I came across a compelling editorial the other day as I reviewed the morning inbox. A writer from Iowa City was concerned about how fake news is subsuming the US midterm elections. “President Donald Trump says that CNN, MS Now, and Politico are banned from the White House for promoting ‘fake news.’ That has a lot of people upset. I think the ban does not go far enough. If we are banning anyone who promotes fake news from the White House, we should ban people who say that the 2020 election was stolen, that the war in Iran would end a couple of weeks after it started, that we are all getting checks from DOGE savings, that Jan. 6 was a peaceful protest, etc. If we banned people who said those things from the White House, the US would be a MUCH better country.” Rex Clemmensen It occurred to me, after reading this succinct and right-on list of the real culprits who spread fake news, that renewable energy and its supporting systems have also been unfairly maligned in the media. And it’s time to right some of those wrongs. As a media literacy practitioner, I collaborate with many scholars in my field, including the folks at the Media Education Lab, which is part of the University of Rhode Island. Inquiry questions around media literacy have evolved as has the media over the years. Most recently, Five Key Questions and Core Concepts for the Age of AI were introduced. I am particularly drawn to revisions that de-emphasize ideology and foreground the influence of AI on our society. Here’s a powerful question that we should ask of media. “What values, lifestyles, and perspectives are emphasized or excluded by AI in this message?” Translating that question into a focus on planet Earth, I ask you to consider the following adaptation. “If we were all taught to act to save the planet as part of moral citizenship, how different would our daily lives be?” Here goes. The fact that our planet is warming has been proven in hundreds of different ways. Burning oil and gas, which are the deposits of ancient plants and animals, heats the planet and is destroying the unity of the Earth’s biosphere. But it’s difficult to convince others of this reality for a variety of reasons, including the new acceptance of alternative truths — that collision of facts derived from intensive scientific study in opposition to opinions widely disseminated that question climate science. There’s been too much blatant fake news about renewables to believe that any longer. It’s a long train runnin.’ The US is not keeping up with the rest of the western world to adopt clean energy and associated technologies. Instead, the US is reverting to an almost exclusive focus on fossil fuels. It’s been well-documented that Donald Trump the Candidate is following through on his promise to campaign financiers to boost their earnings if they promoted him back to the US executive office. The result? The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy within Trump’s Department of Energy has a whole slew of words that are no longer allowed to be uttered during his reign. They include “climate change,” “green,” “decarbonization,”“energy transition,” “‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ energy,” “emissions,”“sustainability/ sustainable,” “carbon/CO2 ‘footprint’” and “tax breaks/tax credits/subsidies.” Clean energy in its various forms has been the object of hundreds of fake news articles, social media posts, and even television shows. We know that core social media narratives shaping discourse around the climate crisis have persistent “stickiness” of mis- and dis-information, influencing people to disregard the danger of fossil fuels. It’s easy to say that, maybe, media influencers and reporters don’t really understand cleantech industries (renewable energy, electric vehicles, and energy storage), so they can’t accurately frame and communicate news about these industries. Bill McKibben writes in the New York Times this week about the important need for our leaders to promote renewable energy. “We have inexpensive solar, wind, and battery technology that can replace the fossil fuels driving temperatures ever higher, though of course getting to that point would require standing up to Big Oil,” McKibben says. “These hopes and fears will animate the next presidential election.” One common repeated story mused that electric vehicles more likely than gas-powered cars to catch fire. Is that factual? No. I wrote a report this year that investigates how electric vehicles are much safer than gasoline-powered vehicles, yet there’s constant media coverage hyping up the opposite idea. Thus, there’s great public concern over the safety of EVs, especially their batteries. This core point should be emphasized much more in order to help raise consumer awareness and help consumers make better choices: electric vehicles are much safer than gas-powered vehicles. Why are EVs the target of such conspiracies? Perhaps a note in Bloomberg Green this week helps us to understand, as “the electrification of road freight is emerging as a structural force that could undermine long-term oil demand across the world.” OOhh! Big Oil’s bottom line plummeting is bad news for its investors. Wind power? It’s the object of constant injunctions and scrutiny. Do whales die from interactions with turbines? No. It’s container ship encounters, of course, but we can’t interrupt supply chains for global exchanges of consumer goods. Do local citizens suffer more headaches as a result of the turbine blades rotating? No, not if the frequency is at or below the threshold of human perception, and turbine sound pressure level is low near residences. The list of fake news about clean energy is nearly endless. The truth is that renewable energy is affordable, reliable, and a modest environmental footprint. It adds jobs at a time where AI is threatening to supplant human jobs. The transition to renewable energy is happening in every neighborhood, everyday. All it takes is an observant person to look around, see the changes, and start asking questions about whose values, lifestyles, and perspectives are being promoted in fake news about clean energy. We need to be wary of claims that denigrate the technologies that can save the Earth and to be ready to speak truth to power.