Above photo: Ata Ojani/Canada’s National Observer.
The Canadian psychologist is leading a Trump administration-linked network opposed to eliminating greenhouse gas pollution by 2050.
“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, Canada — 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 US, the UK, 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 UK.
Farage helped launch a UK 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 traded 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 UK 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 has 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 swath 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 UK, 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. 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 UK 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 UK, 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.
Lomborg 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 rightwing 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.