NEW PAPER | Disinformation about green technologies as a restriction of competition
I have just uploaded on SSRN a new paper of mine (available here) entitled ‘Disinformation about green technologies as a restriction of competition‘. A presentation of the paper delivered to my colleagues at LSE Law School can be found here.
In spite of the staggering progress of green technologies across a number of sectors (including energy, transportation and food), it is not infrequent to read gloomy characterisations of the transition to a decarbonised economy: for instance, heat pumps are as noisy as an aircraft (and do not work), electric vehicles catch fire (and are much more polluting than their internal combustion rivals) and lab-based alternatives to meat are outright dangerous for human health.
The steady stream of disinformation about green technologies is sometimes ideological. However, it is often (if not most of the time) a rational and expected reaction by incumbent operators to the threat posed by emerging alternatives to their products. Suffice it to think, in this sense, of how renewable energies are transforming the electricity industry (towards one that is less concentrated and that empowers citizens and industrial users) or the potential transformation that would come with non-animal-based alternatives to products like butter or cheese.
To the extent that disinformation is driven by such economic concerns, competition law is potentially applicable. The paper provides a framework for the analysis of these strategies from a competition law standpoint. It builds heavily on the case law and administrative practice dealing with disparagement conduct in the pharmaceutical sector, which is the most obvious starting point for the assessment.
As I have not submitted it to a journal yet, it would be wonderful to get your comments on their piece. As ever, I am happy to clarify – in accordance with the ASCOLA declaration of ethics – that I have nothing to disclose.
Chillin'Competition 
Thanks for sharing this. I have a particular interest in the interaction between sustainability and competition law and thus read your paper with great interest. I was left with one question however: what problem does this address? You argue (first bullet) that ‘ disinformation […] is an effective strategy by incumbents to prevent, hinder or delay the roll-out of green technologies’. Yet your paper lists not a single example of such disparagement on the part of an incumbent – or have I missed this? I also missed information on the effectiveness of such campaigns. The ramblings about heat pumps and electrical vehicles certainly haven’t kept consumers from increasingly buying them. That’s perhaps the result of the biggest difference between pharmaceutical disparagement and this green disparagement: it is terribly easy for consumers to debunk the misinformation (or at least the instances that you mention in your paper) whenever they walk past a heat pump and see another Tesla that has not spontaneously caught fire. In pharmaceutical disparagement you almost need a degree in statistics and pharmacy to identify some of the disinformation. It could be interesting to complement the analysis with the (paradoxical?) observation that end-consumer markets may be less susceptible to anticompetitive disparagement than markets where trained professionals do the shopping.
Hans Vedder
20 July 2026 at 4:41 pm
Thanks for the interest, Hans! If memory serves, I do list several examples of disinformation campaigns deployed by incumbents. Which takes me to the next point: why would you place an emphasis on effects (which in any event can only be established against a properly defined counterfactual, not against the fact that consumption has increased anyway, which is what you appear to suggest), where the very object of a disinformation campain is the restriction of competition? We must not forget that object and effect are alternative, not cumulative, conditions.
Pablo Ibanez Colomo
20 July 2026 at 5:16 pm
Thanks for getting back to me, Pablo. I encountered some examples that didn’t really strike me as incumbents (Mattie Brignal, Jeremy Clarkson, Andrew Neil and some other journalists), but maybe I should give it another reading. As to the emphasis on effects, I’m sorry for being unclear: Your paper makes the claim that disparagement is an effective strategy. When a scientific paper argues that something is an effective strategy, I would expect some evidence to support this claim, especially when the claim is counter-intuitive (given the uptake of heat pumps, electric mobility and other green technologies). This doesn’t really have that much to do with the object-effect dichotomy in EU competition law.
Hans Vedder
21 July 2026 at 10:23 am
Thanks so much again for engaging! It is really a pleasure to exchange views on this. Upon a second read, you will indeed find specific examples of campaigns implemented by incumbents directly. In addition, the fact that a particular piece of disinformation is disseminated by a journalist does not rule out the involvement of incumbents. Some of the specific strategies I discuss appear to involve instances of influencers and/or journalists coordinating their conduct with incumbents.
For the rest, the object/effect divide has everything to do with the issue. Where a strategy has no plausible explanation other than the restriction of competition, a rational operator will only implement it if it is known to be effective. It is not surprising that some of the work by the leading researchers on the topic cited in the piece have indeed found these strategies to be effective.
Something else, that is equally crucial (thanks for bringing the issue up): the effectiveness of a campaign in preventing, hindering or *delaying* the roll-out of a technology has to be established against the relevant counterfactual. The question is not whether the technology is growing, but by how much it would have grown had it not been for the campaign.
No wonder the Court of Justice has emphasised the relevance of the counterfactual to establish effects in its Article 101 TFEU case law!
Pablo Ibanez Colomo
21 July 2026 at 10:38 am
Thanks, Pablo, for responding. I guess that, as far as the evidence of incumbency involvement, you’re referring to footnote 13 that has the ClientEarth-letter and the Michigan v. BP-case in it. Insofar as I understand it, the Michigan-case is not about disparagement and not about EV’s or heat pumps, but rather about the energy sources (fossil fuels for transport and heating) and withholding information about their external costs whilst attempting to increase the costs of renewable energy sources. I’ll leave the speculation about the coordination between journalists/influencers and incumbents to you.
So, what we have is essentially the letter by ClientEarth as an example of incumbents said to be disparaging an alternative (and more sustainable) technology. This letter claims that ‘these practices may [emphasis added] have actually contributed to confusing consumers and installers and obstructing consumer take-up of heat pumps in the UK’. The ‘may’ is important here. For sure, there will be more confusion, but the effects of the confusion are unclear at best. You argue that leading researchers cited in the article support the claim that this was/is effective, but this is where I’ll have to ask you to point me to the exact expert that you cite. When rereading section 2, the closest I could get to a substantiated claim about the effectiveness of this practice is the reasoning that a slower uptake will reduce the learning effects and associated cost reduction (section 2.3.2, fn. 43 – 46). To take that as a evidence of effectiveness seems a bit of a stretch.
Please note that all of this relates to the real (empirical) world ‘out there’. Not to competition law or its understanding of what matters in that world to come to a competition law appraisal of a certain practice that takes place. Your claim about the effectiveness is also made outside of the competition law context. You simply claim that it is effective and that is precisely where my doubts start and where my very first question comes from: what is the problem that this addresses? I’m still looking for information that substantiates the claim that this practice is ‘an effective strategy by incumbents to prevent, hinder or delay the roll-out of green technologies’. As to the counterfactual: I had a quick look at the numbers (you’ll have to forgive me for not diving into the full-blown statistics here): there appears to be a dip in the growth of heat pump installations in 2023. Otherwise, there’s a nice upward line to be seen (the same appears to be the case for EVs). Now, that upward curve could have been steeper. It could also be flatter. It could be identical. Nobody knows. There could be a country that is exactly the same as the UK except for this coordinated disparagement. That would clinch it empirically and allow us to come to a scientifically valid claim about the effectiveness of this disparagement strategy. Alas, no identical twin comes to my mind.
Now, on to competition law. That is where we have an object-effect dichotomy to keep us from having to wade into the effects-morass. Just to be clear in this regard: I’m not arguing that effects or effectiveness in relation competition need to be established in relation to a restriction by object. I’m not sure exactly why you write it in that part of your comment, but you say that ‘Where a strategy has no plausible explanation other than the restriction of competition, a rational operator will only implement it if it is known to be effective.’ This is a statement that has two conditions. The first one is about the absence of a plausible explanation other than the restriction of competition. The second one is about the implementation by rational actors only if it is known to be effective. The second condition makes perfect sense, but why have the first condition at all? No rational operator would do anything unless it knows that to be effective. It is as simple as that. Whether or not there is a plausible explanation to restrict competition is irrelevant to that second part of the statement. A practice will also only be implemented if it is known to be effective when there is a plausible explanation other than the restriction of competition. To provide a practical example for this we can rely on Vaillant’s reply to the ClientEarth-letter. They pointed to the fact that in addition to manufacturing gas boilers, they are also a leading heat pump manufacturer. Why would they want to hinder the uptake of one of their own products on the market? Well, perhaps because they also sell gas boilers and also have invested in the technology to use hydrogen in gas boilers. Maybe they make a better margin selling a gas boiler? Perhaps they have some old stock that they want to sell first? The plausible explanations are myriad. Of course, we could go on a plausibility-rating exercise, but that would – I believe – lead us into an even bigger quagmire, if only because I cannot envisage any replicable yardstick for determining the (relative) plausibility of a motive for doing something.
So, my initial question remains: where is the evidence of the real-life effectiveness of this disparagement that you claim? I have a second question: what do you mean with the sentence ‘Where a strategy has no plausible explanation other than the restriction of competition, a rational operator will only implement it if it is known to be effective’ and the plausibility-related condition in there?
Hans Vedder
23 July 2026 at 2:35 pm
Thanks for the exchange and for the interest in my research!
In terms of examples, the paper provides several concrete and well-documented examples (I guess a bit further down): from the coordinated campaign against lab-based meat (which has been alleged to be made up of cancer cells), to carefully orchestrated moves against heat pumps via social media; not to mention persistent propaganda by astroturf organisations against solar farms and wind turbines. Again: it is all in the paper.
As a matter of fact, the paper was inspired by the publicly available information about these campaigns (in media such as DeSmog; see for instance here: https://www.desmog.com/2024/03/01/meat-industry-using-misinformation-to-block-dietary-change-report-finds/), which made me think it could well be a competition law infringement.
As to the plausible explanation point: this is, as you know, the criterion used by the Court of Justice (explicitly since the Generics judgment of 2020; implicitly well before that) to identify restrictions by object.
This approach was particularly prominent in the Court’s analysis in the 101 Hoffmann-La Roche judgment discussed at length in the paper. It is also worth looking at the Teva-Copaxone decision of the European Commission, which articulates it thoroughly.
For the rest, I am glad that we see eye to eye when it comes to the effectiveness of a campaign that has no plausible explanation other than a restrictive one.
Looking forward to keeping the discussion going! Thanks a lot again
Pablo Ibanez Colomo
23 July 2026 at 3:42 pm