Google promised to defund climate lies, but ads keep coming

IN OCTOBER 2021, Google promised to stop placing ads alongside content that denied the existence and causes of climate change, so that purveyors of the false claims could no longer make money on its platforms, including YouTube.

- NICO GRANT & STEVEN LEE MYERS

And yet if you recently clicked on a YouTube video titled "who is Leonardo DiCaprio," you might have found a ramble of claims that climate change is a hoax and the world is cooling after a Paramount+ad for the film "80 for Brady," starring Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Rita Moreno. Before another video that purported to detail "how climate activists distort the evidence," some users saw an ad for Alaska Airlines.

These are not aberrations, according to a coalition of environmental organisations and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In a report released on Tuesday, researchers from the organisations accused YouTube of continuing to profit from videos that portrayed the changing climate as a hoax or exaggeration.