Last month, Republican pollster and messaging guru Frank Luntz sat down in front of a small committee of Senate Democrats and told a personal story about how wildfire almost consumed his California home. “The courageous firefighters of Los Angeles, they saved my home,” he said. “But others aren’t so lucky. Rising sea levels, melting ice caps, tornadoes, and hurricanes more ferocious than ever. It is happening.”

The statement isn’t particularly controversial until you consider the source. Luntz is a former influential climate change denier who authored the now-infamous 2002 memo advising the Republican Party to sow confusion about global warming. Republicans should “continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate,” Luntz wrote, or else the public might start supporting aggressive clean energy legislation. The party followed Luntz’s advice faithfully and with remarkable success for the next two decades.

But at last month’s hearing—titled “The Right Thing To Do: Conservatives for Climate Action”—Luntz said the public should move on. “That was a lifetime ago,” he said. “I’ve changed.” And now, instead of helping Republicans come up with messaging to avoid climate policy, Luntz said he wants to help Democrats come up with effective messaging to enact it. “But in return, you have to put policies ahead of politics,” Luntz said. “You have to make the commitment not to make it partisan.”

There will undoubtedly be more of these turns to the light in the future—pleas for forgiveness from Republicans and others who once denied the crisis unfolding before their eyes. The Arctic is on fire, storms are churning menacingly in the Atlantic, heat records are falling like dominos. Denial, though never particularly tenable, becomes more of a high-wire act every day.

Most converts should feel welcome in the political discussion about climate change; it’s a virtue to admit fault, after all. But those like Luntz—who actively furthered the climate crisis and continues to refuse to admit it—should be shunned. They have no practical use in the extremely urgent effort to solve global warming. They helped to break the world, and thus can’t be trusted to help fix it.