Is Big Tech Fueling the Climate Disinformation War?
As we reckon with the dark side of Silicon Valley’s tech giants, there’s more scrutiny into how these companies are assisting climate denial and obfuscation. We’ll look at a few different stories: Climate and clean energy are getting disadvantaged by Facebook and Twitter’s different policies on political ads: how do we define issue ads and political speech? Google, Facebook and others are getting called out for their support of groups that spread extreme climate denial: How much criticism do they deserve? And Amazon, Microsoft and Google are building the digital backbone of industries that are wrecking the planet. How should we think about their role and culpability? In the second half of the show, we’ll discuss America’s withdraws from the Paris climate treaty. With U.S. global leadership in shambles, who’s going to fill the gap? And how could elections change things? Finally, how California’s wildfire crisis is stoking the state’s distributed generation market. We’ll look at the business impacts. Recommended resources:Heated: Exxon Climate Ads Aren’t Political, According to TwitterVox: Watch AOC Ask Mark Zuckerberg if She Can Run Fake Green New Deal AdsGuardian: Google Made Large Contributions to Climate Deniers Guardian: Facebook Video Spreads Climate Denial to 5 Million UsersGTM: Power Shutoff Disruption ‘Resets’ California’s Residential MarketJigar Shah/Timothy Hade Op-Ed: It’s Time to Evolve California’s Electrical GridSupport for this podcast is brought to you by Sungrow. With the world’s most powerful 250-kilowatt, 1,500-volt string inverter, Sungrow is providing disruptive technology for utility-scale projects. Subscribe to GTM podcasts via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you find your audio content.