Foundations of climate change denial: Anti-environmentalism and anti-science

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0334544 November 12, 2025 4 / 23 We argue that fear of successful challenges to the status quo motivate AGW denial, and our analysis shows that anti-reflexivity--especially attacking climate science (and other impact sciences) and environmentalism (from local to global)--is its foundation. Our results suggest that anti-reflexivity is the underlying foundation or “DNA” of AGW denial. II. The climate change countermovement A social movement is a conscious collective effort to organize for social change [37]. If a movement threatens to be suc- cessful, elites often will defend their interests and organize against the social movement in a “countermovement” [38,39]. As the global environmental movement threatened to successfully convince the international community to fight AGW thereby threating the political-economic status quo, elites organized an opposition project, a countermovement against the global environmental movement. This is the CCCM which started in 1992 after the Rio “Earth” Summit announced global environmental problems at the same time far-right activists were searching for an agenda after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 [19]. The CCCM is well organized and effective, especially in publicizing its denial claims among the public and policymak- ers [40]. Early work showed several conservative fossil fuel-funded think tanks (CTTs) focused on AGW in the 1990s, por- traying it as a “non-problem,” and that their efforts helped fossil fuel and other corporate actors defeat the Kyoto Protocol in the US [6–8].

These disinformation tactics became increasingly successful. When the Conference of Parties met in Copenhagen in 2009 hoping to replace the Kyoto Protocol with an equally ambitious institution. The so-called “Hopenhagen” meeting was a, …pivotal moment in history when nationalist and corporate forces formed new alliances and sought novel ways to undermine climate resolutions. The denial machine’s ability to hinder cooperative and coordinated efforts between nation-states was demonstrated through an unprecedented attack on the summit using media and social media plat- forms to disseminate disinformation and fuel denialism [41]. Further, Brulle [42] reported that 91 countermovement organizations (including industry associations like the American Petroleum Institute and advocacy groups like Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, as well as CTTs) had a total income of over $7 billion between 2003 and 2010, providing ample resources for promoting AGW denial. Shortly after, Farrell [43] identified 164 organizations and 4556 individuals comprising the CCCM, providing insight into the networks linking them and how the actors and networks have evolved from 1993 to 2013. Lastly, while the US was the birthplace of AGW denial, it has gradually diffused to other nations, especially those with a history of economic dependence on fossil fuels [5], but to many others as well--typically through CTTs as a growing body of evidence suggests [27,31,44]. Still, the Anglo group of countries, “… the wealthy, English-speaking, primarily Protestant former British colonies with institutional-

ized white power: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States…,” remain the bastions of AGW denial (although New Zealand and South Africa less so than the others) [45, p. 336]. As these examples illustrate, empirical studies are providing a growing body of evidence concerning the evolution, structure and impacts of the CCCM, as apparent from several reviews [5,46,47]. Here we will focus specifically on the growing body of studies analyzing AGW denial claims. A. Common claims/arguments used in climate change denial Research on AGW denial claims and arguments has expanded considerably since McCright and Dunlap’s [7] early anal- ysis of a sample of 224 documents on AGW posted by fourteen CTTs from 1990 to 1997, the year that over 160 nations met in Kyoto to develop the Kyoto Protocol designed to reduce Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. They employed inductive QCA to discover the “counterclaims” (to the claims made by mainstream climate scientists and concerned policy