What We’re Up Against: Fully Automated Climate Change Denial, Canadian Edition

A May 28, 2025, article in Canada’s National Observer began, “One morning in October of 2024, Fredericton [New Brunswick] city councillor Margo Sheppard received an email with the subject line: ‘The Real Policy Crisis: Prioritizing “Nature” Over People.’ It was polished — almost algorithmically smooth — and it calmly urged her to reconsider Fredericton’s net-zero policies.” The email turned out to have been sent by “a custom AI chatbot” devised to produce “scripts, petitions, reports, and even speeches,” aimed at de-emphasizing “the climate catastrophe narrative” and focusing on “real pollution, not CO2.” The chatbot was devised by a group called KICLEI (Kicking International Council out of Local Environmental Initiatives), which reportedly aims to convince towns and cities to quit a voluntary net-zero program. KICLEI also circulates its Substack posts to councillors across the country; three prominent climate researchers, including John Cook of the University of Melbourne, told the newspaper that misinformation about their research appeared in these posts.