Right-wing media just can’t seem to quit old-school climate change denial. 

Even as fossil fuel companies moved away from directly questioning established science in their marketing in favor of more subtle forms of climate delay and greenwashing, media influencers on the right repeatedly suggested that climate change is a fake crisis manufactured by global elites, using the energy crisis, extreme weather events, and a general mistrust of our institutions to make the case for climate change denial.

The war in Ukraine was convenient for climate change deniers

As gas prices skyrocketed, in part due to the global energy disruption resulting from the war in Ukraine, and American families started to become frustrated, right-wing media took the opportunity to blame climate policies. They insisted that high prices were being caused by a fake crisis manufactured by the government, arguing that climate change was a hoax from the beginning.

An October 6 Wall Street Journal editorial claimed that “the White House blames the industry for high gas prices while it does everything it can to make drilling more difficult and financially risky.”

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Donald Trump went on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria on March 2 and called climate change a hoax while discussing the Biden administration's energy policy, saying that “this climate situation is killing our country.”  

He did the same thing in a March 21 segment of Fox Business’s Varney & Co, saying what the left does “is a climate hoax.” When asked by host Stuart Varney whether climate change is caused by human activity, Trump responded: “In my opinion, you have a thing called weather, and you go up and you go down. If you look into the 1920s, they were talking about global freezing. … The climate’s always been changing,” he continued. 

Media Matters documented ample disinformation about gas prices and the Keystone XL pipeline extension during that period. Some right-wing media influencers claimed the Biden administration was adding insult to injury by allegedly driving high gas prices and lying to Americans about what could be done to fix the situation in order to carry out its agenda. 

Fossil fuel shill Daniel Turner of Power the Future wrote on April 18, “There is no climate crisis and oil is back to $110 because everything @JoeBiden says is a lie.” 

Kurt Schlichter, a Townhall columnist and podcast host, alleged that Biden was more committed to “the idiotic members of the climate change hoax cult” than he was to lowering gas prices for families. 

Schlichter has been a loud and consistent voice for climate change denial. But for someone who believes it doesn’t exist, he certainly spent a lot of time obsessing over it in 2022. He tweeted “climate change is a hoax” or similar statements at least 145 times in 2022, or an average of nearly three times per week, and penned op-eds like “Don’t Let Them Reset Society To Make You Into a Bug-Eating Serf” and “Climate Hoax Hacks Love Putin” in which he claimed that “you cannot claim to both oppose Putin and fight global warming.” 

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton was also an influential Twitter climate misinformer in 2022, voicing opposition to climate policy such as the Inflation Reduction Act, and posting climate skeptic and denialist content. “Taxes on energy, subsidies for favored corporations, dangerous drug price controls will increase inflation. And -- Fact check: There is no ‘climate crisis,’” he tweeted on July 28. 

Judicial Watch is a member of the State Policy Network, which has deep ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch-funded lobbying group that has most recently been working to punish fossil fuel divestment. When Biden was considering declaring a climate emergency in July, Fitton wrote, “There obviously is no ‘climate emergency’-- for Biden to dictate otherwise is a desperate abuse of power.”

The right turned reporting on natural disasters into “climate alarmism”

Last year, we clearly saw the impacts of major climate-fueled extreme weather events at home and around the world: Hurricanes Ian and Fiona, a heat wave and drought in Europe, China, and the American West, and massive flooding in Pakistan. As of October, according to insurance broker Aon, there had been 29 billion-dollar disasters in 2022. Additionally, according to the European Union’s statistics office Eurostat, the EU experienced 53,000 more deaths in July compared with that month’s averages for 2016-2019. 

In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, which pummeled Florida and South Carolina in late September, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson implied that humans cannot influence weather events because “they’re called natural disasters. … They’re products of nature. God’s in charge.” His guest Candace Owens, who has a history of climate change denial, reiterated that climate change does not exist because “if there was no human beings that walked the face of the planet, there would continue to be hurricanes, like there would continue to be blizzards, and like there would continue to be tornadoes.” 

Carlson responded to natural disasters with climate change denial on more than one occasion. On July 20, he devoted a monologue to undermining the existence of climate change, reducing climate predictions to: “It’s gonna be hot and then it’s gonna rain hard.” 

“No one really believes in global warming,” he continued, “and that’s why all of the liberals in the United States live on the coasts – because they don’t believe it. That’s why many of them fly private, because the entire theory is absurd and they know it. … The whole thing is a joke.” 

The day before, on July 19, Fox News host Dan Bongino questioned whether the planet is getting warmer and whether humanity played a role in it, asking: “What kind of a dunce believes that? Come on. Is it [the planet] getting warmer? The answer is maybe. … The question isn’t is it getting warmer; the question is what’s human beings' role in it.”

Even in the absence of an extreme weather event, right-wing media regularly dismissed and challenged the scientific consensus that warming is making these types of events more severe. 

On an October 11 segment of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham brought on climate change denier Tom Harris to falsely claim that the science isn’t settled: “The real underlying thing is that there is no climate crisis. … It's all based on models that don't work. … In fact, we don't even know whether it's going to be warm or cool in the future. … The only sensible approach is to get ready for it, to make our infrastructure hardened, to use solid, dependable sources of energy like coal.”

The “Great Reset” was a magnet for climate skepticism

Also in 2022, some right-wing media framed climate change as a hoax orchestrated by elites to implement the “Great Reset,” using climate policies and other measures to assert dominance and control over the general population. 

These ideas got attention in July, when right-wing media attempted to blame a series of complex global conflicts and unrest on climate policy, and in November as the global community gathered in Egypt to negotiate climate action. 

Former Australian journalist and key Twitter climate denial amplifier Peter Clack attacked plans made during the conference to provide financial climate support for developing nations, tweeting, “This is the reality of the Great Reset. … COP27 has approved - without dissent - reparations starting at $2 trillion because of climate-caused damage. There is none.”

On a December 12 segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson and meteorologist Joe Bastardi had a nearly unintelligible conversation packed with climate change denial, where Bastardi offered that climate advocates might not want to ban private air travel because “they’ve all got climate vaccines. We don't know about them, but unlike the covid vaccine, they actually work.” 

Another cockamamie theory, according to Bastardi, is that climate advocates are trying to pollute the air as much as possible so that they can have an excuse to prevent others from using transportation. Bastardi claimed that another option is that “it's a phony climate war, it's fraudulent,” and it “has nothing to do with CO2.” 

Though not explicitly mentioned, these accusations are consistent with the Great Reset narrative of elites controlling the masses through climate and public health policy. Carlson posited earlier in the segment, “Could it be that the climate movement is really about creating a permanent caste system where the people at the top of society, the Brahmins, can do literally whatever they want?” 

Right-wing journalist Jordan Schachtel mentioned the Great Reset while celebrating Twitter’s change in ownership, tweeting, “Twitter will now become the network through which we utterly destroy the forces of The Great Reset. … This is why the power-drunk covid addicts, climate hoaxers, commies, etc are furious today.” 

On the September 12 edition of Eric Bolling The Balance, host Eric Bolling encapsulated the right’s fearmongering about the Great Reset, claiming that climate change is a hoax being used “in order to make people fear the end of the world, convince us to change everything. They want to control us forever and ever.”

Climate contrarians lashed out against so-called censorship

Sometimes, climate change denial was just a drumbeat regardless of current events. Prominent right-wing culture warrior influencers used climate change denial without any context as part of their rotating script attacking different “liberal” beliefs or simply as a protest against what they view as censorship. 

For example, after Twitter initially accepted Elon Musk’s acquisition offer on April 25, right-wing contrarians and other influencers were seemingly emboldened to “test” the new environment by making statements that might reasonably be labeled as misinformation or hate speech under previous management. This occured in the days following Musk’s takeover of the platform on October 27 as well, with some tweets garnering tens of thousands of engagements. 

Former Daily Caller contributor Greg Price and right-wing Twitter troll and self-described political commentator Gunther Eagleman repeatedly pushed climate change misinformation on Twitter in 2022, along with a plethora of other uncouth and conspiratorial statements. Eagleman tweeted about climate change being a hoax, scam, or similar statements 48 times this year.

Despite right-wing media’s repeated claims that climate change is a hoax, it was among the top voter concerns during the recent 2022 midterm elections, suggesting climate change denial is a losing argument. However, as the phenomenon ramps up on Twitter and “free speech” continues to be a major point of contention in the culture wars, right-wing media may be empowered to continue pushing these types of disinformation in 2023.

Methodology 

Media Matters pulled 22,172 tweets from Gunther Eagleman and 23,839 from Kurt Schlicher between January 1, 2022 and December 16, 2022. We then looked at all the tweets containing the word “climate” and found that out of 49, 48 tweets from @GuntherEagleman promoted climate change denial, and out of 154, 145 tweets from @KurthSchlichterr promoted climate change denial.

Two independent researchers analyzed the tweets and categorized them as climate change denial if they fit the following criteria: 

• Refer to climate change as a “fraud,” “hoax,” “scam,” or “disinformation.”
• Suggest that there is not enough evidence to support the existence of climate change.
• Suggest that climate science is politically motivated.

Correction (2/1/23): This piece originally stated that Greg Price was formerly a Daily Wire contributor. In fact, Price was a contributor to The Daily Caller.