Climate Denialists – Vandals and Saboteurs of the Sustainable Future

In Freedom House rankings, North Korea is listed among the “worst of the worst” in terms of political rights and civil liberties. In the sphere of greenhouse gas emissions, the United States occupies a similarly dismal position. In 2023, it released roughly 4.8 billion metric tons of CO₂, making it the world’s second-largest emitter after China. In cumulative terms since the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. alone accounts for about a quarter of all global CO₂ emissions—the single largest national share.

This historical ‘leadership’ should mean one thing—the United States should be the engine of decarbonization, the driver of green transformation, and the powerhouse of international climate policy. Instead, its current president performs one of the most consequential acts of climate denialism in the world.

During his first term, Trump mocked climate science as a Chinese hoax, ridiculed global warming during cold spells, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, and denied that climate change poses security risks. His administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement, rolled back more than a hundred environmental protections, and filled key regulatory agencies with fossil fuel lobbyists.

Trump’s second term has been far more radical. Within hours of returning to office in January 2025, he withdrew from the Paris Agreement for the second time and pulled the U.S. out of the UN Loss and Damage Fund, the central mechanism meant to help vulnerable countries cope with the devastation caused by climate change. He rescinded National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review requirements, eliminated climate-monitoring satellites, froze federal support for electric vehicle infrastructure, canceled billions of dollars in EPA climate grants, and imposed automatic sunset clauses on environmental regulations to speed fossil fuel expansion.

These steps are not mere policy adjustments but acts of institutional vandalism—the deliberate destruction of an institutional framework painstakingly built to serve the public interest. Within the span of just a few weeks, Trump dismantled the foundations of climate governance, effectively halting the domestic process of decarbonization and withdrawing the United States from global climate leadership.

Trumps, Thiels, and Their Clones

Trump is the most prominent face of climate denialism. It is an attitude that rejects, downplays, or distorts the reality and risks of climate change. Denialists variously claim that the science is uncertain or inconclusive, that climate change is not primarily driven by human activity, that its risks are exaggerated or nonexistent, and that policy responses are unnecessary and harmful.

Trump is far from alone in this. The Republican Party has cultivated climate denial for decades, its leading figures openly dismissing the scientific consensus, obstructing regulation, and championing the expansion of oil, coal, and gas. The Koch brothers—billionaire industrialists and longtime GOP mega-donors—have poured hundreds of millions into lobbying, think tanks, and campaigns designed to undermine climate science and block regulation. Trump’s key financial backer, Peter Thiel, proclaimed on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast that climate scientists are “bluffing” and “exaggerating” and dismissed climate policies as misguided regulatory overreach, advocating instead for technological fixes.

This ecosystem is not uniquely American. Similar networks of denialism thrive across Europe. In Germany, the far-right AfD (now polling near the top nationwide) has become the central political vehicle for climate denial. Its leaders reject scientific consensus, question human responsibility for warming, and depict climate policies as elitist and economically ruinous. They openly call for Germany to exit the Paris Agreement, halt the phase-out of coal, and reverse the transition to renewable energy.

The Czech Republic, too, has been fertile ground for climate denialism. Former president Václav Klaus does not miss an opportunity to rail against what he calls the “fraud” and “hysteria” of global warming, branding EU climate policy as a new form of “totalitarianism.” The party he founded, ODS, echoes this rhetoric, undermining the European Green Deal and other efforts to mitigate climate change. Billionaire coal tycoon Daniel Křetínský, Europe’s largest coal producer and one of its biggest emitters, regularly portrays climate policies as ideological and dangerous. Another Czech coal magnate, Pavel Tykač, recently urged “national disobedience” against EU climate laws, insisting that fossil fuel infrastructure must be preserved for our grandsons.

The Machinery of Doubt

Climate denialism is intellectually unfounded. It runs against the grain of overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus regarding the causes, consequences, and urgency of climate change. The reality of anthropogenic climate change has been established through vast scientific research and IPCC reports. Denial cannot be excused by the lack of access to information: the knowledge base on the causes, dynamics, and dangers of climate change is vast, publicly available, and widely disseminated through reports, books, and media.

Denialism does not represent a legitimate alternative perspective but rather an ideologically and economically motivated distortion of reality. As such, it is not merely reactionary or uninformed—it is manipulative, irresponsible, and reckless. It does not arise in a vacuum but takes shape within specific ideological frameworks and material interests that provide its scaffolding.

The first strand is tied to the economic interests of the fossil fuel industry. Coal, oil, and gas companies seek to maintain enormous profits from the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels and secure the shareholder value of their companies. Decarbonization climate policy—pricing emissions, phasing out fossil fuels, and investing in renewable alternatives—threatens this business model. To stall the move towards decarbonization, the companies promote narratives of scientific uncertainty, economic doom, and the supposed indispensability of fossil fuels for growth and prosperity. Their strategies are not subtle: lobbying governments, funding pseudoscience, and spreading disinformation. ExxonMobil is a well-known example: despite knowing internally about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions since the 1970s, it funded think tanks and campaigns designed to cast doubt on climate models and delay regulation. Czech energy magnates Daniel Křetínský and Pavel Tykač frequently deploy the rhetoric of economic ruin to attack renewable energy transitions. Their warnings that climate policy is ideological and destructive are not analytical judgments but calculated defenses of their coal extraction and fossil fuel-based power businesses.

The second strand is rooted in neoliberal and libertarian ideologies that reject state regulation, international coordination, or any form of collective restraint on markets. In this view, unregulated freedom, competition, and individual choice are presented as the only legitimate solutions to social problems, including climate change. What these arguments target most fiercely are government interventions—such as carbon taxes, emissions caps, regulated trading schemes, and environmental protection rules. While dismissing these regulations as economically destructive and politically illegitimate, neoliberal denialism insists that voluntary corporate commitments or consumer choices are sufficient and that future technological innovation will provide solutions. At its core lies an ideological dogmatism: the belief that markets, left free, will always outperform regulatory interventions in the name of public interest. This position ignores that climate change is a market failure driven by unpriced externalities (emissions, warming) that primarily affect those who did not produce them, such as future generations, negatively.

A third and increasingly influential form of denialism arises from right-wing populism. This ideology mobilizes resentment against elites, migrants, minorities, and progressive social causes, while appealing to notions of tradition, common sense, national sovereignty, and the interests of “ordinary people.” In this framework, climate science and green policies are portrayed as part of an elitist conspiracy designed to suppress and impoverish the majority. International institutions such as the UN, the EU, or the Paris Agreement are framed as illegitimate impositions on national sovereignty and the livelihoods of workers, farmers, or motorists. Populist strategies combine conspiracy narratives (“climate change is exaggerated by globalists”), nationalist slogans (“our country first”), and delegitimize regulations as undemocratic or “totalitarian”. They frame decarbonization as ideological, bureaucratic, and green totality, using anti-climate rhetoric to fortify cultural identity and redefine democracy as the rule of the majority unconstrained by minorities, experts, and elites.

Denialism Blocks Climate Justice

Climate denialism is politically dishonest and corrosive – its purpose is not to produce truth or a serious solution to the problem of climate change but to sow doubt, distrust, block cooperation, and delay reform. Delaying reforms towards a carbon-neutral future is irresponsible, harmful, and unjust.

In my previous post, I argued that accepting the facts of climate change is both a democratic civic duty and an epistemic responsibility to accept knowledge grounded in evidence, reason, and expertise that we cannot generate on our own. These ethical imperatives are especially urgent in contexts where refusal has direct, harmful consequences for others. Climate change is precisely such a case. To deny it and to obstruct institutions designed to mitigate it are not inconsequential personal choices; it is an active boycott of solutions to a problem that has concrete and measurable costs for real people.

In the context of Trump’s retreat from the UN Loss and Damage fund, we can, for example, mention Pakistan, which has been this Fund’s staunch supporter. Pakistan emits only about 0.9% of global CO₂ annually and has contributed less than 0.4% of cumulative emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Despite its negligible responsibility, it is among the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, facing intensifying floods, glacial melt, and extreme heat. In 2022, catastrophic floods caused by monsoon rains intensified by climate change displaced more than 20 million people and caused damages exceeding US$30 billion.

There are many similar examples—small island states like Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Maldives are threatened by rising sea levels, erosion, and soil contamination by salt water, sub-Saharan African countries are threatened by desertification, drought, and heat, and countries such as Mozambique and the Philippines now face the risk of super cyclones and typhoons. Refusing to address global warming and take responsibility for its impacts, especially on those who did not cause climate change, is a typical example of global injustice. Unfortunately, Trumps, Thiels, and their clones couldn’t care less about Pakistanis and Maldivians. But they also couldn’t care less about their own descendants, for whom every year of boycotting climate action means severe economic, political, and security risks.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Representation in the Slovak Republic.