How parties in the US and Germany have fought to keep the planet heating up
“Without the water vapor, global warming is a nonstarter. That’s the actual climate science. It’s water vapor.” With these words, Colorado state representative Ken DeGraaf (a Republican climate denialist) confidently announced to the Colorado General Assembly that global warming is not caused by greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide or methane, but is simply the result of excess moisture in the atmosphere. He uttered this “factoid” in April 2023 out of opposition to a state Senate bill that would set new targets for lowering greenhouse gas emissions and investing in more renewable energy. In tandem with this statement, he also wrongfully claimed that while carbon dioxide is “great for growing plants,” it does “very little in terms of greenhouse gas.”
Despite DeGraaf’s unfounded claims, Senate Bill 23-16 was given initial approval by Colorado’s House of Representatives in the state’s General Assembly. Nevertheless, DeGraaf’s attack on scientific consensus pertaining to global warming was not unique to him. Both in Colorado and all over the country, his fellow Republican politicians have perpetuated half-truths at best, absurdities at worst, over climate change and global warming. Most commonly, their narratives involve undermining the scientific consensus around climate change with made-up, pseudo-scientific “facts,” such as DeGraaf’s regarding water vapor, or denying altogether that man-made climate change is indeed occurring.
Across the Atlantic and into the heart of Europe, another political party utilizes similar narratives. Like the American Republican Party, the German Alternative für Deutschland party (hereafter AfD) has made contesting climate change one of its key political issues. In its 2021 party platform, for instance, the AfD stated that “the climate cannot be altered by mankind, and therefore is not protectable.” Its members additionally have called national and international efforts to tackle climate change “hysteria,” thereby insinuating that global warming is not as dire a crisis as the scientific community would have us believe. For example, Marc Bernhard, an AfD member of the Bundestag from Baden-Württemberg, has called “climate hysteria” the “deadliest pre-existing illness of the German economy” in a special CO2 flier on his website.
The similarity in narratives between the two parties is far from coincidental. Broadly speaking, both the current American GOP and the German AfD fall into the radical right family of political parties. They of course differ in some ways due to their national contexts; the GOP is much older than the AfD and has undergone several ideological transformations since its founding in 1854. It is currently divided between more centrist Republicans and the radical right MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) faction, whose platform has increasingly dominated the party since Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Conversely, the AfD just celebrated its tenth anniversary this past year and has defined itself as a radical right party for most of its existence. The GOP also operates in a two party system meant to represent a country of roughly 330 million people, whereas the AfD functions as one of six main political parties vying for the votes of 83 million.
Nonetheless, the two share quite a few stances on policy areas like COVID19 restrictions, curtailing reproductive rights, and blocking migration. Unsurprisingly, climate change is another common policy area they share. Specifically, the GOP and AfD are united in their opposition to policies meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to invest in renewable energy sources, and to acknowledge that man-made climate change is happening in the first place.
Like they do with their other issue areas, one major way they win support for their anti-climate policies is through the spread of mis- and disinformation. To be sure, these misleading statements and narratives do not come only from official party material like platforms and legislation. They also arise from various statements uttered by local, state, and national politicians in both countries, and especially in the United States, through news outlets like Fox News or think-tanks like the Heartland Institute (though Germany has its own sensationalist news outlets like the tabloid Bild). Though these are not official party organs, they do often serve as mouthpieces for these parties’ policy stances, especially in the U.S. where the specifically right-wing media outlets are much more developed than in Germany.
Before proceeding to specific examples of the GOP’s and AfD’s climate narratives, it is important to clarify a note on semantics. Though often used interchangeably, misinformation typically refers simply to narratives or statements that are factually incorrect, whether intentionally or not. Disinformation, on the other hand, denotes blatantly false information intentionally meant to mislead people. Both might contain some “half truths,” or information that is technically correct, but that is taken out of context and is thus misleading. For the purposes of this article, I will use the term “disinformation” to categorize the GOP’s and AfD’s climate narratives, since they weaponize them intentionally for their political goals.
Common Climate Disinformation Narratives: The GOP and the AfD
The Republican Party
One of the most common disinformation narratives the GOP and its affiliates use is simply that man-made climate change is not real. This includes statements that imply that there is a legitimate debate amongst the scientific community as to how much of global warming has been caused by human activities, and how much is simply Earth’s “business as usual.” During the years leading up to Trump’s election, the former sentiment seemed to be more common amongst Republican politicians. For instance, Indiana Senator Todd Young claimed in 2014 before he won his Senate seat, “We’re often told there’s a consensus among the scientists, and I’ve come to discover…that’s not necessarily the case.” Especially during the Trump years, others stated more specifically that the climate has simply always changed as a way to downplay the scientific consensus on global warming. South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace was quoted in 2020 to have said, “If you look at the history of the Earth, we’ve had climate change many times, over one hundred thirty times over millions of years. And so part of it might be man-made, part of it might just be natural environmental causes as part of the cycle of Earth.” Some went a step further by creating their own pseudoscience meant to explain climate change phenomena; in 2018, for example, Alabama representative Mo Brooks explained, “Every time you have that soil or rock, whatever it is, that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise because now you’ve got less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up.”
In the current leadup to the 2024 election, the most dominant narrative involves brushing aside extreme weather events caused by climate change and calling them “business as usual.” In the summer of 2023, Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host, attributed extreme heat events to the fact that it was summertime and the weather is naturally hotter. Similarly, in a Fox News interview, Florida governor Ron Desantis chalked up his state’s stronger and deadlier hurricanes to a simple fact of life in the Sunshine State, adding that he was “against the politicization of the weather.” By denying that these weather events were in any way extreme or extraordinary, they further implied that climate change simply does not exist.
Another key Republican narrative revolves around backlash to renewable energy sources, particularly wind energy. In the first half of 2022, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) predicted that much of the country would face blackouts during peak summer demand due to increased use of AC units. Republican elected officials were quick to jump on the report, claiming that “Biden blackouts” in the heat of summer would be the consequence of shifting to renewable power, thus leaving people without air conditioning. During the major winter storm Texas faced in late 2021, which killed over two hundred people, GOP officials and fossil fuel advocacy groups quickly blamed frozen wind turbines for shutting off electricity. A federal report later found that natural gas plants, which are themselves significant greenhouse gas emitters, were responsible for most of the outages during the storm, with wind power at a distant second.
Republican officials and politicians also link their disinformation narratives around renewables to economic concerns about energy costs, and especially China’s role in the matter. Echoing Trumpian stances, Colorado state representative Ron Hanks has called climate change “a Chinese hoax to emasculate us” that hampers domestic manufacturing and economic growth, and thus, American jobs. During the first Republican presidential debate earlier this year, GOP candidates pushed for a slowdown in renewable energy production on the basis that producing renewables only helps China because of their production of the materials necessary to manufacture renewable energy infrastructure. Other GOP officials like Nikki Haley have taken a relatively more moderate (albeit nationalist) approach, acknowledging that climate change is indeed happening, but casting most of the blame on other top polluters like China and arguing that they must lower their emissions before the U.S. tackles its own. She and Senator Tim Scott (R. South Carolina) have also argued that the solution to lowering our own emissions is to produce more American natural gas, which is another source of emissions.
Finally, Republicans have increasingly framed climate change and renewable energy transitions as a culture war issue between ordinary Americans and liberal elites, especially since the beginning of the Biden administration. In spring 2021, for instance, GOP officials circulated the myth that President Biden planned to ration red meat in order to reduce emissions. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebart demanded that Biden “stay out of her kitchen,” Nebraska Republican governor Pete Ricketts announced that red meat restriction was “an attack on our way of life here in Nebraska,” and his Iowan counterpart, Governor Kim Reynolds, chimed in that “Democrats and liberal special interest groups are trying to cancel our meat industry.” In early 2023, in response to rumors on regulations on gas stoves, Senator Tom Cotton (R. Arkansas) tweeted, “Democrats are coming for your kitchen appliances. Their desire to control every aspect of your life knows no bounds- including how you make breakfast.” Coupled with their economic scare tactics on the cost of renewable energy, Republican lawmakers and politicians try to tap into cultural fears that Democrats and the so-called liberal elite will worsen the average American’s way of life by banning everyday items like types of food, vehicles, and kitchen appliances.
The AfD
Across the Atlantic, AfD politicians share their American counterparts’ disinformation narratives about climate change. Like Republican officials and politicians, one of the most common of these is their myth that climate change is not real, or at least is not man-made. Specifically, they argue that the scientific evidence simply is not there. On the official AfD website, party members claim, “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s statements that climate change is primarily man made are not scientifically proven. They are based solely on computational models that cannot correctly describe either the past nor the current climate.” Interestingly, they provide no data of their own to back up this claim. In their 2021 party platform, they also call for an “open, free discourse on the causes of climate change and the potential consequences of decarbonization.” In this way, they try to soften the blow by making themselves appear open for debate on the subject, which then further undermines the scientific consensus on climate change.
Like the GOP, the AfD also takes a strong position against renewable energy, particularly on electric vehicles, wind turbines, and heat pumps, which they use as fodder for disinformation tactics. Bundestag member Marc Bernhard’s CO2 flier, for example, wrongly cites “e-mobility” (referring to electric vehicles) as “the dirtiest type of driving” and claims that their production “destroys every second workplace in the auto industry,” without elaborating how or why. The flier also calls the wind turbine industry “economic and environmentally harmful,” also with no evidence to back up the claim. Also similar to the GOP, the flier taps into economic fears, stating that the overall energy transition to renewables will cost every German citizen, “from young childhood to old age,” over 6,300 euros by 2025 (it is unclear whether this means 6,300 euros per year, or 6,300 total until 2025). Notably, it also fails to explain how that number was calculated.
Overall, much of the AfD’s disinformation narratives about climate change tie back to economic concerns, such as the misleading figure mentioned above. Recently, much of this has had to do with the new Building Energy Act (Gebäudeenergiegesetz, or GEG) passed by the German government in September 2023. The new law aims to phase out traditional home heating systems like gas boilers and replace them with more environmentally friendly heat pumps. In the last year, the AfD has capitalized on economic fears surrounding the law. These include vague figures about how much it will cost individual households to replace their heating systems and how much the overall energy transition will cost the average German citizen, citing numbers from 25,000 euros per family to 2500 billion euros for the entire country.
Coupled with these concerns is AfD slander against the current Traffic Light coalition (the Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats, named for their party colors) that makes up the German government, specifically on the Green party. Like their American counterparts in recent years, a favorite narrative amongst the AfD is to frame the Greens as “the party of bans,” and the coalition as uncaring about the citizens it governs. Regarding the GEG, the AfD claims that the government does not really care about the climate, but more about unnamed private interests at the expense of its hardworking, tax-paying citizens. Per the climate and energy section of the party’s website, the AfD states, “the supporters of this green network claim that they care about the climate and the future of the planet. In truth, it’s about themselves. Those in charge give each other the most lucrative positions and encourage each other in their ideological madness.” These types of statements allow them to push another of their favorite phrases, “Freiheit Statt Ideologie,” meaning “freedom instead of ideology.” In this sense, they frame the government’s advances towards climate friendly policies as “sick” ideology, whereas they can frame themselves as defenders of German citizens’ economic and personal freedom.
Why Climate Disinformation?
The simplest reason why both the GOP and AfD choose to spread disinformation about climate change has to do with electoral gain. Interestingly, both Republican and AfD officials have privately acknowledged that man-made climate change is indeed happening. However, they push these views aside in order to appeal to frustrated voters, largely out of economic concerns. From there, they are also able to exacerbate voters’ deeper cultural fears of an out-of-touch, liberal elite taking control and passing policies that will impoverish the average citizen and restrict their freedom of choice (be it jobs, food, or type of home heating device).
In both contexts, weaponizing climate change and spreading disinformation about it are useful for triggering fears of rising energy costs and how much it will cost the average citizen. The Republican party certainly utilizes these narratives, especially in arguing that the transition to renewables only strengthens China’s economy and therefore hurts the average American worker and their family. However, the AfD seems to use this tactic more often, especially by providing numbers on how much the transition to heat pumps or clean energy as a whole will cost (even if they do not disclose their methods of calculating those costs). This seems to have gained much traction in just the last few years. Although anti-climate and anti-renewable energy policies have always been part of the AfD’s platform, the fear-mongering, disinformation narratives about cost appear to have increased since the Green party entered the government as a coalition partner.
This has been exacerbated by two things: Germany’s energy crisis following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent cutoff from Russian gas, coupled with the recent passage of the GEG. With economic uncertainty about rising energy costs already existing due to Russia’s invasion, the AfD, as well as other parties like the Free Democrats, spun the GEG as an undemocratic mandate from the Green party that would cost the average German citizen thousands. With the narrative that this would force Germans to spend even more money to replace their home heating systems in the interest of cutting emissions, the connection between climate action and rising costs became clear, one which the AfD has been able to easily exploit.
Even more significantly, these narratives that tie back to denying climate change’s very existence help the AfD stand out politically. No other major German political party denies the scientific consensus around climate change to help their political agendas. This means that while other right-leaning parties may push back against legislation like the GEG that is meant to cut emissions, the AfD truly presents itself as an alternative because of its radical denial of climate change altogether, thereby widening its appeal to frustrated and scared voters.
Republican officials and politicians certainly also spread climate disinformation under the guise of economic fears, but they are also increasingly apt at framing it as a culture war problem, seemingly more so than the AfD. To be sure, AfD does this as well, and with similar narratives, such as liberal elites taking away freedom of choice from food, jobs, vehicles, and heating devices. However, the GOP seems to utilize these narratives somewhat more frequently in the last few years and has worked them into their larger policy areas, whereas the AfD has honed in more on citing misleading numbers on how much clean energy will cost the average citizen and saving cultural arguments as an extra.
If the AfD tends to emphasize economic concerns more, the GOP increasingly seems to couple these explicitly with cultural ones (for example, that the red meat industry in the American heartland would die out if Biden restricted it, and not eating red meat goes against the American way of life). The Republican culture war angle could be getting stronger because the economic concerns regarding clean energy policies might actually not be all that pressing by themselves. As of the end of 2023, the American economy overall was decently strong and showed positive growth, more companies are investing in green energy transitions, and legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the new American Climate Corps initiative is set to bring more green jobs and infrastructure. Thus, the GOP’s economic arguments against the energy transition and climate change mitigation might be starting to fall a bit flat by themselves. If this is the case, the GOP has to couple them more with culture war arguments to stoke fear in their voters in order to maintain electoral popularity. Conversely, those economic concerns might be more imminent in Germany because of the high energy costs imposed by the war in Ukraine next door and the passage of the GEG. This means that the AfD might have more widely-shared economic concerns at their disposal and thus does not need to tap into the culture war side as much as their American counterparts do in order to win over voters.
Unlike the AfD, the roots of GOP climate disinformation today are also much more tied to private interests that in turn influence politics and policy. Though Republican anti-environmentalism has a much longer history, the recent radicalization against climate began in the period after the 2008 election in which the Democrats won both the presidency and both houses of Congress. From that point on, Republican lawmakers and candidates increasingly began to accept substantial donations from the fossil fuel industry. This led to an anti-climate campaign largely orchestrated by Charles D. and David H. Koch, Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of oil refineries. The 2010 Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision unleashed this even further by allowing fossil fuel industries like the Koch brothers’ to pour large amounts of money into advertising and events aimed at electing GOP lawmakers, who would in turn fight for their interests in Congress and oppose environmental regulations. Thus, to keep the money necessary to win elections rolling in, the Republican party has kept true to its fossil fuel sponsors and has unleashed climate disinformation campaigns disguised as protecting Americans’ economic interests and even cultural identity from supposed greedy, liberal elites. Indeed, nearly every GOP lawmaker mentioned above in the disinformation examples has accepted donations from the fossil fuel industry over their political career. In the 117th Congress Jan. 2021- Jan. 20223), 139 members of Congress received $61 million combined in lifetime contributions from the coal, oil, and gas industries.
Why It Matters
The consequences of these climate disinformation campaigns in both countries are not to be understated. Climate change is an imminent threat to the entire world, not just one country or group of countries (though some are certainly more vulnerable to its effects than others). Time is running out for us to collectively lower our emissions and phase out fossil fuels to hit the 1.5 degree target necessary to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. But if a significant portion of the electorate in leading democracies like the United States and Germany believes false claims about climate change, the parties that spread these claims can come to power and slash any progress that has been made, including cutting investment in renewables or pulling out of international climate agreements. This possibility is more likely and especially dangerous in the United States; the country is a top polluter and has a much greater likelihood of the GOP taking control of all branches of government, since Americans only have two parties from which to choose.
But the AfD’s potential popularity in Germany should not be underestimated either. Even if they as a party cannot exercise complete control due to Germany’s coalition-style government, they could act as substantial roadblocks to policies aimed at lowering emissions and investing in renewables. More worryingly, they are beginning to get more moderate right-wing parties on their side like the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats, which could lead to a future German government radicalized against climate that could also pull out of international agreements, like the Trump administration did in the U.S. As a major player in the European Union, this would also undermine the EU’s ability to adhere to international climate efforts meant to cut emissions.
For these reasons, the implications of climate disinformation are existential to all of us, more so than perhaps any other political issue. To be sure, progressive politicians, think-tanks, and grassroots movements in both countries have become more vocal about the need for climate action and have called out disinformation when it arises. However, we need to further amp up these efforts into locating the disinformation, calling it out publicly, fact-checking it, and better educating both American and German citizens on how climate change affects them and will cost them more in the long run than the energy transition. In doing so, we must normalize pro-climate policies and rhetoric at the grassroots, consumer, and political level, regardless of political party. Likewise, we must consistently hold accountable those who deny there is a problem to begin with so as to build widespread political support for climate action across party lines. Because at the end of the day, climate change does not affect just Democrats or Republicans, card-carrying Green or AfD members, or even the West or the Global South. It is an existential threat for all of us.