20 GREEN YEARS: AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

A moral panic over air conditioning recently raged across the West as high summer temperatures have produced the usual flood of exaggerated concerns. How in the world did we get here? How did something as personal as home or workplace temperature become an ecological sin requiring both state condemnation and centralized control? How did government intervention this invasive and totalizing become not only the norm, but the declared moral ideal?

BY DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON ON X / READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON ON X
Part 1: How Cool Are We Allowed to Get?
A moral panic over air conditioning recently raged across the West as high summer temperatures produced the usual flood of exaggerated concerns. Britons were summarily ordered to remove already-installed AC units under

Net Zero rules

. France’s climate minister expressed horror at the very notion of artificial indoor cooling. “Do you think that’s going to prevent forest fires?”

she said

. “Do you think that’s going to prevent a crop from dying?” Germany’s state broadcaster added to “climate awareness” with

this pearl of wisdom

: “Air conditioners: what cools us down, heats up the Earth.”

The European Commission, for its part,

shut down the AC in its headquarters

—but only on floors 1-7, where the peons worked. President Ursula von der Leyen and her commissioners remained comfortably cool on the 6 remaining upper floors of the 13-story building.

Across the Atlantic, New York’s newly elected socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani,

took to X

with a plea for virtuous conservation during a concurrent heat wave: “Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights and electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can.” This, despite his office simultaneously issuing weather warnings advising the use of air conditioning for safety; despite the city’s newly passed “Cool Homes for All” act requiring landlords to provide that same environmentally desolating service to tenants.

How in the world did we get here? How did something as personal as home or workplace temperature become an ecological sin requiring both state condemnation and centralized control? How did government intervention this invasive and totalizing become not only the norm, but the declared moral ideal?
What we drive, how we heat our homes,

what we eat

, how much water we use: every modern activity increases industrial CO2 emissions in a manner not dissimilar to air conditioning. Do all such intimate, local decisions therefore necessitate

governmental oversight and regulation

? And if so, what freedoms can possibly remain?

Part 2: An Inconvenient Anniversary
The roots of such worrisome totalizing can be traced in the more academic realm to the 1960s and 1970s, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. More distal influences, such as Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, also merit consideration, as we shall see. There is another source, however, unmatched in its combination of scientific pretension, charged emotional tone, policy impact and mass appeal: former VP Al Gore’s 2006 Hollywood hit documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which this year marks its twentieth anniversary.
More than any other single work, this glossy, visually dramatic production translated the abstractions of climate modeling into a compelling narrative—one that struck fear into the hearts of tens of millions. It did so by framing mankind’s industrial activity and consequent increase in CO2 production as the driver of a dangerous increase in global temperature. It did so by warning of immediately impending ecological devastation and economic disruption. It did so by arguing for the necessity of emergency response, while casting dissent as the most serious of modern sins.
An Inconvenient Truth proved far more effective than any prior academic report or specialist warning at propelling climate change from scientific and policy circles into mainstream cultural consciousness. At the same time, it entrenched the partisan—almost religious—tone that still dominates the issue today.
Many observers (including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assert that global average temperature has risen

between 1.1 and 1.5°C since the 1850-1900

establishment of reliable instrumental records and the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution. The same experts attribute most of this warming to human technological activity and the consequent increase in atmospheric CO2.

Criticisms of such estimates abound. The 1850-1900 period is situated, for example, at the

tail end of the Little Ice Age

, a relatively cool period. Thus its use as baseline may inflate the apparent magnitude of subsequent warming. Alternative reference points, including reconstructions extending back to the Medieval Warm Period,

yield more modest estimates

. The post-industrial era is also embedded within a longer

epoch of natural warming

, making it difficult to disentangle anthropogenic influences from background climatic variability. Finally, global mean surface temperature is not necessarily the most appropriate—or even a fully physically meaningful—statistic for indexing climate change.

Nonetheless, Gore and similarly-minded activists insisted on the untrammeled reality of human-caused warming and forecast a host of catastrophic consequences: the disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice by 2016, sea levels rising 20 feet from collapsing ice sheets and disrupted ocean currents, Amazon rainforest die-off, and the creation of hundreds of millions of climate refugees. At the same time, the broader network of climate scientists, IPCC reports, UN bodies, and NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund issued urgent warnings of expanding desertification, global browning, large-scale vegetation die-off, and ecosystem collapse. All this dire prognostication was presented as settled “science”—as in the insistent demand to “follow the science.”
Part 3: Belief—And Its Price
An unsettling political fact emerged at the same time—one indicating that factors other than the scientific were at play. Belief in the severity—even the reality—of human-caused, CO2-driven climate change began to fracture sharply along partisan lines, a divide that has only widened.

Recent Gallup polling (2026)

indicates that 72% of Democrats but only 6% of Republicans worried about climate change, with 59% of the former versus 12% of the latter ranking it a top presidential priority.

This polarization was no coincidence. It reflected—and actively reinforced—the deeper hijacking of the climate issue by a set of a priori political and moral commitments. A second, equally telling manifestation has been the extraordinary rise in spending. Annual global expenditure on the so-called energy transition now

exceeds $2 trillion

—more than 2% of world GDP—with cumulative spending since the release of An Inconvenient Truthreaching $10–15 trillion. Influential organizations now call for

doubling or even tripling that figure

to meet 2050 Net Zero targets, much of it through centralized state planning.

The sheer magnitude of these sums is difficult to grasp, but one fact remains unassailable: every dollar directed toward this enterprise is a dollar unavailable for other purposes. Any error or exaggeration in the narrative therefore carries profound opportunity costs, crowding out priorities valued by the progressive left as much as the conservative right.
Serious environmental concerns unrelated to CO2, such as oceanic overharvesting, have received comparatively little attention. Danish analyst Bjørn Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus have shown, more broadly, that many of humanity’s most pressing humanitarian challenges—malnutrition, malaria, HIV, education, clean water, and sanitation—could be tackled globally for roughly

$50 billion per year

, about one-fortieth of current annual green transition spending.

It may be true that CO2 levels have risen due to industrial activity and contributed to some warming. The significance of those facts, however—and especially their implications for action—remains an entirely different matter. The insistence that they constitute an existential crisis of apocalyptic proportions is not a scientific claim. It is, instead, a dogmatic and partisan assertion.
Part 4: An Inconvenient Truth—Updated
The repeated failure of high-profile predictions from motivated doomsayers offers powerful evidence of this distortion. While some errors stemmed from genuine uncertainty, many more resulted from the subordination of evidence to a broader left-wing ideological worldview. This produced a profound and willful blindness—at best selective interpretation, at worst a willingness to play fast and loose with the facts. The result has been scientific and economic error on a virtually unimaginable scale.
Dramatic sea-level rise, for instance, simply never materialized—even in island nations once portrayed as doomed. Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Maldives, and

over 200 other atolls

have

gained rather than lost land area

. Warnings of advancing desertification and collapsing crop yields have likewise failed to occur—to put it mildly. What actually happened was the literal reverse—a fact so central, undeniable, and consequential that it should force a drastic reevaluation of the entire climate narrative.

We can begin that reevaluation by revisiting the confident, uniformly pessimistic predictions of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Climate doomsayers warned incessantly of sweeping ecosystem collapse, plunging agricultural yields, intensifying droughts, and the relentless advance of deserts. Any marginal benefits from elevated CO2, they insisted, would be violently overwhelmed. The dominant narrative—permitted in popular media—foretold a far less verdant, more unstable, and markedly less hospitable planet. The crisis was already upon us. Emergency action was imperative.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics—or so the cynical adage goes. But it gets still worse. There are claims that literally invert the truth. Such lies, or damned lies, or statistics, might be aptly deemed anti-truths. An anti-truth is not merely false; it is a falsehood so profound that it stands in direct, antagonistic opposition to reality itself.
The term applies most deservedly to the predictions advanced in An Inconvenient Truth and by similarly-minded ideologues: so thoroughly and systematically wrong—invariably in the direction of overstated catastrophe—that they cannot be dismissed as mere error. This is particularly true of the claim that increased CO2 represents a net danger, especially to plant life.
The first indications that the planet was experiencing not the predicted global drying, drought, desertification, and starvation—but precisely the opposite—emerged in satellite data as early as the mid-1980s. By 2016, it had become one of the most robust and well-documented findings in environmental science. That year,

a NASA-led international study

analyzing satellite data from 1982 to 2015 concluded that the Earth had not only failed to become more drought-prone and desert-like, but had instead been transformed—and stunningly so—into a much greener planet, with up to half of the world’s land surface showing clear increases in vegetation density.

The added leaf area equals roughly twice the size of the continental United States and nearly three times that of the Amazon rainforest. The same study attributed about 70% of this effect to elevated CO2. Remarkably, this greening has been especially pronounced in arid regions. Increased atmospheric CO2 allows plants to partially

close their stomata

, dramatically reducing water loss through transpiration.

Recent analyses of global drylands

, including the Sahara-adjacent Sahel, confirm that greening has overwhelmingly outpaced desertification: significant increases in ~41% of drylands versus desertification in only ~6%. Projections suggest vegetation productivity in these areas could

expand another 50% by century’s end

.

Here, then, is a genuinely inconvenient truth. No other terrestrial change in our era rivals planetary greening in geographic scope, biomass increase, and detectability via satellite records. Its very existence offers a direct and powerful refutation of the earlier narrative of widespread browning, desert expansion, and ecosystem collapse.
And what of agricultural production, given the looming threat of climate-change induced starvation, shouted so insistently from the rooftops, and woe betide the objectors? Surely catastrophe has been visited upon the fields. But no—and here another equally dramatic anti-truth has revealed itself. Crops have not merely not failed—they are

positively thriving

, with staple crops such as rice, wheat, and soybeans seeing yield increases of 10–25%. Overall plant-based agricultural production has risen 8–25%. Much of this, like the broader greening, is attributable to elevated CO2—producing enough additional food to support several hundred million to a billion more people.

Thankfully, however, some facts appear too large to conceal. The addition of roughly another continent’s worth of plant life to Earth appears to be one of them.
Vegetation continues to benefit as CO2 levels rise as high as 1200 ppm. If plants could vote, therefore, they would cast their ballots in favor of increasing CO2 levels far beyond even today’s industrially-heightened levels. In the early 1800s, atmospheric CO2 stood at 280 parts per million—levels

clearly suboptimal for plant life

(glacial-period lows of 180–220 ppm reduce photosynthesis by 40–70%). Human activity has brought the total to a more salutary 430, averting a worsening CO2 drought.

The well-being of plants may not be the only consideration, but it is one worthy of serious attention—particularly from those who claim to prioritize environmental concerns. We might also remember that CO2 levels reached

4,000–9,000 ppm

in Earth’s deep past, including during the Cambrian explosion of life some 500 million years ago. For most of the subsequent 500 million years, levels were

at least double today’s

.

Part 5: Ignorance—Or Worse
The architects of our culturally dominant climate and economic models issued apocalyptic predictions with a confidence bordering on the unshakeable. The same insistence prevails today—often in the form of the unchanged opinions of the same actors, despite their prediction of anything but the presently undeniable rapid, comprehensive greening of the Earth. Such error is particularly striking given the phenomenon’s speed, well-understood mechanisms, and truly planetary scale.
How, then, could it be anything but time to question the accuracy, integrity and value of all the conclusions derived from such models—and to ask what factors drove the catastrophizing and made such failure not merely possible but inevitable?
This brings us back to the ideological. Politicization of the climate debate meant that facts about atmospheric CO2 and its effects became less scientific observations than convenient proofs of a pre-existing position. Three partisan advantages accrued to those who cast such effects as catastrophic proof that industrial capitalism was irredeemably corrupt. First, this transformed the mere fact of industrial CO2 production into evidence of humanity’s intrinsic rapaciousness. Second, it made its advocates planetary saviors, whose moral authority licensed any measure, however invasive. Third, it allowed all criticism to be dismissed not as wrong but as dangerous: denialist, ecocidal, anti-scientific, fascist.
Is it unreasonable to note how conveniently this narrative mirrors the broader world-view of the left—even the radical left? The West is inherently colonial and exploitative; free market capitalism endangers humanity and the planet; centralized planning is the necessary corrective.
Naomi Klein’s 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate perfectly exemplifies this convergence. Its thesis is explicit: meaningful climate action is impossible without bringing the free-market growth model to an end. The crisis—too good an opportunity to waste—necessitates precisely the corrective the worldview had always prescribed: totalizing state intervention, public ownership of key industries, decision-making based on equity rather than profit, degrowth in rich nations, and massive wealth redistribution from North to South.
Is it too cynical to suggest that this remarkable convenience might explain why interpretations other than “CO2 equals catastrophe” have been systematically marginalized, even at the level of allowable facts?
Let us be clear: this is not science. It is, instead, the subordination of science to ideology, at every stage—from data selection to conclusion. It is the “science-justified” derogation and persecution of dissenters from the claim that “the realities of climate demand socialism.” It is the willingness to wield the prestige of science as a cudgel while denying any motivation other than pure objectivity. And this holds even if we assume their interventionist catastrophism stems from a genuinely benevolent desire to advance sincerely held leftist aims and save the planet.
The situation looks even bleaker, however, when we abandon such naivete and consider the darker psychological elements at play. George Orwell famously posed the key question: is the typical socialist motivated by genuine concern for the oppressed and working class, or by resentment of the existing order and envious hatred of the productive and successful? In other words, is the socialism still insisted upon by the CO2 warriors a movement of love, or of hate?
Orwell observed that a genuinely working-class socialist leader was a rarity. Such people generally came, instead, from the middle or even upper classes. The typical socialist was not the “ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls” but a prim little specimen with a secure job, vegetarian leanings, and an air of sniffish superiority, or else one of that “

dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers

who came flocking toward the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”

These are the people who refuse to abandon the prestige and advantage—the “privilege”—of their education, wealth, and social position, while claiming the moral high ground and the compensatory benefits owed to the oppressed. They want it both ways, like the student radicals of the modern elite university, whose acceptance by Harvard, Yale, or Oxford all but guarantees their eventual place in the very “top 1%” they claim to condemn. These are the people who can and will say, without flinching, that “the planet would be better off if there were no people on it.”
Such characteristics provide ample reason to doubt the stated intentions of those who insist the apocalypse is upon us. The economic track record of leftist regimes provides more reason still. In milder forms, they

tend toward stagnation

, disproportionately harming the poor. In more extreme cases, economic failure reliably gives way to

totalitarian murderousness

. The left’s stunning refusal to learn from this history—often excused by the claim that “true socialism has never been tried”—reveals a willful blindness that is hard to forgive.

The narcissism of believing “this time it will work, because the right people are in charge,” combined with the delight in redistribution and the pattern of entitled resentment Orwell identified, warrants deep skepticism about the true motives of the CO2 warriors. Theirs is not, in all likelihood, a movement of love.
The errors in economic prognostication surrounding the so-called green or renewable revolution are equally grievous, reflecting not only a misplaced faith in central planning but a heedlessness bordering on criminal negligence. Solar and wind installations, touted as redemptive by the same activists warning of CO2 catastrophe, require backup generation of equal capacity for periods of calm or cloud—inevitably fossil-fired, often coal. These “green” systems typically operate at 25–35% of maximum capacity, compared to 90% for nuclear and 70–90% for gas turbines. In the UK, 25 GW of wind capacity reduced conventional power needs by a mere 4–7 GW while still requiring 30 GW of backup. Renewables thus often necessitate maintaining or building the very systems they were meant to replace—doubling cost and complexity.
Batteries are the proposed remedy for intermittency, but utility-scale storage that could matter does not exist and will not for the foreseeable future. And the mining of minerals those batteries require

is itself environmentally destructive

: deforestation, pollution, prodigious energy use.

Most telling of all, the same voices object to nuclear power—so fervently that several European countries have shuttered functional, clean, safe plants while halting future development. This is incomprehensible, if the goal truly is reduction of CO2 emissions. It makes sense only as part of a broader hostility toward capitalist industrial civilization, and a desire to impose a socialist or degrowth alternative. The same logic explains the closure of North Sea oil fields and the strangling of fracking, a technology whose replacement of coal with natural gas has arguably been an environmental boon. And all the while, China and India expand their emissions on a scale that reduces the Western green project to theatre.
Part 6: An Alternative World
What are we then to conclude? That much of the “science” surrounding industrial CO2 has been corrupted by self-serving obfuscation, if not outright deception. That the errors of anti-industrial activists have been driven by motives far removed from—indeed, often antithetical to—genuine concern for planet or poor. By championing catastrophe, they have justified their preferred economic theories, played at moral heroism, squandered a fortune—and achieved next to nothing for the environment and the world’s most vulnerable.
Worse, this self-anointed sainthood has enabled the demonization of those who built the energy systems that powered Western prosperity, while aggrandizing activists whose record of economic failure and authoritarian excess is a matter of history. Recent research sharpens the portrait, linking the revolutionary strain of leftist activism

to antagonistic narcissism and outright psychopathy

— and, notably, to no measurable commitment to social justice whatsoever.

Thus An Inconvenient Truth stands not as a noble wake-up call but as one of the most influential works of propaganda in modern history. It demoralized a generation, crippled energy production and, in claiming its mantle, compromised the moral authority of science itself.
We could have chosen a different path: clean, affordable, abundant energy — and with it, widespread prosperity and genuine environmental progress. Instead, we embraced radical leftist lies, subsidized inferior alternatives, paraded our false virtue, and radically extended state control over what should have remained a matter of private choice — all while insisting that our only motivation was the pursuit of objective truth.
A movement of genuine love builds; it measures itself by what the impoverished gain. A movement of resentment and hate, by contrast, wishes to tear down, obstruct and punish—whatever the cost. The result is a poorer, more desperate world.
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.”
And here is a parting shot at those who despite all this remain committed to the apocalyptic CO2 narrative and its call for a green revolution:
25-50% of the $15 trillion the world has spent on the so-called energy transition since the early 2010s came from taxpayers. What could we have done instead with that purloined money—indeed, what could we still do, given the projections of more spending to come?
Consider nuclear power. We could have built 1,400 new low-CO2 reactors at the current cost of $5.5 billion each. If

Wright’s Law

is factored in, however—the cost of industrial production drops 10–15% with each doubling of production capacity—the build number would have risen to 11,000, along with the associated grid infrastructure. A fleet that size would supply electricity to 6 billion people at North American standards (or 13 billion at European/Japanese levels). Global CO2 emissions would fall by half, electricity prices would drop by 95%, and the resulting manufacturing boom would create jobs and lower the price of consumer goods. There’s something of benefit to the poor–and the planet.

The same cheap, abundant electricity would transform water security. Desalination is already practical—as Israel demonstrates, where it supplies 80% of the country’s water. A 95% drop in electricity costs would slash desalination prices to around 20 cents per cubic meter. With tens of trillions of kilowatt-hours from an expanded nuclear fleet, we could desalinate hundreds of billions of cubic meters annually—enough to irrigate the Sahara, reverse aquifer depletion worldwide, and eliminate drought as a civilizational threat.