Revenge of the Climate Heretics: The 50 Leading Eco-Policy Dissenters

In December 2009, a week before the much-heralded Copenhagen climate summit, a full-page advertisement in The New York Times urged President Barack Obama to lead the world on climate change . Its signatories warned that delay would bring “catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.” Among them were Donald J. Trump and three of his children. Nearly 17 years later, the man who signed that advertisement has taken the United States out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, and his Environmental Protection Agency has rescinded the finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health.

Others have changed direction too. BlackRock, once outspoken about environmental, social and governance, or ESG, investing, has left the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative. The banking alliance built under Mark Carney has dissolved. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has pressed Brussels to weaken its ban on new gas-powered cars. Bill Gates , author of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster , now argues that the world’s fixation on emissions and temperature change is diverting money from saving lives.

Read More on Environment In this new ranking, devised as delegates descend on COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, from November 9 to 20, Newsweek uses “heretic” to describe people who have challenged the orthodoxy of rapid decarbonization, whether its science, its politics or its technology. It doesn’t mean someone denies human-caused warming, because many on this list accept the science but dispute the response: the cost of net zero policies, the speed of the timetable, or the green movement’s insistence on wind and solar over gas and nuclear.

A smaller number reject mainstream climate science outright. Others are executives and officials positioned to gain from a world that has decided it needs more energy of every kind, including the electricity demanded by the AI boom and its data centers . Together, they shift the debate from whether the climate is changing to what to do about it. 01. Bill Gates United States The Microsoft co-founder wrote How to Avoid a Climate Disaster in 2021.

Early in 2025, Breakthrough Energy, the climate investment group he founded in 2015, cut its policy and advocacy staff in the United States and Europe. That October, days before COP30 in Brazil, he published a memo arguing that climate change will not lead to humanity’s demise and that improving human welfare should take priority over temperature and emissions targets. Trump claimed it as a victory on Truth Social. 02. Mark Carney Canada ...

As U.N. special envoy on climate action and finance, Carney launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero in 2021. At its peak, its members claimed $130 trillion in assets. His 2021 book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All , argued that markets had failed to price the climate crisis. Yet on his first day as prime minister of Canada, in March 2025, he signed the order ending its consumer carbon tax. In October 2025, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, part of the network he built, voted to shut down.

Weeks later, he signed an agreement with Alberta to advance a new oil pipeline to the Pacific coast. 03. Donald Trump United States The signatory of the 2009 Copenhagen advertisement has become the principal author of the retreat. In his first week back in office, he signed orders withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and declaring a national energy emergency . His administration describes its approach as “energy addition,” meant to power reindustrialization and AI data centers with more of everything.

It has cut federal support for parts of the wind and solar industries. At the United Nations in September 2025, he called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” 04. Larry Fink United States In his 2020 letter to chief executives, the CEO and chairman of BlackRock wrote that climate risk is investment risk. In January 2025, the world’s largest asset manager withdrew from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative.

The initiative suspended its activities days later. Texas and other Republican-led states had pulled billions of dollars of public money from BlackRock over its climate positions. In 2023, Fink said he had stopped using the term ESG because it had been “weaponized.” 05. Friedrich Merz Germany ... From 2016 to 2020, Merz chaired the supervisory board of BlackRock’s German arm. As chancellor, he has moved to roll back Germany’s heating law and urged the European Union to relax its 2035 ban on new combustion-engine cars.

In 2025, the Commission proposed loosening it. Merz led his conservatives to victory in the February 2025 election promising to cut energy costs for German industry. He called Germany’s 2023 closure of its last nuclear plants a mistake. 06. Matthew Wielicki United States Wielicki left the University of Alabama in 2023, calling himself a “professor-in-exile.” He went on to host a podcast and appear in videos for conservative outlet PragerU.

He has no formal training in climate science and now leads the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which compiles the National Climate Assessment. The administration dismissed the authors of the sixth assessment in April 2025. In June 2026, before his appointment was public, he asked on X what people wanted included. 07. Michael Shellenberger United States Time named Shellenberger a “Hero of the Environment” in 2008. In 2020, he published Apocalypse Never , which argues that climate alarmism harms the poor and the environment.

His pro-nuclear, environmentalist framing reaches centrist audiences that traditional skeptic groups do not. He cofounded the Breakthrough Institute in 2003. He ran for governor of California as a Democrat in 2018 and as an independent in 2022. 08. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber United Arab Emirates ... In 2006, Al Jaber founded Masdar, now one of the world’s largest renewable-energy investors. He is also chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and was when he presided over COP28 in Dubai, the first climate summit to agree on a “transition away” from fossil fuels.

ADNOC now plans to invest $150 billion between 2026 and 2030. Ahead of the summit, he said there was “no science” showing that a fossil-fuel phase-out was needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. He later said his remarks had been misinterpreted. 09. Narendra Modi India As chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, Modi published a book on climate change, Convenient Action , in 2011. As the nation’s prime minister, he has overseen one of the fastest solar build-outs in the world.

He also oversaw India’s first year of more than 1 billion tonnes of coal production, in the 12 months to March 2025. The International Energy Agency expects Indian coal demand to keep rising by about 3 percent a year through 2030. At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, India’s last-minute intervention changed the summit’s commitment on coal from “phase out” to “phase down.” 10. Delcy Rodríguez Venezuela ... Venezuela’s acting president has, under U.S. pressure, set out to turn the country with the world’s largest oil reserves back into a production giant .

Her government has broadened private participation and improved the fiscal terms for undeveloped fields. In October, she said Venezuela expects almost $76 billion of oil and gas investment over five years, with 61 agreements signed and 44 more under negotiation. Her reforms have made the country’s vast heavy-crude resources more attractive to private investment, putting oil-led economic recovery at the heart of Venezuela’s rebuilding strategy. 11.

Lee Zeldin United States ... As a New York congressman, Zeldin joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. As Environmental Protection Agency administrator, he rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding , the legal basis for federal limits on greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and factories. In March 2025, he announced 31 deregulatory actions in a single day. 12. Elon Musk United States ... Musk built Tesla on a mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.

In 2017, he quit Trump’s business advisory councils in protest at the first withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. In his August 2024 livestream with Trump, however, he said the transition could take 50 to 100 years and argued that the oil and gas industry should not be vilified. 13. Steven Koonin United States Koonin was BP’s chief scientist before Barack Obama appointed him undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy. His 2021 book, Unsettled , challenged how climate science is presented to the public.

In 2025, he coauthored a DOE report arguing that the dangers of greenhouse gases had been overstated. He has also served as provost of Caltech. 14. Jeff Bezos United States The Amazon founder has pledged $10 billion to fight climate change, yet his larger worldview rejects the environmental politics of scarcity. His answer to humanity’s ecological problem is not retreat but technological abundance: cleaner energy, enormous innovation and ultimately an economy expanding beyond Earth.

The Bezos Earth Fund has already awarded $2.4 billion across 371 grants, making Bezos one of the clearest exponents of the idea that prosperity and environmental protection need not conflict. 15. Vladimir Putin Russia ... At a climate conference in Moscow in 2003, Russia’s president suggested that a warmer Russia might not be so bad, since its people could spend less on fur coats. The country remains one of the world’s largest exporters of oil, gas and coal.

Researchers say it has used BRICS to promote a “sovereign” climate agenda, including a push to have more efficient fossil-fuel use counted as climate action. Russia ratified the Paris Agreement only in 2019, four years after it was adopted. 16. Paul Marshall United Kingdom In 2004, the hedge fund founder coedited The Orange Book , a manifesto for the eco-friendly Liberal Democrats. But his politics have since shifted toward net zero skepticism.

In 2024, he bought right-wing magazine The Spectator for £100 million ($133.5 million). He also has a stake in right-wing media group GB News. His foundation gave £1 million to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a hub for politicians and commentators opposed to net zero policy. Marshall Wace, which he cofounded in 1997, is one of Europe’s largest hedge funds. 17. Chris Wright United States In a 2019 video, Wright drank fracking fluid made by his company, Liberty Energy, to demonstrate its safety.

As energy secretary, he has revived the National Coal Council and announced $625 million in support for coal. Until his confirmation, he sat on the board of the nuclear startup Oklo. In a 2023 video, he said there was no climate crisis. 18. Joe Rogan United States ... In January 2020, Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders, who was campaigning on the Green New Deal. His podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience , among the most popular in the world, has repeatedly hosted climate skeptics, including multiple appearances by the writer Randall Carlson.

Analysis of leading U.S. online shows has identified Rogan among the prominent figures circulating misleading climate claims . His Spotify deal, renewed in October, was reported to be worth an estimated $250 million. 19. Prabowo Subianto Indonesia At the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro in November 2024, Indonesia’s president pledged to phase out coal and fossil-fuel power within 15 years. However, his country remains the world’s largest exporter of thermal coal, and his government continues to expand coal, oil and gas, alongside renewables.

The national electricity plan published in 2025 still includes several gigawatts of new coal capacity. 20. Amin Nasser Saudi Arabia At an energy conference in Houston in March 2024, the Aramco chief executive told the industry to “abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.” Saudi upstream investment was expected to reach about $40 billion in 2025, and Aramco’s $100 billion Jafurah gas development began production that year. Aramco reported net income of about $106 billion for 2024. 21.

Bjørn Lomborg Denmark ... Lomborg is a former Greenpeace member who accepts that warming is real and caused by humans. His argument has been about money: that adaptation, innovation and development deliver more than emissions cuts. His 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist , led a Danish scientific-dishonesty