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has taken the United States out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, and his Environmental Protection Agency has rescinded the finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health.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.
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. 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.
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