Tackling disinformation and financial power in the fight for a green economy

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of The Counterbalance. This week, we’re taking a look at a new paper exploring the links between disinformation and competition policy.

Pablo Ibañez Colomo, a law professor at the London School of Economics, has this month published a paper contending that unfairly criticising green technologies may be a violation of competition law.

His argument, set out in “Disinformation about green technologies as a restriction of competition” is that campaigns against sustainable technologies are often proliferated by those who are invested in resisting them, including industry members themselves. Thus, he argues, these campaigns should fall within the reach of competition law.

“Disinformation campaigns against green technologies — including solar panels, heat pumps, and plant-based and lab-based alternatives to meat — have become widespread,” Colomo said. “Very often, if not most of the time, these campaigns are the expression of a strategy put in place by incumbents that feel threatened by green technologies.”

Colomo draws on recent EU cases against disparagement in the pharmaceuticals sector — where a company allegedly spreads false or misleading statements about rivals or rival products — to illustrate his view. For example, in 2005 the European Commission found that AstraZeneca abused its dominant position by providing misleading representations to patent offices in several EU Member States. This is used to call on Teresa Ribera, the European Union’s competition chief, to approach green disinformation through the lens of competition law.

“It is not difficult to see how addressing disinformation by incumbent players could contribute to the well-being of society at large,” Colomo adds. “Green technologies across a number of sectors…have the potential to inject competition, reduce market concentration and benefit citizens on a number of fronts, not just through lower prices and greater choices but by means of reduced carbon emissions and harm to the environment.”

Devoting resource to disinformation investigations would be worthwhile in thwarting the blockers of transition to a green economy, but this alone would skim the surface given the more structurally focused priorities competition authorities should urgently adopt to support sustainability.

Typically, global warming is framed as a challenge that can be overcome by collective political will or by sufficient capital and financing. As we said in January: “The prevailing narrative assumes that if enough capital can be mobilised through green finance or voluntary net zero commitments, markets will deliver the green transition.”

However, the findings we shared in our report: “Too Big to Cool the Planet: How Financial Power Blocks Planet-friendly Action and How to Break It” showed that our collective failure to create sustainable alternatives is not due to instances of bad corporate behaviour alone, but about the concentration of power baked into key financial markets. A small number of firms including the world’s largest banks and asset managers — “Big Finance” — dominate and shape markets by controlling the allocation of vast swathes of capital and in doing so choose the direction of our common path to sustainability.

As we state in the report, for example, 65 of the world’s largest banks have provided almost $8 trillion in fossil fuel financing since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016. The world’s largest asset managers, which all exercise significant influence over a plethora of companies across multiple and interconnected markets, routinely fail to support ESG-linked initiatives tabled by shareholders.

A poignant example of this dynamic can be found in BlackRock’s voting behaviour. In 2024 the world’s largest asset manager voted on over 152,000 proposals at nearly 17,000 shareholder meetings and engaged with over 1,900 companies across 44 distinct markets. Despite that undeniably high volume of voting and influence, BlackRock only supported four per cent of ESG-related proposals in that year. In contrast Vanguard — the world’s second-largest asset manager — backed zero per cent of equivalent proposals.

In the face of such extreme influence and financial power such as this, it becomes all the more important to address concentrations of power and dominance if we want to prevent climate harm at a systemic level.

To be clear, this is not so much a gap in Colomo’s argument as it is a natural limit of what countering disinformation can do. It is also not a judgement on regulators: we argue “the regulatory tools designed to police market behaviour - competition law, prudential rules and disclosure frameworks - were not built for this type of power.” Consequently, the financial sector has grown more dominant even as its societal harms have intensified.

We contend that Competition Authorities have a central role that takes them beyond their narrow price effects or narrow market definitions. They need the mandate and confidence to scrutinise cross-market power; restrict mergers that solidify dominance across finance, technology, infrastructure and data-dependent sectors; tackle discriminatory access to essential inputs such as energy and data infrastructure; challenge ownership structures that stifle rivalry and consolidate governance influence; and deploy structural remedies where market power threatens economic resilience and democratic accountability.

You can read Too Big To Cool in full here.

The Counterbalance is published every Thursday. Please send any thoughts and feedback to scott@balancedeconomy.org.