This Q&A is part of our Guest Series, where we sit down with industry experts and climate and human rights leaders to explore their work and insights.
Julie Mallat is the founder of The Climate Propagandist, a platform with a mission to uncover pollution propaganda and make climate communications accessible to everyone. She’s also the Communications Director of Entertainment Culture Pavilion, and the co-founder of the Dubai Climate Collective.
You can find Julie on Instagram or LinkedIn, and follow her platform, The Climate Propagandist, here.
You describe your work as ‘de-academizing climate communications’. Why is it important for people — whether as consumers, citizens or employees — to understand the techniques of climate propaganda?
Behavioural science shows that what really shifts beliefs and behaviour is social norms: what people around us think, say, and do. That means everyone at work, at home, online, is constantly reinforcing or challenging climate narratives.
The problem is that some of the most powerful insights on climate communications and behaviour change are still locked inside academic papers, conferences, and expert circles. Meanwhile, the real battle over climate action is playing out in everyday conversations. There’s a massive disconnect between where knowledge lives and where influence actually happens.
De-academizing climate communications is about closing that gap. It’s about equipping people to participate consciously and strategically in the narratives they’re already part of, instead of unknowingly reproducing frames designed by polluting industries.
When you say ‘propaganda’, some might think of governments, not corporations. Yet corporations, as some of the biggest polluters and culprits of accelerating climate change for profit, also often engage in complex forms of propaganda in order to shape cultural narratives for their benefit. How do you define corporate climate propaganda, and how does it differ from greenwashing?
Greenwashing is usually about false or exaggerated environmental claims. Corporate pollution propaganda is broader﹣and ultimately more dangerous.
It’s not just what companies say, but what stories they choose to amplify, what futures they make imaginable, and what alternatives they erase. A campaign can be factually correct and still function as propaganda if it redirects responsibility, delays regulation, or frames systemic harm as an individual choice.
Research on climate delay discourses, such as the work by Lamb and others, offers a useful starting point for understanding how corporations maintain the status quo without outright denial. Greenwashing is one of those tactics﹣but it’s far from the only one. To this framework, I’d add culture-washing as another strategy that ultimately serves the same purpose: delaying climate action.
Culture-washing is when pollution is woven into identity, lifestyle, and belonging. Rather than denying harm, it makes extractive systems feel familiar, desirable, and socially acceptable. By softening resistance to the status quo, culture-washing makes meaningful change feel culturally unrealistic﹣buying time for polluters while delay becomes normalised.
Pop culture is a huge part of your analysis. Why is it such a powerful channel for shaping climate narratives? And how do corporations use pop culture, sports, or influencers to normalize certain climate narratives?
Pop culture keeps polluters relevant. When polluters embed themselves in music, sports, fashion, or influencer culture, they stop looking like industries of the past and start feeling current, on-trend, and unavoidable. It’s a way of buying a social licence to operate, especially with younger audiences, by staying part of the cultural conversation rather than being challenged from the outside.
What are some of the most surprising or creative strategies you’ve seen companies use to shape public perception on climate?
One of the most striking strategies I’ve seen is how heavy industries,like steel, are actively rebranding themselves to appeal to younger audiences. In our collaboration with ASL, we analysed how steel companies borrow the language, aesthetics, and emotional codes of youth culture to reposition themselves as part of the future.
That took forms like:
- a K-pop–style music video filmed inside a steel factory, framing industrial production as romance and aspiration
- solarpunk-inspired campaigns presenting steel as a mystical, almost sacred material essential to a green future
- gaming aesthetics and hashtag campaigns like #FantaSteel designed to attract young gamers and digital natives
Are there any examples where a company’s climate messaging was technically ‘true’, but still misleading in the bigger picture?
All the time.
A company might say, “We’re investing billions in clean energy.” That can be true﹣ but if 95% of its capital expenditure still goes to fossil fuels, the message fundamentally misrepresents reality. Or a company claims it’s “reducing emissions intensity,” while its total emissions continue to rise.
This kind of messaging relies on selective framing. It creates the feeling of progress without delivering it.
The same logic applies to campaigns that use culture as a vessel﹣framing fossil fuels as part of national identity, pride, or everyday life. These messages are harder to flag as greenwashing, but they still normalise harm. Which is why, ultimately, the most effective response isn’t better disclosure﹣it’s banning fossil fuel advertising altogether.
Do you think the propaganda techniques used by corporations have evolved since the 1980s, when fossil fuel companies started running ads denying climate change? And do you think the public’s level of media literacy and ability to spot these techniques has changed as well?
Absolutely. In the 1980s, fossil fuel companies largely denied climate science outright. Today, they acknowledge the problem﹣but they’ve learned how to weaponize that acknowledgment to control the solution space.
The central communication challenge of this decade is not explaining what is happening﹣it is communicating what can be done. Attention is shifting from the problem to its solutions.
On one hand, there’s a constant effort to undermine transformative solutions﹣casting renewables as unreliable or harmful, framing ambitious climate policy as too expensive, too radical, or not ready yet. These narratives are designed to erode public confidence in real alternatives and keep people stuck in doubt.
On the other hand, companies aggressively promote non-transformative “solutions” ﹣what we call greenwashing. These messages sound reasonable, forward-looking, even pragmatic. But their real function is delay.
As for media literacy: people are more skeptical, but they’re also more overwhelmed. Still, I’m hopeful. Our generation isn’t passive﹣it’s questioning, connecting the dots, and pushing back. De-academising climate communications is what helps turn that instinct into real power.
What practical things could people do to resist climate propaganda, especially in the age of AI?
First: slow down interpretation.
I’ve already seen deepfakes﹣including fabricated videos of Greta Thunberg promoting violence ﹣designed to discredit the climate movement, especially when it takes clear political positions. And there will be many more.
There will be many more examples.
At a collective level, we need shared tools: visual literacy, narrative analysis, and cultural critique (not just fact-checking!). AI will flood us with plausible stories. Resistance won’t come from debunking everything. It will come from pattern recognition.
The stories that we tell each other and that form our cultural fabric have deep implications beyond just communications — but it’s easy to dismiss this as surface level. How can corporate communications influence policy, regulation and even our daily lives?
Culture shifts the Overton window﹣what feels politically acceptable or unacceptable. Corporate communications work precisely to keep certain policies outside that window, protecting the status quo. In doing so, they shape the cultural conditions in which policy becomes possible.
If you could reimagine the way corporations use culture, what would it look like to turn those same tools into forces for climate action and accountability?
It would mean moving from storytelling as reputation management to storytelling as accountability.
Do you think current climate movements could use similar propaganda techniques to encourage people to take collective action?
To answer this, we first need to be clear about what propaganda actually means. The word comes from the Latin propagare﹣to spread. Propaganda isn’t inherently bad. At its core, it’s strategic communication designed to circulate, scale, and influence public opinion. It’s messaging built with mass dissemination in mind.
So yes, the climate movement absolutely needs it.
We need to think more intentionally about how campaigns move through culture and the public psyche: how messages spread, stick, and shape norms. The goal is to make pollution feel culturally embarrassing, and climate action feel desirable, essential, even aspirational.
The fossil fuel industry understands narrative power deeply. The task now is to reclaim that power and use it in the public interest.
