It’s So Easy To Fool People — Misinformation & Myths Abound
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Last Updated on: 13th August 2025, 01:30 am
I’ve been covering electric vehicles for 13 years, renewable energy for 16 years, and climate science for 25+ years. I’ve seen so many myths on these topics, so much misinformation. Unfortunately, a lot of it gets quite popular, and it’s super hard to get people to let go of misinformation and believe and understand reality.
After debunking myths multiple times, as a writer and editor, it’s easy to then think, “We’ve done that. We don’t need to write the same thing again.” However, when myths are spread relentlessly every day, we should probably cover all of these things much more regularly than we do. (Of course, for our regular readers, the problem is that would get quite boring.) One thing I think we need to finally get around to doing is having a resource page that brings together commonly held myths, and responses to them, responses we can keep refining over time. Skeptical Science provides an excellent example of how to do this, but with its focus being on climate science.
To start, though, we need to come up with a list of the biggest misinformation and myths regarding cleantech — EVs and renewable energy, primarily. You can help by dropping any ideas down in the comments under this article.
The thing that struck me recently and got me to start an article with the title above is just how absurdly easy it is to fool people, to get them to believe nonsense. You just have to say something that sounds smart and people will believe it, or repeat an absurd lie over and over and over again. Fox News does it every single day, and very effectively. People on social media steer people even more incessantly away from reality. The fossil fuel industry has gotten countless people to believe that global heating isn’t happening, or isn’t caused by CO2 emissions. They have gotten people to support subsidies for fossil fuels but not for clean energy, which is absolutely absurd. People have been tricked into thinking EVs are much worse for the environment than fossil-fueled cars. Donald Trump got millions of people to believe that the 2020 election was “stolen” or “rigged” and got them to try to overthrow democracy. Despite a completely anti-democratic attempt to invade the Capitol and stop Congress from doing what voters voted for, an obvious attempt at a coup to stop the transfer of power, tens of millions of people voted for the fraud again and put him back in the White House!
Some people have been fooled into thinking the Earth is flat, vaccines don’t help prevent deadly diseases, and Obama isn’t American. For real. It’s not just an absurd joke or extreme rarity — millions of people believe all kinds of nonsense. It’s frequently shocking to me what people will believe just because they heard it repeatedly on Fox News.
So, with the myths that you’ve heard, don’t be afraid to share the most absurd ones. Who knows what people think and what’s spread in countless fake news circles on social media? And also let us know if you have seen excellent ways of correcting the misinformation in a friendly, effective way. While I am obviously not holding back about the idiocy of many people while writing this article, and not concerning myself with politically blinded people who have fallen for common right-wing media traps, when we get to writing responses to popular myths and misinformation, we’ll be diplomatic and more inclusive. After all, the aim is to get as many people as possible to stop believing nonsense, even true, genuine idiots. We want to dissolve misinformation, not push people deeper into it.
It’s so easy to fool people. It should be easy to unfool them, right?
Featured photo by Gerd Altmann
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