“No more carbon apocalypse-mongering,” Jordan Peterson told an audience of thousands in February at a global conservative conference in London known as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC).
The crowd applauded loudly.
The world is “certainly not going to hit our 2030 targets” for achieving net-zero on climate change, Peterson claimed, because those targets “were proposed by buffoons and liars.”
“We’re not going to hit our 2050 targets either,” he told the audience, which, according to a leaked attendee list, ranged from fossil fuel executives and Trump administration officials and allies to climate denial organizations, political leaders from Europe and right-wing tech billionaires.
To Peterson, the prospect of this failure is cause for celebration, because he ridicules the notion that climate change is an emergency and views government efforts to reduce emissions as an affront to personal freedom.
For him, attacking net-zero appears to be a stand-in to attack all climate action. Others in the ARC network are leading efforts to ban wind energy, roll back conservation laws and undermine institutions promoting global action on emissions.
Peterson grew up in Alberta — home to the third-largest oil deposits in the world. He is known to millions of people for dispensing self-help advice through best-selling books. He’s also a well-known conservative influencer whose podcast has often featured multi-hour interviews with prominent conservative figures, and is distributed by Ben Shapiro’s right-wing media outlet The Daily Wire.
Now, Peterson’s influence is growing beyond the world of conservative punditry into geopolitics and policy making, especially his strident opposition to policies aimed at achieving net-zero.
During the ARC Conference – a multi-day right-wing networking event organized, promoted, and moderated by Peterson – journalists from DeSmog and Canada’s National Observer observed efforts to spread anti-net zero strategies across a growing conservative network that includes Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Europe, and Australia.
Attendees said they were using the conference to help develop national political party platforms, deepen transatlantic alliances, disseminate anti-renewable energy messages globally, and shift rightward the boundaries of acceptable public debate on net-zero.
ARC’s overarching goals when it comes to climate change are to debunk “the environmentalist climate scam” and end the “appalling policy” of net-zero worldwide, Peterson said while moderating a panel with Nigel Farage, the leader of the conservative political party Reform U.K.
Farage helped launch a U.K. branch of the Heartland Institute, the Chicago think-tank that is at the forefront of denying the science of climate change, and that in recent months worked with politicians in Austria and Hungary to oppose a major European Union ecosystem restoration law.
Now is the moment, Peterson declared to an enthusiastic conference hall packed with attendees who’d traveled from dozens of countries, “for conservatives to really push the envelope.”
***
Less than a month earlier, world leaders and business executives had met in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum (WEF). That forum’s annual meetings, which typically include discussions around sustainability and climate goals, have become potent fodder for conservative conspiracy theories. These include false claims advanced by Peterson and others that “tyrannical bureaucrats” want to force people to live in “15-minute cities,” an urban planning concept emphasizing walkable neighborhoods that has become right-wing shorthand for fears about shadowy global elites.
Some at ARC saw Peterson’s conference as an emerging alternative to the Davos gathering. Delivering a virtual keynote address on opening day, Congressman Mike Johnson, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives and leader of its Republican majority, told the conference that “organizations like the World Economic Forum lose their dominance when organizations like ours seek to challenge their hegemony.”
Whereas the WEF has actively championed and encouraged net-zero pledges from corporations and countries, speakers at ARC envisioned eradicating the global framework for climate action entirely.
“Net zero 2050 is a sinister goal,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the conference in a live video appearance. Echoing dubious conspiracy theories that frame climate action as an authoritarian effort to control people’s movements and actions, he added that net zero has “certainly been a powerful tool used to grow government power, top-down control, and shrink human freedom.”
Wright, who was the CEO of the fracking services company Liberty Energy before joining the Trump administration, argued that instead of pursuing net-zero initiatives that will help shift the world away from fossil fuels and towards cleaner sources of power, countries should “get out of the way of the production, export, and enhancement of our volumes of coal, oil and gas.”
Official net-zero pledges by countries, states, regions, cities and large publicly-listed companies have been proliferating rapidly over the past few years, growing from 769 in 2020 to 1,750 in 2024, according to a report from the independent research group Net Zero Tracker.
One ARC organizer said privately that Wright’s comments about net-zero being “sinister” wouldn’t have been politically acceptable on the world stage even one year ago. The conference, in the organizer’s opinion, was providing a platform for shifting the international conversation on climate action rightward.
That shift is also being accelerated by the Trump administration, which has created a National Energy Dominance Council for driving up oil and gas production, moved to ban wind energy projects and is taking steps to repeal the federal legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases as a pollutant.
It’s all welcome news to Paul Marshall, an owner of the right-wing U.K. television broadcaster GB News. Marshall runs a hedge fund that in 2023 had $2.2 billion in fossil fuel investments.
“What I am describing is a European problem and a Canadian problem and an Australian problem,” Marshall said during a keynote speech that attacked net-zero as a form of “climate derangement syndrome.”
“These countries have been infected by an ideological zeal, which is leading us to sacrifice our economic prosperity and our peoples’ livelihoods, all for the sake of making some fractional changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” he claimed.
***
Peterson is in some ways an unlikely figure to be helping lead a global campaign against net zero. The former University of Toronto psychology professor rose to notoriety in 2016 for protesting a federal Canadian law aimed at preventing gender discrimination. Videos of Peterson attacking the bill as a threat to free speech and refusing to use students’ preferred gender pronouns went viral, turning him into a digital right-wing celebrity.
That initial groundswell of internet attention helped make Peterson’s 2018 self-help book 12 Rules for Life into an international bestseller and launched his career as an online reactionary popular among young disaffected men.
The pressures of fame seemed to catch up to him in early 2020, when the CBC reported that he was seeking medical treatment in Moscow for severe withdrawal from the anti-anxiety medication clonazepam.
In 2021 Peterson published his second self-help book, Beyond Order. While it was a bestseller, mainstream media interest in the controversial professor had started to wane. But in the place of New Yorker profiles and BBC interviews, Peterson built a social media following that rivals — if not surpasses — the online reach of legacy outlets, including on platforms such as YouTube, where he currently has over 8.6 million subscribers.
In 2022 he signed a distribution deal for his podcast with The Daily Wire, a major conservative outlet founded with nearly $5 million in seed funding from Texas fracking billionaire Farris Wilks. Peterson has in recent years ramped up his anti-net zero content by regularly featuring climate crisis deniers on his podcast, generating millions of views for fringe figures rarely taken seriously by most legacy media. They include Judith Curry, a U.S. climatologist who has gained conservative fame for disputing well-established climate science, including by disputing that “humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.”
Peterson in turn has leveraged his online platform to build his power in the conservative movement across a huge swathe of the English-speaking world. In 2023, Peterson used his podcast to launch ARC, a network of policymakers, investors, activists, and journalists from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Europe, and Australia that hosts in-person networking events. A video trailer for ARC’s first London conference, held in November 2023, began with Peterson reading a statement: “We do not believe that humanity is necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster.”
At this conference, as DeSmog reported, Peterson and other speakers generally avoided explicitly political language on climate change. By 2025’s second ARC conference in London, this seemingly cautious approach appeared to give way to full-blown climate denial.
***
During a private drinks reception at ARC, Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, claimed that the enormous wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles in January had “nothing to do with the fiction of climate change and everything to do with the reality of liberal elite failure.” Scientists have concluded that the lingering drought and other weather patterns that accelerated the disaster were largely due to climate change.
The Heritage Foundation is behind Project 2025, the radical conservative plan for hollowing out the U.S. government that is now being implemented by the Trump administration.
The Project 2025 leader vowed to support European conservatives in their own efforts to downsize government and oppose international institutions. “Our friends from Europe, from other parts of the world, if we can reclaim our country, if we can reclaim our institutions, including the bloated, ridiculous overreach of the federal government, you can do what is necessary in your country,” Roberts told the conference room.
ARC co-founder David Stroud asked the powerful conservative figures gathered in London to take what they’d learned during the conference and bring it back to their home countries.
“There are communities of leaders on the ground in Canada and in America and in South America and in Brazil that are working these ideas out,” Stroud said during the same private drinks reception. “So the purpose of this evening is to enable as many of you as possible to connect and to have a meaningful conversation.”
By plugging more deeply into the network, he added, “you will strengthen your hand.”
Less than a month after the conference, the Heritage Foundation seemed to make good on that promise. It convened several conservative groups from Poland and Hungary for a meeting in Washington, DC. The goal was to generate ideas for overhauling the current structures of the EU, according to the Polish investigative outlet VSquare, an outcome that could severely curtail the EU’s ability to achieve net zero by 2050.
A researcher and campaigner at the transparency watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory said in reaction to news of that meeting that the growing transatlantic alliance fostered by Trump allies was “quite simply terrifying.”
***
In early March, the leader of the U.K. Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, officially announced that she would be abandoning her party’s 2050 net zero target, claiming incorrectly that it was “bankrupting” the country.
Badenoch appeared well on her way to this position during her appearance at Peterson’s ARC conference the month before. During her keynote speech at ARC, she likened her party to Trump’s MAGA movement and took aim at net-zero initiatives, arguing that “whether it is pronouns or DEI or climate activism, these issues aren’t about kindness, they are about control.”
She seemed eager to learn from other speakers and attendees about specific strategies for advancing a conservative agenda on climate change and other issues. “My party is starting the largest renewal of policy and ideas in a generation,” she said. “This conference is part of finding those answers.”
During his panel with Farage, who is Badenoch’s leading conservative rival, Peterson said that this is an opportune political moment for conservatives to get more aggressive in their opposition to net-zero. “You have an opportunity now, because the right is split in the U.K., to really hash things out on the conservative side,” he said.
Peterson then invited Farage to criticize the global net-zero framework, asking, “how appalling is it?”
Farage began his answer with an attack on Badenoch – “the Conservative Party is not on the right in any measurable way” – and then questioned whether human-caused climate change is real. “I’m not a scientist,” he said. “I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not, but there are so many other massive factors.”
Well-established climate science has long confirmed that the CO2 pollution created by burning fossil fuels is the primary driver behind climate change.
That basic scientific fact was acknowledged at the conference by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish author and speaker, but he noted that while climate change is real it’s “not the end of the world.”
Lomborg, who is an advisor to ARC, has attempted for decades to convince the world that there are more pressing global problems to address than climate change, including by writing an internationally syndicated newspaper column and recently appearing on the HBO show Real Time With Bill Maher.
He had a booth in the conference’s exhibition hall promoting his most recent book, Best Things First (a copy of which Peterson presented to Elon Musk last year), and made himself easily accessible to media, even hosting a press briefing on the final day.
During a keynote speech, he described the idea of the global economy smoothly transitioning off fossil fuels as a “green fantasy,” saying that renewable energy advocates are being “dramatically misleading” in their insistence that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of power, and arguing that net zero will “drive us bankrupt.”
Climate experts argue it is Lomborg who is being misleading by drawing on outdated energy statistics and cherry-picking data that presents renewables in the worst possible light. The ARC conference gave Lomborg a platform to spread his anti-net zero message to a highly influential group of people. A leaked ARC attendee list obtained by DeSmog named executives and other senior figures from such industries as fossil fuels, finance, tech, business consulting and defense, alongside representatives of prominent religious right groups, libertarian think tanks and right-wing media outlets.
Peterson in turn urged attendees to fight for an energy system where coal, oil, gas and nuclear remain dominant for decades — if not centuries — to come.
“It’s not a net zero vision,” he said. “I can tell you that.”
This special investigation between Canada’s National Observer and DeSmog was produced in collaboration with the Institute for Sustainability, Education and Action and TRACE Foundation.
Comments
How do we get a list of all Canadian attendees and those foreigners besides Jordan Peterson who are working to influence Canadian politics and policy?
Jordan Peterson is from Alberta, says it all and clearly a nut job and highly likely in the pockets of the corrupt oil & gas industry.
Peterson ET-all seem bent on destroying the world.
Excellent article and links.
Peterson has a point about Foucault and Derrida becoming the Western academic community's overarching focus. I studied them in the context of a Critical Theory course in English wherein authors were subjugated to critics, which both these men WERE. They never pan out enough, these entitled guys, ensconced as they are in a system that has favored them for ages, which is something they have in common with Peterson. That link showing his emotionality around young men turning to him says A LOT I thought, as well as the serious problem he had with anxiety himself.
The article covers many progressive issues that most people seem to think lost us the American election, starting with the "pronoun" issue with Peterson, but I still think most of it is a proxy for the rise of women. The whole DEI thing started with women's equity in the workplace after all, which in turn arose from the "women's movement" in the sixties, which I've read spurred religious organizations because religious doctrine is both the origin AND the sanction for the predominant hierarchy world-wide, i.e. patriarchy.
So Peterson has become a god figure for all the lost young men like himself, hence the emotionality, many of whom can't see their way clear to embrace traditional, organized religion, even though Peterson himself does just that! Proxy upon proxy.
What we do to "make it new....." knows no bounds, but repeats endlessly.
Why someone as educated and intelligent as Peterson would go full-on anti-science makes little sense unless you look at the ingrained battles in academia itself where his focus, Psychology, was considered less rigorous in the realm of "the sciences," which made it subordinate to, say Environmental Science or Climate Science?
Just a thought, plus, like all sensitive, intelligent types, he's "got issues" at a time when white men everywhere have declared grievances that have grown in seriousness now that they've been NAMED by the likes of Peterson.
Excellent comment -- I particularly like your suggestion about the origin of Peterson's hostility towards science. He's become the prime articulation of that sense of grievance that appears to underlie this whole movement...and what is so frightening is that it is an emotional response that can't be addressed through "reasonable" argument.
Thank you for this review of the ARC conference and Jordan Peterson's influence. While at a dinner party a few months ago, I noticed that some of the younger men were talking about Jordan Peterson. They seemed to believe what Peterson is saying. How do we counteract the misinformation coming from people like Peterson?
At this late date and after so much delay, it is so disheartening to see this terrible backlash against action that seeks to avoid the worst impacts of Climate Change.
Is human greed that powerful?
It is quite likely that any new vision of the world and how it works will be opposed at some point by reactivists who can't accept that their world view has been critiqued and found wanting. What is dangerous about this movement is how well funded it is, and how possible it is that they might delay transition past the point of no return. Michael Mann's hockey stick graph is nothing to sneeze at, if you understand the runaway greenhouse gas rise that it predicts. There will come a point, likely sooner rather than later, when it is too late....and nothing we might do from that point on wil. save us.
And yes....white male superiority is part of it....know it alls seldom cede any ground willingly. Patriarchy has had centuries to push its weight around and I would suggest that anyone who listens to Petersonn pontificate for more than 5 minutes will see and hear the arrogance with which he communicates his privileged perspective.
So the white entitled, rich and widely esteemed (in their own minds at least) mandarins are setting out to maintain their power and tell science its out of order.
If we let them get away with it.......the apocalypse many of them long for will be guaranteed.
So what is it we must do??