Inside the doomsday ‘cult’ spreading climate disinformation to global leaders

Earlier this year, a conference was held in the European Parliament to discuss the dangers of nanoplastics. Such an event would not be unusual, were it not for its co-host: a “religious cult” that predicts humanity will go extinct by 2036.

Founded in Ukraine in 2014 and now headquartered in the US, AllatRa presents itself as “a volunteer-driven initiative” studying the climate crisis and natural disasters. Yet its publications advance a radically different explanation for climate change than the scientific consensus. According to reports published by the group, the principal threat comes not from greenhouse gas emissions, but plastic pollution – combined with an “external cosmic” phenomenon that it says takes place every 12,000 years.

In materials that were removed from its website soon after openDemocracy approached for comment, AllatRa warned that “humanity’s very existence could be at serious risk” due to a possible escalation of natural disasters within the next ten years. One now-deleted report claimed that nanoplastics in the world’s oceans are preventing the Earth’s core from cooling, causing seismic activity that will rupture the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean – Earth’s deepest point – and lead to a massive explosion that will destroy the Earth’s “atmosphere, oceans, and magnetic field”.

Screenshot of AllatRa ‘About’ section, now removed While scientists have dismissed this narrative as pseudoscience, AllatRa has secured a remarkable degree of access to influential members of the global far-right. Since 2024, the organisation has been welcomed into the US Capitol, the European Parliament, the US Congress, UN meetings and the Vatican – allowing it to spread its ‘scientific findings’ to global audiences and leaders.

Experts warn that pseudoscientific narratives like AllatRa’s are part of a growing wave of climate disinformation that is diverting attention away from trying to tackle the real causes of climate change and undermining public understanding of the crisis.

“Plastic production is not currently seen as a centre stage as a driver of climate change,” Richard Thompson, a marine biology  professor at the University of Plymouth, told openDemocracy. “The prediction of the science is that the contribution of plastics towards climate change could become more important in the future if the other drivers of climate change, such as burning of fossil fuels, are reduced. Saying that microplastics are already becoming a driver of climate instability is, in my view, an overstatement.”

AllatRa’s climate disinformation creates an “epistemological crisis that generates perception problems”, said Polish academic Patrycja Sasnal, a member of the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee and a co-author of a report about environmental disinformation.

“Disinformation exploits the nature of science: we know that climate change is man-made and we’re affected by it,” Sasnal told openDemocracy. “There’s always a political interest behind every disinformation campaign. We don’t have time anymore to check information, and doomsday disinformation causes anxiety.”

Inside the European Parliament

In a press release on its website , AllatRa takes credit for co-hosting ‘Nanoplastics: Hidden connections and emerging risks’ in the European Parliament with far-right Czech MEP  Ondřej Knotek in February of this year.

The conference featured panels that mixed real scientists and members of AllatRa Global Research Centre, the organisation’s think tank.

AllatRa frequently uses real scientists to give legitimacy to its work, sometimes manipulating their opinions to do so. Experts featured in one AllatRa documentary released last year say their comments on plastic’s impact on planetary health were twisted to support its predetermined pseudoscientific conclusions, such as a correlation “between the rise in oceanic plastic concentrations and the warming of ocean waters”.

One of those experts was Thompson of the University of Plymouth, who told openDemocracy that correlation doesn't imply causality. “They [AllatRa] are splicing pieces of information together and reaching conclusions that are not supported by the science that sits behind them,” he said.

Another expert, Turkish marine biologist Sedat Gündoğdu, asked AllatRa to remove his interview from the documentary. “While it is true that they [AllatRa] have selectively highlighted studies addressing the potential risks of nanoplastics, it could perhaps be argued that they have disregarded research that raises questions about these risks”, he explained.

Gündoğdu also noted that AllatRa does not mention any mitigation strategies on plastic pollution, which adds confusion to its doomsday narrative. “Their so-called ‘papers’ on nanoplastics appear to be a simple summary of the existing literature – that is why I asked for my interview and involvement to be removed from the documentary,” he said.

Towards the end of the documentary, which is three hours and 20 minutes long, a section c…