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By Christopher Roberts
Global Publishing Editor
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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has taken the United States out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, and his Environmental Protection Agency has rescinded the finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health.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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 committee to rule against him in 2003. The Danish science ministry later overturned the ruling. A 2025 academic study credits his work with shifting the debate toward cost and prioritization, while noting extensive scientific criticism of his interpretations.
22. Wesley Batista Filho
Brazil
Batista Filho’s family has strengthened its grip on the world’s largest meat company, JBS, just as it retreats from its most ambitious environmental promises. In 2026, JBS dropped its net-zero-by-2040 target and removed its time-bound deforestation commitment, shifting attention toward emissions it can control directly. JBS named Batista Filho, son of former JBS CEO Wesley Batista, global CEO from January 2027.
23. Doug Burgum
United States
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Burgum made his fortune selling Great Plains Software to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. In 2021, as governor of North Dakota, one of the country’s biggest oil-producing states, he set a goal of making the state carbon neutral by 2030, largely through carbon capture. As interior secretary, he oversees expanded oil and gas leasing. "Why would we concede that the existential threat is a theoretical computer model?” he asked early this year.
24. Darren Woods
United States
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In 2024, ExxonMobil, run by CEO Woods since 2017, sued two of its own shareholders, Arjuna Capital and Follow This, to stop a climate resolution from reaching a vote. The same year, it completed its $60 billion acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources, the largest oil deal in decades. A 2023 study in Science found that Exxon’s own scientists had projected global warming from fossil fuels with notable accuracy between 1977 and 2003.
25. Gautam Adani
India
...
Adani heads a sprawling energy empire with major interests in coal and owns the Carmichael coal mine in Queensland, Australia. His group is also building the Khavda renewable-energy park in Gujarat. At a planned 30 gigawatts, it is designed to be the largest in the world, covering an area five times the size of Paris. Australian protesters campaigned for years under the slogan “Stop Adani.” The mine shipped its first coal in 2021.
26. Jordan Peterson
Canada
The psychologist, author and influencer said he worked on the U.N. secretary-general’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability and claimed to have read about 200 books on the environment for it. On Joe Rogan’s podcast and his own, he has attacked climate modeling and argued that major climate policies punish the poor. In 2022, he argued on Rogan’s show that “climate” was a meaningless term because it encompassed everything.
27. Gina Rinehart
Australia
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Rinehart has become one of Australia’s most powerful corporate opponents of net zero while positioning her mining empire to prosper from both conventional resources and the energy transition. She urged Australia to abandon its 2050 net zero target, arguing that decarbonization would raise costs and accelerate deindustrialization. Meanwhile, her company, Hancock Prospecting, has expanded across rare earths, copper, gallium, antimony and other strategic minerals.
28. Patrick Moore
Canada
Moore was an early leader of Greenpeace in the 1970s and describes himself as a co-founder, a claim Greenpeace disputes. He served for nine years as president of Greenpeace Canada and seven as a director of Greenpeace International before leaving in 1986. He now argues that carbon dioxide benefits the planet and has consulted on forestry, mining and energy and co-chaired a campaign advocating for more nuclear power.
29. Alice Weidel
Germany
In January 2025, the AfD leader said, “When we are in power, we will tear down all wind turbines. Down with these windmills of shame.” A month later, the AfD finished second in the federal election with about a fifth of the vote, its best result. Her party rejected further expansion of wind energy and called for cuts to renewable energy subsidies.
30. Javier Milei
Argentina
...
During his 2023 campaign, Milei called climate change a socialist lie. In November 2024, he ordered Argentina’s negotiators home from COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, midway through the summit. His government downgraded the environment ministry, whose budget fell 79.4 percent in real terms in 2024 compared with 2023.
31. Meg O’Neill
Australia
Soon after Australia’s Labor government won reelection in May 2025, it approved the extension of Woodside Energy’s North West Shelf gas project through 2070. O’Neill, who was Woodside’s CEO, later became chief executive of BP, the first woman to lead an oil supermajor. The North West Shelf plant sits on the Burrup Peninsula, home to more than a million rock carvings, which in 2025 was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list.
32. Judith Curry
United States
Curry chaired the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech for more than a decade before resigning her tenured post in 2017, citing the politicization of her field. In 2025, she joined Steven Koonin on the DOE working group whose report was published in support of the proposed repeal of the endangerment finding. She now leads the Climate Forecast Applications Network.
33. Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi
Qatar
...
Qatar’s energy minister has threatened to stop supplying liquefied natural gas to Europe if the EU enforces penalties under its corporate sustainability due diligence law. QatarEnergy is expanding the North Field to raise export capacity from 77 million tonnes a year to 142 million by 2030. It has also signed a series of 27-year supply deals with China, including agreements with Sinopec.
34. Mike Wirth
United States
In 2024, Chevron announced it was moving its headquarters from California, home to the most aggressive climate rules in the country, to Houston, Texas. Chevron Chairman and CEO Wirth has publicly criticized the state’s energy policies. The oil major was among the top bidders in the first of 30 mandated federal Gulf lease sales, where 81.2 million acres were offered at a 12.5 percent royalty rate. In 2025, it completed its $53 billion acquisition of Hess after winning a legal battle against ExxonMobil to secure a stake in the biggest oil discovery in decades.
35. Ryan Lance
United States
The Biden administration approved ConocoPhillips’ Willow project in Alaska in March 2023, despite opposition from environmental groups. Willow is expected to produce about 600 million barrels of oil. The project is central to executive chairman Lance’s company’s plan to add $7 billion in annual free cash flow by 2029. The Trump administration has since moved to open more of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska to drilling.
36. Patrick Pouyanné
France
...
In 2021, Pouyanné renamed Total as TotalEnergies to signal its shift toward renewables. The same year, an insurgent attack on the town of Palma forced the company to halt its $20 billion Mozambique LNG project. In late 2025, TotalEnergies lifted the force majeure, paving the way for construction to restart in 2026. CEO Pouyanné has said TotalEnergies will keep increasing its oil and gas production through 2030.
37. Randall Atkins
United States
Ramaco Resources says its Brook Mine in Wyoming, permitted as a coal mine, holds one of the largest unconventional rare earth deposits in the United States. Atkins, Ramaco’s founder, chaired the National Coal Council before its charter lapsed. He has been reappointed to the revived council, where he argues that coal is a national security resource. When opened in 2025, Brook became the first new rare earth mine in the United States in more than 70 years.
38. Elsa Widding
Sweden
Widding went from a niche YouTube channel about climate and energy to Sweden’s parliament. A peer-reviewed study analyzed more than 2,000 minutes of her content and found that she used her roles as politician and online personality to delegitimize scientific expertise and reinforce “us vs. them” narratives among climate contrarians.
39. Zou Lei
China
Zou leads CHN Energy as the state-owned group combines extraordinary coal scale with rapid renewable expansion. By the end of 2025, CHN Energy was the world’s largest coal producer and seller, thermal-power generator, wind-power operator and coal-to-liquids and coal-chemicals producer, with annual coal-production capacity of 827 million tons. In 2026, Zou helped unveil a new Coal Industry Research Institute in Inner Mongolia as the group pursued coal-to-oil and gas alongside wind, solar, hydrogen and storage.
40. Mauro Mendes
Brazil
The former governor of Brazil’s agricultural state of Mato Grosso backed a law removing tax benefits from businesses participating in agreements imposing environmental requirements stricter than Brazilian law, striking directly at the Amazon Soy Moratorium. The nearly 20-year-old agreement prevented major traders from buying soy grown on Amazon land cleared after 2008, even when the clearing was legal, and was credited with sharply reducing soy-linked deforestation. In January 2026, industry association Abiove and about two-thirds of participating companies moved to quit the pact after the tax law took effect.
41. Aliko Dangote
Nigeria
...
Dangote spent about $20 billion building Africa’s largest oil refinery outside Lagos. The world’s largest single-train refinery can now process 700,000 barrels a day, in a country that for decades exported crude while importing fuel. Dangote is spending another $14.3 billion to double capacity to 1.4 million barrels a day by 2029.
42. Mukesh Ambani
India
Ambani’s company Reliance operates the world’s largest single-site oil refining complex at Jamnagar, Gujarat, processing about 1.4 million barrels a day. On the same site it is building giga-factories for solar panels, batteries and green hydrogen. The company has proposed a 30-year underground coal gasification complex in Andhra Pradesh. Ambani and Gautam Adani have traded places as Asia’s richest man.
43. Roger Pielke Jr.
United States
In 2015, Representative Raúl Grijalva sent a letter to Pielke’s university seeking information about his funding. The inquiry followed Pielke’s congressional testimony that disaster losses had not risen because of climate change once growth in wealth and population was accounted for. He remains a prominent critic of claims linking individual extreme weather disasters to climate change. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder and writes the newsletter The Honest Broker.
44. Wayne Langford
New Zealand
As president of Federated Farmers, Langford made revising New Zealand’s methane targets a central political demand. In 2025, the government reduced the statutory 2050 biogenic methane target from 24–47 percent below 2017 levels to 14–24 percent. It also ruled out a tax on agricultural methane and promised greater recognition for food production in climate policy.
45. Toby Young
United Kingdom
In 2020, Young started a website called Lockdown Sceptics to oppose COVID restrictions. Renamed the Daily Sceptic, it became one of Britain’s most prolific publishers of material attacking net zero. He co-founded the Free Speech Union in 2020 and became a member of the House of Lords in 2025.
46. Gary Nagle
Switzerland
Nagle, who has led Glencore since 2021, planned to spin off its coal business after buying Teck Resources’ steelmaking-coal operations. In 2024, he reversed course. “The ESG pendulum has swung back over the last nine to 12 months,” Nagle said. “They [shareholders] recognize that cash is king.” Its Ulan mine in Australia has been approved to operate through 2035.
47. Marc Morano
United States
Morano worked for Rush Limbaugh then ran communications for Senator James Inhofe, a prominent opponent of climate regulation. In 2009, he founded Climate Depot, a website challenging mainstream climate science and policy. In 2016, he produced the documentary Climate Hustle, which called climate change a scientific con.
48. Jim Grech
United States
Peabody Energy, the largest private sector coal company in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy in 2016. Its chief executive, Grech, now chairs the National Coal Council, which Trump restored after its charter lapsed in 2021. In 2025, Trump signed executive orders supporting coal, and U.S. coal-fired generation subsequently rose an estimated 13 percent that year.
49. Mohamed Al Hammadi
United Arab Emirates
Abu Dhabi Media Office
The UAE is an oil giant, but Al Hammadi has led its nuclear power push. He has headed the state-owned Emirates Nuclear Energy Company since 2008, overseeing Barakah, the Arab world’s first nuclear plant. It generates a quarter of the UAE’s electricity. “Nuclear energy is a cornerstone of the UAE’s decarbonization strategy,” he told The Energy Year.
50. Alexey Miller
Russia
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After losing most of its European market, Gazprom reported a net loss for 2023, its first in more than two decades. In September 2025, CEO Miller announced a legally binding memorandum with China on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, designed to carry 50 billion cubic meters of gas a year. Pricing terms remain unresolved, and China holds most bargaining power.
Illustration by Ricardo Tomás for Newsweek
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