A new study published in Risk Sciences models how climate disinformation can degrade carbon pricing policy. Researchers from University College Dublin and the ILaVita Foundation split agents into informed and misinformed groups, then compared a politically constrained planner against majority voting. They found voting can initially produce stronger carbon taxes, but once disinformation erodes the informed majority, policy can drop sharply in a cliff edge dynamic. Timing matters. Late or persistent disinformation is especially damaging because it arrives after the transition to stronger policy has begun. The study also found a strong counter disinformation intervention can almost fully offset an early shock, bringing outcomes close to a no disinformation baseline. That makes protecting the information environment a practical part of carbon pricing durability.
