Building Climate Enemies: Politics, Conspiracy, and the Delegitimization of the Environmental Agenda on Telegram

The study shows that, in Brazil's conspiracist Telegram communities, climate disinformation has not retreated, it has simply changed its guise. Between 2018 and 2026, content that once circulated in an openly combative, promotional tone came, from 2023 onward, to adopt the sober appearance of journalism, making its disinformational character harder to recognize and easier to share. In these spaces, the climate almost never figures as an environmental problem: it enters as a weapon in the political contest between Lula and Bolsonaro, as alleged proof of opponents' hypocrisy, or as a sign of a supposed plan for global control. This is a process the note describes as semantic colonization: not the denial of scientific vocabulary, but its capture and the reversal of its valence. Terms such as climate change, Agenda 2030, and carbon are repositioned to connote foreign domination, elite hypocrisy, and loss of sovereignty. This is why fact-checks that correct isolated factual claims have limited effect, as they operate on individual links in the chain without destabilizing the semantic architecture that sustains them. The Rio Grande do Sul floods, with 640 mentions, are the most-cited disaster in the entire corpus. In 2026, in the thick of an election year, 62% of the posts analyzed combine the political use of climate disasters with a naturalizing tone and the format of a news report.