The oil and gas industry spent almost four million dollars publishing "misleading" messages on social media about the climate crisis on the occasion of the last climate summit.

The 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) will be held in November 2022 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and the figure appears in a report released yesterday by the Climate Action Against Disinformation Network (CAAD), according to the Spanish news agency EFE, quoted by Lusa.

The study analyzes Facebook and Instagram campaigns that encouraged "false or biased" discourse on the climate crisis in the context of the international meeting.

Coordinated by the British Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the work was prepared by various organizations and groups such as ACT Climate Labs, Code for Africa, Climate Nexus, Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, among others.

The report considers "climate disinformation" to be the dissemination of content that minimizes the seriousness of climate change, denies it or presents measures that contradict the scientific consensus on the subject as positive for curbing global warming.

The study identifies the fossil fuel industry, the main cause of global warming, among those who spent the most on "climate disinformation" advertisements in connection with COP27.

Between September 1 and November 23, 2022, the research identified 3,781 advertisements - most of them promoted by the Energy Citizens group, linked to the American Petroleum Institute - with messages that "delay" climate action.

The "narrative manual" of the disinformation analyzed consisted of "exploiting the cost of living crisis and misleading concerns about greenhouse gases", casting doubt on the reliability of clean technologies and defending the use of fossil fuels as "necessary and reliable" energies, among other techniques.

"This research shows that climate disinformation is not disappearing, but on the contrary, is getting worse," said Erika Seiber, spokesperson for Friends of the Earth North America, in a statement.

"Until governments hold social media and advertising companies accountable, and until companies hold professional disinformers accountable, the crucial negotiations on the climate crisis will be at risk," he said.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has spoken out against this phenomenon on several occasions, and did so again on Wednesday at the Davos Economic Forum, when he recalled that fossil fuel producers - referring to the oil company ExxonMobil - "were fully aware in the 1970s that their main product was contributing to turning the planet into an oven".