Revenge of the Climate Heretics: The 50 Leading Eco-Policy Dissenters

Newsweek · Christopher Roberts · 2026-11-04 10:00 UTC

Newsweek ranks the world’s top 50 business leaders, politicians and influencers challenging eco-orthodoxies

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has taken the United States out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, and his Environmental Protection Agency has rescinded the finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health.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

Read the full story at Newsweek · All coverage of this story