Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called climate change “one of the most urgent challenges of our time” and pledged tens of millions of dollars to help fight it.

Yet his company Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is listed as a “gold sponsor” for an event in Alberta next month featuring Barry Cooper, a University of Calgary political scientist who’s argued that there is “growing scientific skepticism” about whether humans are causing the climate to warm. 

Another gold sponsor is Koch Industries, the oil and gas company whose billionaire owner Charles Koch, along with his late brother David, has given more than $100 million since 1997 to organizations that dispute or deny climate science, according to Greenpeace calculations. 

The event is headlined by Chris Rufo, the U.S. conservative activist who created a moral panic around “critical race theory” and has argued that “transgenderism” is “threatening families and kids all over the United States.”

“It’s pretty unusual,” Sean Buchan, a researcher with the organization Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), said of Meta’s sponsorship. “They generally speaking do their best to have a clean public image. These are some pretty toxic brands to be associated with.”

Meta didn’t reply to detailed questions from DeSmog. 

Rufo Influenced Donald Trump

The event, which takes place September 21, is a regional networking conference for the Canada Strong and Free Network, an organization committed to building the country’s conservative movement. “We aim to delve deep into the foundational principles that have shaped our nation and its conservative values,” a description of the conference reads. 

Rufo, the keynote speaker, is advertised as being “a prominent figure in the fight against critical race theory in American institutions.” His activism reportedly helped inspire President Donald Trump to sign an executive order banning racial sensitivity training in federal institutions. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Rufo as a leader “in the right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ culture war.” And the Guardian reported earlier this year that he maintains a close relationship with a rightwing magazine called IM-1776 that “regularly showers praise on dictators and authoritarians, puffs racist ideologues, and attacks liberal democracy.”

Denying Climate Since 2005

He’ll be joined at the event by Cooper, a longtime climate change denier. Cooper was involved with the release of a 23-minute video from 2005 entitled “Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You’re Not Being Told About the Science of Climate Change.” 

Through his position at the University of Calgary, Cooper helped facilitate fundraising for an organization called Friends of Science, which in 2014 ran a billboard in Calgary stating that “the sun is the main driver of climate change. Not You. Not CO2.”

Cooper in 2021 wrote a report for the Alberta government where he questioned whether humans are the main driver of climate change and claimed incorrectly that “there are good reasons for a decline in the plausibility of alarmist rhetoric.” 

Meta claims to be taking steps to combat misleading climate claims on its platforms, including partnering with “more than 90 independent fact-checking organizations.” The company characterizes misinformation as “false information that outside experts say undermines the existence or impacts of climate change, misrepresents scientific data and mischaracterizes mitigation and adaptation efforts.”  

Yet Meta’s enforcement of penalties against accounts that spread false claims is haphazard and lacking, CAAD argued in a report last year. Sponsoring a conservative networking event alongside Koch Industries which features a known climate denier would seem to flout the company’s policies on misinformation entirely, Buchan argues. 

“I’m kind of surprised,” he said. “To sponsor something like this so publicly seems like a reputational risk.”