© Sean McGrath - 23 February 2025
A strange group called “The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship” met in London from February 17th to 19th. It was a massive event, drawing billionaires and right-wing intellectuals eager to discuss how to “save Western civilization” from wokeism. Naturally, Jordan Peterson was there. I would have ignored the whole thing—watching paint dry holds more appeal—if it weren’t for their outright hostility toward “climate change activism,” which Peterson dismissed as a “totalitarian lie”; Having lost friendships over this very issue, I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to reflect on this distressing power play.
The New Right is merely a mirror image of what Roger Scruton called the “New Left” in a 1985 book that ruined his academic career. He criticized Foucault and company for reducing all social relations to power struggles, pretending to champion justice while simply seeking control. I have no idea what Scruton would think of the current right-wing circus that claims him (along with Edmund Burke) as a founding father. But there’s a stark contrast between his “green philosophy” and the corporate-sponsored populism that now calls itself conservative. The New Right has adopted the same ideological blinders Scruton identified in the left—just in reverse.
Scruton’s conservatism wasn’t an ideology but a common-sense response of ordinary people unwilling to watch their institutions, their farms, green spaces, and historic buildings sacrificed on the altar of progress. His was a rebellion against the total rationalization of human life and the bulldozing of local heritage in the name of economic development. Crucially, Scruton’s conservatism cared about the environment. He defended the ordinary person’s deeply felt sense of value for rural natural beauty, wildlife and the community traditions that have developed around both.
This was not at all inconsistent with his conservatism. Until the late 20th century, environmentalism wasn’t a left-wing monopoly. Thoreau was hardly a socialist when he wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Aldo Leopold, a pioneer in my field of environmental ethics, supported gun rights and argued that rural communities should maintain local control of their wilderness. Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican President, created the National Park System. Richard Nixon (yes, Nixon!) signed the Environmental Protection Act, which Trump later gutted. Reagan and Mulroney spearheaded the Montreal Protocol, which successfully tackled ozone depletion.
But today’s political discourse has been flattened into reactionary soundbites. The left has its non-negotiable talking points: trans rights, socialism, environmentalism. So the right defines itself in pure opposition: heteronormativity, corporate capitalism, and the unregulated plundering of nature. This is ridiculous. There’s no inherent reason one can’t support both environmental protection and free markets. There’s no contradiction in defending gun rights while advocating for clean air and water.
Peterson, never one for original thought, has simply listened to his massive audience and decided that climate change activism must be a leftist plot. But climate change denialism isn’t just about doubting the science—it’s about justifying the rollback of all environmental protections under the guise of resisting tyranny.
There are three key problems with Peterson’s position on climate change. First, he attributes far too much intelligence to the opposition. The idea that the UN, the world’s scientists, and 178 countries who signed the Paris Agreement are all part of a coordinated socialist conspiracy is laughable. If there’s a grand plan to control everything, it’s the worst-organized plot in history.
Second, the charge that climate science is “weird science” as J.D. Vance called it is nonsense. Peer review remains the gold standard of scientific rigour, and by that measure, climatology is one of the most scrutinized fields in history. The evidence in support of the theory is overwhelming: last year was the hottest year on record. Every year since we started keeping records, temperature increases are locked in step with rising global emissions of greenhouse gasses. The basic science is simple enough for schoolchildren to understand. Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels trap heat, and since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve been pumping out carbon at unprecedented rates. If there’s even a 50% chance the models are right, ignoring the science is lunacy. A 4 degree world, which is where we are heading by the end of this century if trends continue, is incompatible with civilization as we know it. One particularly badly informed professor friend of mine sanguinely observed, “It won’t be so bad. It will only be the coastal communities that suffer.” Leave aside that that’s about 600 million people. In a 4 degree world civilization will collapse under the pressure of desertified food belts, massive uncontainable fires, catastrophic weather events, acidified barren oceans, and the greatest refugee crisis in human history. You wouldn’t board a plane if you knew it had a 50% chance of crashing.
Third, climate change is just one piece of a broader ecological crisis, the facts of which are not in dispute. We’re in the middle of a mass, human-caused, extinction event, with species disappearing faster than at any time since the dinosaurs. Microplastics, which did not exist before the 50s, are not only in every ocean, they are in all our food. Peterson, who obsesses over his diet, might want to consider that his beloved Alberta grass-fed beef likely contains plastic. Industrial agribusiness is gutting rural communities and lowering food quality worldwide. Wild fisheries are 60 percent collapsed. These problems aren’t theories; they’re measurable consequences of unbridled development.
Someone recently suggested that we should stop asking politicians whether they “believe” in climate change. Belief belongs to religion. The real question is: do they understand it?