During a February 24 panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference, former Trump economic adviser and climate denier Stephen Moore claimed that “climate change is not a science, it’s a religion.” 

Moore, who has a long history of making incendiary and inaccurate comments about climate science and domestic energy production, has worked for several fossil fuel-funded think tanks and is the co-founder of the right-wing nonprofit Committee to Unleash Prosperity. He is also a distinguished fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation, the Koch-connected conservative think tank behind Project 2025, an expansive policy plan for a potential second Trump term.

According to Politico, Project 2025 would “decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it. It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency.” Politico also reported that the Project 2025 agenda would ensure that another Trump presidency would “bring an all-out war on climate science and policies — eclipsing even his first-term efforts that brought U.S. climate action to a virtual standstill.”

During the panel, titled “Bidenomics: Bad for America’s Health,” Moore, said, “I don’t think there’s any issue where Joe Biden has been more hostile to America’s interests, both from an economic standpoint and from a national security standpoint, than on energy.” 

He falsely claimed that the U.S. “became the dominant country in the world” due to former President Donald Trump’s energy policy, adding, “‘There is no way in hell that we would have Russian troops in Ukraine if … Donald J. Trump were still president today. We basically played into the hands of our enemies.” (Blaming climate activists and policies for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a mainstay of right-wing media rhetoric since 2022.)

“And by the way, I’m going to say this loud and clear: Climate change is not a science it’s a religion,” Moore said. “It’s the religion of the left, and we have to fight back against this.” 

“Under Trump, we were energy independent,” he later said. (Contrary to Moore’s statements, the U.S. is not only still a net exporter of energy, it is also the world’s leading producer of oil.)

He concluded by praising Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mentality, calling it a “top priority” when he returns to the White House and a way to “solve so many of these problems.”