It’s easy to dismiss Jordan Peterson, the Canadian bad boy ex-academic, as a sideshow. But when he’s standing six feet away, scowling before an audience of thousands of powerful conservatives from around the world, it clicks: Peterson’s influence has gotten too big to ignore, and his message is a danger to all of us.

“It’s time to stop our obsession with carbon altogether,” he said as he repeated the climate denial trope that more carbon in the atmosphere will cause beneficial plant growth and not climate disaster (this is false). “No more carbon apocalypse mongering and terrorizing.”

For years, I’d dismissed Peterson as a scholar who, after torpedoing his own academic career, became a YouTube personality infamous for spewing conservative political messages and basic self-help dressed up as philosophy and psychology. 

I was wrong. He is now the frontman for powerful people on the right attempting to take over the world. And I was at their self-described replacement for the World Economic Forum: the second annual conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC).

Surrounding me were close to 3,000 people, mostly men in suits, who had paid £1,500 (about CAD $2,750) to attend. Elite conservative politicians from Canada, the U.K. and Europe, the U.S., including Mike Johnson, Chris Wright, Kemi Badenoch, and Candice Bergen gave speeches. Some congregated at VIP tables in the centre of the conference hall along with representatives from fossil fuel, tech, and arms-dealing corporations. In the bleachers behind them, thousands of conservatives from around the world applauded Peterson’s attacks on climate efforts, the sexual revolution, and progressive politics. 

An army of young people wearing white softshell coats kept the peace. I took to calling these footsoldiers the “White Coats.” They had strict instructions to reveal nothing; I only learned it was a job at all, and not a volunteer gig, after overhearing two of them chat about the generous pay.   

The White Coats weren’t the only young people there. Hundreds of the attendees were about my age, in their late 20s and early 30s. I was curious what drew them to a conference where the speakers celebrated ultra conservative policies that will make the planet burn and are antithetical to the values I and my friends hold, like accepting all people regardless of race or gender, guaranteeing everyone bodily autonomy, and trusting science. 

This was not the place to be too loud about my values. But I wasn’t here to preach; I was here for work, along with Geoff Dembicki of DeSmog and my Canada’s National Observer colleague Sandra Bartlett, to witness the coalition of powerful people Peterson has brought together in a war against modern progressive liberalism. At a time of escalating climate disaster, this group is crafting a battle plan to destroy essential climate action in the name of ideology. 

This article is the first dispatch from ARC, and there’s a lot more to come on the surprising linkages we found between some of the most powerful, climate-action averse people on the planet. This conference, it turns out, is a place where they feel truly free to be themselves, and that’s what we were here to see: How do they talk, and who do they talk to, when there’s nobody else around to listen in?

***

ARC was co-founded by Peterson and Philippa Stroud, a conservative peer to the British House of Lords and pro-Brexit tactician known for her climate denial, to “unite conservative voices and propose policies based on traditional Western values.” It positions itself as an intellectual hub for the resurgent right. 

In the conference’s opening address, Stroud — tall and slender and enveloped by long white hair — explained the group’s mission as an orchestra played the final dramatic notes of Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” 

“The West,” she said, is facing a “civilisational moment,” and the survival of countries and regions like Canada, Europe and the U.S. is on the line.  Immigration is eroding the identity of western countries. Sexual freedom and “hedonism” have made Western youth nihilistic. Diversity, equity and inclusion, and the programs and policies that support them, are harming the West’s Christian cultural foundations. Climate change isn’t a crisis. 

She quoted the Lord of the Rings  — “It was Frodo who said to Gandalf: ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time.’ ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf. ‘And so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the times that we are given.’” 

There’s a potent irony to this, given that Tolkien was obsessed with the way power corrupts, yet speaker after speaker at the event celebrated Trump and Musk’s authoritarian takeover of the U.S. while calling on conservatives in other countries to emulate them. 

Building off Stroud’s key themes, the conference speakers wove standard conservative tropes into a new narrative attacking climate action and progressive politics: More kids and Christian families are the solution to Western population and moral decline, and fossil fuels will fuel the free market, saving humanity from “energy poverty” and low standards of living. 

It will be a world where diverse and cosmopolitan places like East London, where I found dinner in fish’n chip shops that also serve falafel and biryani, dwindle in favour of more posh, white or culturally homogenous neighbourhoods. A world where DJs at clubs play God Save the King — in full — at afterparties as young men in suits awkwardly sway in their MAGA hats. Yes, this happened at ARC.  

It’s a world where the rich preach the free market as a solution to poverty and social isolation, yet — as happened at ARC — celebrate the dismantling of social institutions that bring people together and redistribute wealth. It is a world of utilitarian sex (with eugenic undertones), where the Bible regains its former prominence above human rights as society’s moral foundation. 

If conservatives, empowered by reactionary politics, implement ARC’s vision, it will plunge the planet into chaos. We have only a few years to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases before the climate crisis will get dramatically worse. It will be a world slammed with extreme storms, droughts, floods, wildfires, heat waves and other disasters. 

***

Three stories above the main event was a hall of conference rooms, replete with their own meal catering and guarded by extra security guards in black uniforms. White Coats patrolled the area, keeping their eyes on me as I made my way to the nearby press room. My discreet scans of the nametags worn by people heading into the conference rooms suggested these meetings were reserved for the conference elite. 

I saw in this area Leslyn Lewis, an ultra-conservative and former Conservative Party of Canada leadership hopeful who is on the ARC board. I noticed former Australian conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, and I spotted a vice-president of AI at Microsoft. A White Coat who had been watching me throughout ambushed me on the last day and joked that he would let me into Peterson’s private lunch.

Lewis wasn’t the only prominent Canadian I saw at the conference. On the first day, I saw her chatting with former federal Conservative politician Candice Bergen while they watched Peterson speak on the main stage. 

At a reception that evening, I struck up a conversation about the conference with two Alberta-based executives in the oil and gas sector and David Knight-Legg, former Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s senior advisor. On the final day, I spotted Bergen chatting with Daniel Gray, a Canadian conservative communications strategist hired by Alberta premier Danielle Smith to manage voter ID. 

I could understand the appeal of ARC for the fossil fuel executives and investors keen to capitalize on a global rightward political shift against climate action. But I was curious what drew everyone else, and whether they were all committed to the world Peterson preaches. 

***

The main exhibition hall was a conservative candy shop. People mingled between about a dozen exhibition booths, and chatted on white leather sofas scattered throughout the room. It was like any other conference I’ve attended — except the stalls were filled with self-published books and flyers about free speech, conservative Christian theology, and climate denial.  

GB News, a right-wing British television channel, had a bustling temporary studio. People flocked around a woman carrying a microphone from Rebel News, a rightwing Canadian outlet. 

A bizarre map of “the culture wars” caught my eye: Drafted to look like an old-fashioned chart, the piece was illustrated with canyons, rivers, and swamps to represent political divisions in western countries between groups like the “social justice warriors,” the “incels,” and political figures like Justin Trudeau.

I was wandering among the crowd when a bright dress jumped out from the sea of suits. I asked its owner — a woman about my age and an Ivy league graduate — her thoughts about Peterson’s Bible-laced opening speech. Without hesitation, she ripped into his cryptic delivery, criticizing him for not being libertarian enough. 

Pushed towards libertarianism during college because of so-called “cancel culture,” which stifled right-leaning politics and debate, she saw ARC as a networking opportunity. I Googled her after our conversation, digging through her online links to the so-called pronatalism movement, a movement loved by Elon Musk that calls on people in developed nations to have more kids. 

And yet, despite our political differences (I’m lefty and can’t morally justify having kids, for one), she was willing to hear my critiques of the morning’s talks and ARC generally. It was a trend that left me cautiously surprised. 

Take Eric Kaufmann, a U.K.-based Canadian political science professor who teaches at Birmingham University because its aggressive pro-free speech policy protects him. Striking up conversation with him in the exhibition area, it was clear he holds aggressively conservative views on sexual identity, mental health and immigration. But he acknowledged that the DOGE-style destruction of democratic institutions and free market policies pushed by many ARC speakers could destroy the conservative movement. 

But while all the conservatives might not be fully sold on Peterson’s new world order, pretty much everyone I talked to was critical of climate action. 

***

I was emotionally drained as the conference drew to a close. In my regular life, the constant flow of headlines about how right-wing politicians and businesspeople are dismantling vital environmental laws, attacking human rights and gender rights, destroying basic social services and abetting genocide is depressing. But plunging into ARC, where those very policies are celebrated, left me with too many hard questions.

What will Peterson and his ARC mean for the climate if they manage to transform their vision into reality? How will Canada’s conservative politicians adopt his ideas into their policy platforms, and will those positions get them elected? Can climate activists separate climate action from progressive politics? Should they?

Outside, the venue was already prepping for its next event: Europe’s Pokémon championships. Two teens rocking brightly dyed hair, jeans and t-shirts were practising their game on a public table, oblivious to ARC’s new world order. 

This special investigation between Canada’s National Observer and DeSmog was produced in collaboration with the Institute for Sustainability, Education and Action and TRACE Foundation.