Climate Denial the Heritage Foundation Way

New York Times readers were already aghast even before Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — the man behind Project 2025 — took the stage at the outlet’s Climate Forward event, held during New York’s bustling Climate Week. Normally, this is when famous people including researcher Jane Goodall, Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, and Rivian CEO R.J. Scaringe would discuss climate solutions before an audience of the thoughtful and well-heeled. Inviting Roberts violated that norm, which may have been the point — nothing draws eyeballs like outrage, and for the Times’ elite liberal readership, bringing Roberts to a climate discussion certainly counts as outrageous. But Roberts’ segment, in which he was interviewed by climate reporter David Gelles, was as revealing as anything the more friendly celebrities had to say.

Not because Gelles exposed Roberts for the climate denier he is, discrediting fossil fuel stooges once and for all. That’s what many hope for from this kind of encounter, but it almost never happens. Gelles did his best, but Roberts was more than up to the challenge of advocating the conservative approach to addressing the warming of the planet (or rather, not addressing it) to a hostile audience.

We’ve come a long way from the time when crude denialists like Senator Jim Inhofe were bringing snowballs to the Senate floor to show that global warming must be a hoax. Roberts said many things that were framed in ways seemingly designed to appeal to liberal principles — he defended scientific skepticism, and claimed that when Project 2025 proposes ending civil service protections for government employees so they can be replaced by political appointees, its intention is to depoliticize the government (“We don’t care whether they’re Democrats or Republicans; we actually want them to be objective”) — but he returned again and again to one conspiracy-tinged notion. Serious climate policy, he argued, is an attack not just by American elites, but rather by an entire global elite against ordinary people, whom they are immiserating with ill-considered ideas not based in science, or even in reality.

While it might seem ironic to hear the head of a think tank with a nine-figure annual budget that comes largely from corporate interests talking like a tribune of the common folk, that’s where Roberts began. He started with a punch in the nose, saying that while he was surprised to get the invitation from the Times, “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American dream.” In response to the criticisms of Project 2025, he said, “Rather than take the well-funded agenda of elites in New York and Brussels and in the Chinese Communist Party, why don't we ask the American people?” And those struggling people, he insisted, are being harmed by the transition away from fossil fuels “far more than any of the harms that you would cite from so-called climate change.”

Does that mean he’s a climate denier? Heavens no. “That doesn’t mean that we’re rejecting that humans have an effect on climate; clearly they do,” he said. So climate change is real, but also maybe not; whatever perspective you like, you can decide Roberts agrees with you. He also claimed that according to Heritage’s irrefutable research, there’s just nothing we can do to stop that warming, which isn’t really a problem anyway. “Let’s just take all the ideas of everyone in this room and we implement them with a magic wand,” he said. “Our estimates show, what would the difference in temperature be? Zero point two three degrees Celsius. It's simply not going to make a difference.”

That kind of faux-precision is impossible to adjudicate in the moment, of course, which is why it can be so effective. This is another key theme for Roberts and others like him. “There is this thesis that if the United States leads on climate policy, the world will follow. That hasn't happened,” he said. “In fact, if we eliminate all emissions and pollution in the United States, it has an almost non-measurable impact on pollution and emissions worldwide.” That’s just false — the U.S. is still the second-largest carbon emitter in the world, after China — but if it were true, then why should we bother cutting our emissions, if doing so would have a “non-measurable impact”? There are no benefits, only costs.

The Biden administration, he said, “have made a grave mistake. They have taken the will of elites and they've imposed this on the American people.” And don’t think Roberts is an advocate for the corporate elites that pay his considerable salary; heck no, he’s just a humble reg’lar fella, thinking about the good honest folk who have no one to speak for them. “I see public policy through the lens of working-class people,” he insisted. “Our perspective at Heritage is on behalf of not just ordinary Americans but the global poor who are damaged by these policies.” The global poor.

What Roberts offers is climate denial without guilt. The details of increasing temperatures and their effects on people in the present and future are quickly minimized, then the focus shifts to imaginary harms to the vulnerable not from climate change but from climate action. Every emissions reduction proposal is dismissed as an indulgence of repugnant elitists, leaving only one moral alternative: to do nothing about climate change except burn more fossil fuels.

Presenting climate denial as an act of selflessness might seem appalling, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t attractive. If you want to hold to outright denialism, Roberts is with you. But if you admit that climate change is happening, he’s got you covered; what matters is that we shouldn’t do anything about it, because inaction is the real way to care for the vulnerable and fight back against the nefarious forces holding the world in their grip. The chutzpah is jaw-dropping, but it would be a mistake to think no one will find this argument attractive.