Jordan Peterson’s Climate Culture War

Jordan Peterson delivered an urgent message for the rapt crowd on a warm spring evening at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, earlier this year. Thousands of people had bought tickets starting at $95 to hear the Canadian psychologist and star talent of conservative media outlet the Daily Wire promote his latest book, “We Who Wrestle With God.” 

“We’re in a culture war now,” Peterson explained in a tone both reedy and authoritative, sounding like a nasally smalltown preacher from the Alberta prairies, where he grew up. This war was started, he claimed, because the idea that we can lead moral lives and build a just society based solely on scientific facts “turned out to be wrong.” 

Peterson was there to create hype and advance sales for the book he’ll be releasing in November, as well as stoke enrollment for his new online school called Peterson Academy that launches September 9. He was also communicating a worldview that’s increasingly central to the political strategy of his allies in the U.S. conservative movement – that environmental advocates who push for urgent action to avert climate catastrophe are followers of a “pseudo-religion” seeking to impose socialist control over every aspect of modern society. 

Variations of this message can be heard from Texas fracking billionaire and pastor Farris Wilks; rightwing media The Daily Wire and PragerU; anti-abortion groups such as Focus on the Family; and The Heritage Foundation, the Donald Trump-aligned think tank responsible for producing Project 2025.

DeSmog reviewed public materials and internal documents showing that these rightwing power players are more tightly connected to Peterson than has been previously reported. And while attending two Peterson shows in recent months, DeSmog saw firsthand how the Canadian podcaster is using his fame and influence to turn followers against what he portrays as false faith in science and environmentalism.  

Throughout his two-hour performance, Peterson accused experts and technocrats of being naively unaware of how the world functions — if not blatantly corrupt. “You pretend to be serving people,” he said of one hypothetical scientist, “so you can produce false data so that you can get a promotion.” He continued, scowling, “and that’s happening a lot, by the way, in the scientific enterprise — an awful lot.” That echoed a video interview Peterson had done with the climate change denier Patrick Moore, published on YouTube and the Daily Wire four days before his show at Dickies, during which Moore accused climate scientists “of playing with the numbers” and “lying.”    

Pacing the arena stage wearing a suit jacket decorated with images of the Virgin Mary, Peterson offered an alternative to science as a guide for living: Biblical faith. “It’s a calling that moves you towards the next level of development,” he said of accepting God. “You attend to what calls to you, and you allow it to transform you.” You’re turned, he said, “into a leader.” Peterson got three standing ovations. 

Project 2025: ‘Old, familiar spin’

Despite the audience’s rapturous applause, the message Peterson is imparting isn’t entirely original. Daily Wire contributor and author Michael Knowles has referred to global warming as a “false religion,” while a conservative evangelical group called the Cornwall Alliance previously argued that “Christians must resist Green overtures to recast true religion, nor allow themselves to be prey for teachers of pagan heresies.”

Project 2025, the over 900-page blueprint for a radically conservative White House that includes severely weakening the Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile claims environmentalism “is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.” Green activists, the document says, want human activity “to be sacrificed to the god of nature.”  

“The religious right has been pushing the same narrative for years, linking social liberals to authoritarian socialism and in turn characterizing environmental science as a socialist partisan weapon,” Adrian Bardon, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University who has studied evangelical movements and climate denialism, told DeSmog. “Jordan Peterson may or may not be fully aware of the long history of the exact messaging he is pushing, but he is closely parroting an old, familiar spin.”

Peterson didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions from DeSmog.

Last fall, the Heritage Foundation began working behind the scenes to invite Republicans to the inaugural gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a global conservative conference organized by Peterson. The Washington-based think tank had only months earlier released Project 2025. And as the late October launch date for ARC approached, Heritage reached out to 46 congressmembers — including JD Vance, Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz — and offered to pay their way to the London-based event, along with their spouses. 

Just one Republican appears to have accepted, according to documents filed by Heritage with the House Committee on Ethics that were reviewed by DeSmog. It was Rep. Tom McClintock from California, who racked up a travel bill of $16,211. The ethics filing was signed by the Heritage Foundation’s general counsel Daniel Mauler, who is listed as a contributor to Project 2025. Other Republicans who took part in the event, though not necessarily on Heritage’s invitation, included House speaker Mike Johnson and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The think tank didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog.

DeSmog reporter Adam Barnett attended the ARC conference opening at London’s O2 Arena. It began with a video statement read by Peterson downplaying concerns about an imminent climate crisis: “We do not believe that humanity is necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster.” Later, U.S. author Michael Shellenberger described climate change to the large crowd as a “secular religion” intended to replace humankind’s belief in God. 

During an invite-only ARC event, Peterson appeared on a dinnertime panel about the environment and energy that included Dennis Prager, founder of the right-wing media outlet PragerU. Not actually a university, Prager’s organization has amassed nearly 10 billion views on YouTube and other platforms packaging religious right ideology — including claiming that global temperature rise is “far from being a recent human-caused disaster” — into viral videos aimed at people under age 35. 

During the panel, Prager floated the question of whether Antarctica is melting. According to an account of the event shared on the blog of a conservative Australian think tank, other panelists, including Shellenberger, largely avoided the question. Author and climate crisis denier Alex Epstein — who had previously described activists pushing for reduced fossil fuel use as belonging to an “anti-human religion” — responded to Prager’s query: “Antarctica is melting, but slowly.”

What was the purpose of these discussions? The House ethics forms signed by Mauler, the Project 2025 contributor, described ARC and additional meetings in London as being “focused on looking at solutions to public policy questions globally.” Back in the United States, the Heritage Foundation strategized about how the conservative policies described at length in Project 2025 could be implemented should Trump win the 2024 election. 

“Obviously, there will need to be coordination, and the president and his team will announce an official transition this summer, and we’re going to integrate a lot of our work with them,” Project 2025 senior adviser John McEntee told the Daily Wire in April. “But I think keeping the two separate is actually the most beneficial way to go about it.”

As top Democrats seized on Project 2025 as a way to paint Republicans as radical extremists, with Joe Biden at one point claiming it would “destroy America,” Trump began publicly distancing himself from the plan despite his well-documented ties to the Heritage Foundation and its allies, saying “I have no idea who is behind it.”

Nevertheless, the Daily Wire’s Knowles ran a July segment describing Project 2025 as a solution to Trump’s staffing troubles and described the Heritage Foundation as “the greatest of the conservative think tanks.” Kamala Harris’ campaign responded with a post on X calling Knowles a “Trump operative.” Peterson offered a cryptic defense of his Daily Wire colleague in a tone suggestive of a sarcastic rebuttal: “He’s definitely an operative. But for who? I just can’t figure it out.” 

Peterson’s billionaire backers

It may not come as a surprise that the fracking billionaire who helped launch the Daily Wire has also denied that the climate emergency is real. 

Farris Wilks grew up in a family of seven near Cisco, Texas, a sleepy rural town of low brick buildings that’s about a two-hour drive west of Dickies Arena. In the 1980s, then in his 30s, he was appointed pastor in a church founded by his father. Called the Assembly of Yahweh, it’s an idiosyncratic blend of Christianity and Judaism. Followers believe that the Bible is “true and correct in every scientific and historical detail” and also celebrate Passover, according to a list of doctrinal points published by the church. The Assembly of Yahweh in Cisco considers abortion to be “a serious crime” and homosexuality “a very grievous sin.” 

Alongside his church duties, Wilks started an oil and gas company called Frac Tech in the 2000s with his brother Dan, just before the U.S. fracking industry exploded in value. They sold the company in 2012 to a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund for $3.5 billion and landed themselves on the Forbes 400 list. The following year, Wilks appeared to brush aside any concern about climate change, claiming during a sermon that “we didn’t create the Earth, so how could we ever save the Earth, or save all the animals even on the Earth, or save the polar caps?” 

That was around the time the Wilks brothers started making large investments in conservative media. They donated more than $6.5 million in 2013 to Prager University, now known as PragerU. Not long after the Wilks’ donation, a PragerU co-founder helped facilitate introductions between Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boreing, Caleb Robinson and Farris Wilks. The four of them launched the Daily Wire with nearly $5 million in seed funding from the Texas billionaire. 

It has since grown into a major conservative outlet, reporting top-line revenue in 2023 of more than $200 million and over 15 million followers across its social media handles, while remaining “majority owned by the original co-founders,” including Wilks. Part of that growth has come from promoting climate change denial. Throughout 2022, the Daily Wire bought advertisements on Google search terms including “climate change is a hoax” and “why is climate change fake.” 

Peterson officially joined the outlet in 2022. He had pragmatic reasons for doing so. Though he now has 9 million Instagram followers, 7.9 million YouTube subscribers, 5.3 million followers on X and 2.9 million Facebook followers, this huge social media following isn’t fully under his control. Peterson was suspended from Twitter in 2021 (and then reinstated when Elon Musk bought the site), and he worries that he could someday be deplatformed again. 

“It was prudent to protect myself,” he said in a 2022 video explaining his decision to join the Daily Wire. “God only knows when I will say something that the invisible powers that be (including some that are artificially intelligent in nature) will decide that they’ve heard enough from the reprehensible magic super-Nazi.” 

Bringing Peterson into the fold also brought clear benefits to the Daily Wire. Its two most prominent shows — “The Ben Shapiro Show” and “The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast” — are now among the 100 most popular podcasts in the United States. Neither Wilks nor the Daily Wire responded to questions from DeSmog.

Revival tent widens

Establishment media has for years portrayed Peterson’s core audience as a cohort of young, directionless and often sexually frustrated men. But the predominately white crowd in Fort Worth — which included a biker with an embroidered jean jacket reading “Love God,” a nun in full regalia, a blonde mom breastfeeding in a floral dress, businessmen in blue suits and cowboy boots, pale teenagers with rangy beards, several men resembling college professors seated together in turtlenecks, and a large number of smartly dressed young couples that wouldn’t have looked too out of place in Brooklyn — didn’t totally fit those expectations. 

This appears to have been the case during other stops on the tour, which included cities as varied as Omaha, Mexico City and São Paulo. “Once inside the arena,” one conservative commentator wrote after attending the New Hampshire show, “it was clear that Peterson’s following was much stronger than I realized.” 

Even members of Peterson’s entourage seemed impressed with the turnout. “I just want to take a moment to acknowledge and appreciate how remarkable this is,” the emcee for the Fort Worth show, a Russian-British podcaster and comedian named Konstantin Kisin, told the crowd. “Right here we are in an arena that has hosted Justin Timberlake.” 

Kisin, a millennial, last year went viral for a speech slamming “woke culture” and youth climate activism, claiming incorrectly that actions from developed countries such as Britain “make absolutely no difference to the issue of climate change” and that the crisis will be decided “in Asia and Latin America, by poor people who couldn’t give a shit about saving the planet.”

Despite the size and relative diversity of the crowd in Fort Worth, many people there seemed to be eager participants in a conservative culture war. “They just passed a law in the state legislature banning sex changes for children,” exclaimed an elderly man in a Texas drawl as Peterson’s opening music — Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major by Bach — played through the arena’s loudspeakers. Following the show, another man paraphrased his favorite line from the Daily Wire’s co-founder Shapiro: “He goes, ‘Do you know why there are only boys in the Boy Scouts? Because it’s literally called BOY Scouts.’”

Channeling fears about shifting gender identities and the decline of traditional families is standard fare for conservative influencers. But Peterson goes one step further and links those grievances to denial of a planetary emergency. One way he does so is by ridiculing young people so terrified of climate catastrophe that they’re deciding not to start families. 

“You might say the planet has too many people on it; It’s like, yeah whatever. Good luck with that,” Peterson said on TikTok last December, calling those who abstain from having children due to ecological and other reasons “deluded or immature.” 

During a podcast interview with former BP chief scientist Steve Koonin posted on the Daily Wire and YouTube, Peterson claimed of young people that “not only do they not want to have children, they don’t even want to have sex. I mean, we’ve really demoralized a whole generation.” The video, entitled “Unsettled: Climate and Science,” has 1.1 million views on YouTube.

By making the debate about population control, Peterson is echoing anti-climate arguments that have been floating around the religious right for years, especially among anti-abortion groups. This includes Texas Right to Life, which in 2014 argued that “climate change activists are still touting the nonexistent connection between global overpopulation [which is also nonexistent] and climate change [also, arguably, nonexistent].”

The exchange of ideas appears to go both ways, as Texas Right to Life recently devoted an entire podcast episode to discussing Peterson’s ideas on medically assisted suicide.

During a sold-out show at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall in April, a week and a half after the venue hosted Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, Peterson spent the Q&A portion of the event going on an extended tirade against birth control. “What happened when the pill emerged? The family fell apart,” he said. 

Though Peterson hasn’t identified as a Christian for most of his career and seems to express his interest in religion as an intellectual outsider, his outspoken views on gender and sexual expression have won him powerful admirers on the religious right. This includes the anti-abortion group Focus on the Family, which argued that “a secular professor is speaking truth” after Peterson made multiple posts on X in June attacking Pride Month.

The vibe at his New York City show seemed more libertarian than religious, however. Many audience members, some with slicked-back hair and expensive business suits, looked like they had arrived at the show straight from offices on Wall Street. But the crowd also included people dressed in hoodies and jeans, including one man in his late 40s who said he lives on Staten Island and owns a modest courier business. 

Asked how a perpetually scowling psychologist from Canada can sell out one of Manhattan’s most storied venues, he described Peterson’s appeal as “so many things, you can appreciate him on the superficial level, like for motivation, but you can also learn from him on an intellectual level.” For years he has listened to Peterson’s podcast while stuck in traffic. 

It appears some of Peterson’s messages about climate change are sinking in. When the Center for Countering Digital Hate commissioned a survey of 13-to-17-year-olds in the United States about “new denial” narratives pushed online by influencers like Peterson, over one-third agreed that “the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless.” Teenage boys in particular seemed more likely to hold extreme views. Forty-five percent of male respondents to the survey thought climate scientists are “manipulating data,” and 41 percent agreed climate change “is a hoax to control and oppress people.” 

That trend seems likely to continue, given that Peterson claimed in late July that over 5,500 people had already enrolled in his new educational venture Peterson Academy. Its professors include Jonathan Pageau, an icon carver and YouTuber, who has characterized fears about climate change as “secular apocalypticism.” 

Another professor, the podcaster and author Michael Malice, claims that projections of sea-level rise are “literally a religious belief.”