In the wake of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s spring economic update, Canadian politics is increasingly being organized around a familiar set of priorities: jobs, growth, investment, productivity, competitiveness and building. Climate change, information integrity and democratic resilience, meanwhile, risk being pushed into a separate category — important, perhaps, but secondary to the “real” economic agenda.
That framing is understandable but risks becoming dangerous and unproductive.
If there is one lesson the digital age has made clear, it is that climate action, information integrity and economic growth are no longer separate conversations. Increasingly, they are part of the same discussion.
And when it comes to climate disinformation specifically, we would do well to remember an old political truism coined by James Carville in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
For years, policy makers and commentators have treated disinformation primarily as a technological, political or ethical problem. The focus has largely been on “bad actors,” bots, foreign interference and content moderation. Those issues matter enormously, but they often obscure a more fundamental reality: disinformation is also a market phenomenon shaped by supply, demand and economic incentives.
Climate disinformation persists not entirely because people are malicious or uninformed, but increasingly because false, sensational and emotionally charged content performs extraordinarily well within today’s attention economy. It generates clicks, engagement, outrage and advertising revenue. In economic terms, there is both a profitable supply of disinformation and a powerful consumer demand for it.
That matters because many current responses focus almost entirely on the supply side of the equation. Governments debate platform regulation, algorithmic transparency, fact-checking and content moderation. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, for example, has introduced important new obligations for large platforms around risk assessments and transparency, while Canada has debated various online harms and platform accountability proposals in recent years. These interventions are necessary and, in some cases, have improved transparency and oversight, but their overall impact on reducing disinformation and contributing to a healthier information ecosystem remains limited and difficult to measure.
Enforcement challenges, jurisdictional fragmentation, rapidly evolving technologies and the global nature of digital platforms continue to constrain their effectiveness within a fragmented information ecosystem. Meanwhile, the demand side receives far less attention.
As media theorist Neil Postman warned decades ago in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, modern communications systems increasingly reward entertainment, spectacle and emotional stimulation over depth or deliberation. Social media platforms have supercharged that dynamic. The result is an information marketplace where outrage routinely outcompetes nuance and where emotionally charged narratives — whether good or bad — spread faster than evidence-based analysis.
Climate communication often struggles within this environment, not because the science is weak, but because public-interest information is rarely designed to compete effectively for attention.
This is why climate disinformation cannot be tackled solely through regulation or fact-checking. To change the information ecosystem, we must also change the incentives and communication models operating within it. Put differently: if disinformation is partly a market problem, then information integrity requires market-aware solutions.
As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe frequently argued, effective communication means meeting people where they are — using narratives, language, values and platforms that resonate in everyday life. Facts matter enormously, but facts alone rarely win attention in an economy driven by emotion and engagement.
This has implications far beyond communications strategy. In today’s political environment, climate action increasingly succeeds when it is directly connected to economic security, industrial strategy, affordability, jobs and competitiveness. Governments around the world — including Canada’s — are shifting toward this framing because they recognize that citizens experience policy through economic realities first.
However, this also means information integrity itself must increasingly be understood as economic infrastructure.
Democracies cannot successfully implement long-term industrial policy, energy transitions, critical mineral strategies or climate adaptation plans if public trust continuously erodes under the weight of disinformation and fragmented realities. Stable investment environments require institutional trust. Long-term climate planning requires public legitimacy. Economic resilience depends on informational resilience.
In that sense, the fight against climate disinformation is not peripheral to economic growth — it is foundational to it. Ironically, this challenge is emerging at precisely the moment when Canadian politics is shifting toward the economic framing long championed by Carney himself. As Governor of the Bank of England, Carney repeatedly warned that climate change posed systemic risks to financial markets that governments and investors were dangerously underestimating. Yet the same political environment now prioritizing growth, productivity and competitiveness risks sidelining the informational conditions necessary to sustain durable climate policy in the first place. If climate risk requires systemic governance, informational risk likely does as well.
Carville’s old slogan still applies: it’s the economy, stupid. But today, that insight cuts deeper than many assume. The economy shaping climate disinformation is not only the economy of jobs and trade. It is also the economy of attention, engagement and incentives that increasingly structures democratic life itself.
If governments want durable climate policy and sustainable economic growth, they cannot afford to treat information integrity as an afterthought. They must recognize it for what it has become: a core condition for democratic stability, public trust and long-term economic resilience in the digital age.
If governments want durable climate policy and sustainable economic growth, they cannot afford to treat information integrity as an afterthought. That means moving beyond reactive fact-checking toward broader efforts to strengthen public-interest journalism, digital literacy, civic education, platform transparency and democratic resilience. Regulation of social media platforms will likely remain part of the equation, particularly around algorithmic accountability and advertising incentives, but regulation alone will not solve a system built to reward outrage and emotional engagement above all else.
The costs of failing to address this challenge are no longer abstract. A degraded information environment does not simply produce confusion online — it undermines public trust, weakens democratic legitimacy, destabilizes long-term investment environments and makes coherent climate policy increasingly difficult to sustain politically. In the long run, societies unable to maintain shared factual foundations will struggle not only to manage climate change but also to govern effectively at all.
