Five members of the Baden-Württemberg state parliament from Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) have asked their own government whether a "publicly accessible documentation" of people and organizations who "repeatedly spread false information about climate change" would be "sensible and legally feasible." The CDU caucus says the question is not a demand for a register.

The motion, titled "Umgang mit Fake-News zum Klimawandel" (dealing with fake news about climate change), was received by the state parliament on November 3. Peter Hauk, a former state minister for rural areas and consumer protection, signed it with four colleagues, listed as Rathgeb, Dr. Schwarz, Dr. Rapp and Herzog.

The document asks for a report, not a law, and contains no definition of climate misinformation and no proposed penalty.

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The register idea comes from the state government's consumer advisory panel, the Verbraucherkommission. Its October 6 statement recommended that platform operators delete bots and keep posts with false climate claims out of feeds, and that chatbots which produce climate falsehoods be treated as a "prohibited AI practice" and penalized.

According to the translation by the privacy and free-speech site Reclaim The Net, the statement also recommends listing persons and organizations that have repeatedly spread false information about climate change, "comparable to a lobby register," with "traceable documentation."

In that translation, the paper counts the claim that "Measures to curb climate change are ineffective or harmful" as misinformation, and says that for consumer protection a speaker's intent "is irrelevant." It also says the goal of regulation "must therefore not be to ban opinions."

Reclaim argues that under those categories, simply arguing that a climate policy will not work could put someone on the list.

When the regional paper Schwäbische Zeitung asked about the motion on November 10, the CDU caucus pushed back. Spokesman Steffen Tanneberger said the questions and the justification contain no demand for a register or order to examine one, and that "A parliamentary question is not agreement with the proposal in question."

The caucus says Hauk has not advocated a registry.