Two Economies With the Same Interest

During the May 2026 heatwave, a familiar set of claims circulated across European platforms. Heatwaves are natural. Scientists manipulate data. The media exaggerates. A June 2026 report from the European Digital Media Observatory documents the pattern: climate disinformation spikes during extreme weather, and the narratives are recycled, not improvised.

Two overlapping economies sustain the system. The carbon economy funds misleading content to protect commercial interests. The attention economy’s algorithms reward inflammatory material because engagement generates revenue. Neither is coordinating with the other. Their incentives converge.

“It’s spreading at the speed of light,” Sara said. Accurate climate communication travels in the same environment. It is not rewarded by the same algorithm.

From PR to a PhD in What Goes Wrong

Sara built her career across public relations, international development, and corporate sustainability consulting before arriving at the structural question of why so much communications work fails. A PhD in sustainability communication at Universidade do Minho, completed in 2024, produced the CARE model: a peer-reviewed audit framework covering Content, Aim, Reporting, and Engagement.

More than five years at EY followed, advising Portuguese companies on ESG strategy, materiality, and disclosure. The consulting work confirmed what the research had found.

“There are companies doing greenwashing on purpose,” she said, “and others that are caught in the trap and do it because of their lack of knowledge.”

She is now Managing Director of BeTrue, a sustainability communications agency, and founder of Mossy, an AI-powered greenwashing detection tool launched in June 2026 and built on the CARE model.

A Machine Built in the Fifties

The EDMO report traces the organised suppression of climate knowledge to at least the 1960s, when fossil fuel companies had internal evidence of the impact of their products and chose not to disclose it. Sara notes the connection was identified even earlier, around 1912.

Why does the suppression continue, given that those funding it have descendants who will inherit the consequences? “Power and money. Because they think they can buy their exit out of this crisis with money.”

The modern architecture adds a layer the fossil fuel industry did not design. Russia maintains a developed climate disinformation strategy targeting the EU. State actors and commercial actors share no coordination mechanism. They share a common interest in delay and confusion.

The CARE Model and the Gap It Measures

Sara’s doctoral research at Universidade do Minho produced the CARE model: a peer-reviewed framework for auditing sustainability communication across four dimensions, Content, Aim, Reporting, and Engagement.

At BeTrue, she applies it with sustainability and communications teams to close the gap between what organisations do and what stakeholders actually understand and trust. As CSRD raises the bar on disclosure, that gap is becoming harder and more costly to ignore. The penalty for miscommunication is no longer reputational alone. It is regulatory.

“There are companies doing greenwashing on purpose,” she said, “and others that are caught in the trap and do it because of their lack of knowledge.”

The work operates at the communicator end of the information supply chain. It helps organisations say things that are accurate, proportionate, and defensible. It does not change what the algorithm amplifies. A company that communicates accurately and one that communicates misleadingly compete in the same attention environment. The incentive structure governing which content travels further has not changed.

The Variable Upstream of All of It

The EDMO report describes the goal of disinformation as white noise: not persuasion, but exhaustion. Enough misleading content surrounding the signal makes the signal impossible to locate.

Sara’s counter moves upstream from communication entirely. “From the past two hundred years there was a decrease in sixty percent of our connection to nature.”

People disconnected from direct ecological experience are more susceptible to narratives that deny it. Her argument for nature-based education and local community engagement is not peripheral to the disinformation question. It is, in her reading, the underlying variable.

Her magic wand is a shift in consciousness: the ability to see how much daily purchasing is manufactured by advertising rather than need.

“I would give people the ability to see the reality of the world we are living in and the way they would recognise how many of the things that we buy every day are unnecessary, useless, and how companies deceive and mislead us.”

The incentive structure making disinformation commercially rational remains intact. That is the condition in which better sustainability communication is being attempted.

The IOC Took Eni’s Money. Greenpeace Called It Absurd.

Markets work when prices tell the truth. In the case of fossil fuels, they do not. Eni, the Italian oil and gas company, sponsored the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. Greenpeace called it absurd. It was also, from a purely economic standpoint, entirely rational.

Eni’s products contribute to the warming that is shortening the Alpine ski season and threatening the long-term viability of winter sport. None of that cost appeared on Eni’s balance sheet. The IOC received a sponsor. Eni received credibility. The glacier continued to retreat.

The arrangement held because the price signal that would have made it unsustainable did not exist.

This is not primarily a story about corporate hypocrisy. It is a story about what happens when externalities go unpriced. The companies that build alternatives to the status quo compete on a tilted field. The companies that created the problem do not pay for it.

A Decade in China and the End of Landfill Space

Manuela Zoninsein spent nearly a decade in China between 2007 and 2015. She arrived as a Newsweek reporter, stayed to study Mandarin at universities in Taiwan and Beijing, and built an agricultural analytics firm tracking China’s agritech market for foreign investors. She watched, over those years, a country of one and a half billion people make the transition from reuse to single use at a speed and scale that settled a question she had not quite known she was asking.

“Anything that happens in China, one point five billion people jump,” she said. “You understand the impact.”

The landfill space ran out. The conclusion she drew was structural, not moral. Single use does not work at scale. She went on to study at Oxford and MIT, work at Palantir across four international markets, and co-found an agricultural marketplace in Brazil. The common thread, visible only in retrospect, was a repeated encounter with what happens when convenience is optimised and consequence is externalised.

Bike Sharing, Bottle Returns, and the Infrastructure Nobody Built

Two further observations shaped what became Kadeya. Watching New York build out its bike-sharing network, Manuela asked why the model worked. The answer was ownership economics. People do not want to maintain a bike, store it, or file a police report when it is stolen. They want mobility. Bike sharing sells the outcome rather than the asset.

The analogy to beverages was direct. At MIT business school she began asking why bottle return rates were assumed to be low. The consensus answer was behavioural: Americans were disinclined to return bottles. Her counter was infrastructural.

“If you create enough density, if you have enough points for pickup and drop off, actually you can get ninety-nine percent return rates with no penalty or deposit.”

The deeper error, she concluded, was methodological. Reuse had always been benchmarked against single use as currently designed, rather than asked what it could achieve if engineered to match single-use convenience. The former comparison always favours the incumbent. The latter is a different question entirely.

A Dishwasher, a Soda Fountain, and a Ninety-Nine Percent Return Rate

Kadeya’s answer is a bottling plant inside a vending machine footprint. Stainless steel bottles are dispensed, returned, inspected by machine learning, washed, sanitised, and refilled on-site. No plastic. No deposit. No supply chain shipping water around the planet.

“We did not invent a single new thing,” Manuela said. “We just recombined existing technologies in a novel fashion.”

The numbers are notable. Across five commercial deployments the return rate has held at ninety-nine percent. Carbon footprint runs seventy-five percent below single use. Employer costs are a third lower. Consumer price is at parity today. The company has turned down exclusivity offers from major beverage firms to keep the network open.

Kadeya targets workplaces where hydration is operationally critical and workers are mobile: construction sites, military bases, refineries, fulfilment centres. Manuela calls it the liquid railroad, beverage infrastructure built on existing tap networks rather than against them. The economic logic is designed to hold without a carbon price. That, for now, is a necessity rather than a choice.

The Additionality Problem and Why Carbon Credits Risk Becoming Indulgences

The Eni case and the Kadeya model represent opposite ends of the same market failure. Eni sponsored a climate-threatened event because its emissions were unpriced. Single use dominates because the cost of plastic waste is unpriced. In a world where those costs appeared in market prices, both propositions would look different.

Manuela’s answer to the magic wand question is a free and open carbon market. Get the price right and the economics of every commercial activity reset. Kadeya’s advantage widens. Eni’s position becomes harder to sustain.

The obstacles are well known. Additionality, establishing that a protected forest would not have been protected in any case, is difficult to prove credibly. Voluntary markets cover a fraction of total emissions. And there is an older problem that she identifies with precision: credits risk functioning like medieval indulgences. The polluter with the deepest pockets buys the right to continue.

“How do you create a cap? How do you really say that you’ve got the full market under consideration? And then how do you ensure that it is being consistently applied and measured? I don’t know that you can.”

The carbon market, in its current form, is not solving the pricing problem. It is deferring it.

When the Richest People in History Do Not Price In the Consequences

There is a political economy argument running beneath the packaging and carbon questions. Manuela makes it directly. The most powerful figures in business and government are, in her reading, pursuing strategies that shrink the markets on which their own wealth depends. A race to the bottom generates less aggregate demand, not more. A hollowed-out middle class buys less.

Her observation about the CEO of Salesforce carries the point efficiently. A prominent climate and DEI position, held publicly for years, has been quietly abandoned as political conditions shifted. The commitment was priced at the prevailing rate of reputational risk. When that rate fell, so did the commitment.

Kadeya’s commercial model is not constructed on reputational risk. It is constructed on cost, convenience, and return rates.

The bet is that a business case built on operational advantage rather than goodwill holds across political cycles.

Whether a functioning carbon market arrives to reprice the competition before those cycles exhaust the window for structural change is, for now, the open question.