem. We can fight back, if we treat information as the critical infrastructure of climate action. For communicators, advocates, and policymakers, this means a strategic shift in thinking:
Start earlier: Don’t wait for a void to form. The moment you know a new policy or finding is coming, fill the information space proactively. Explain why a city’s new clean-air rule matters, how a carbon tax will actually work in practice, and what benefits to expect, in clear terms.
Speak clearly (and often): Clarity is a force multiplier. In climate comms, that means framing information in terms people understand: their bills, their jobs, their kids’ health and repeating the core facts relentlessly. If it feels like you’re saying it too often, you’re probably just starting to reach beyond the bubble.
Monitor the ecosystem: When you see a false narrative gaining traction, address it publicly and quickly, even if it’s to preempt a question people haven’t asked yet. A well-timed pre-bunk could cancel out a conspiracy before it takes hold. This also means investing in media monitoring and community feedback: know where the conversation is happening and what gaps in knowledge persist.
The fight against climate change is also a fight for clarity over chaos. If we fill the voids, we take away the fertile ground where misinformation breeds. We tilt the playing field back toward reality.