There’s no need to wor­ry about reduc­ing the green­house gas­es dri­ving cli­mate change — all that car­bon diox­ide is actu­al­ly ​“green­ing the plan­et.” The Green New Deal, on the oth­er hand, would send the coun­try back to the stone age, or at least the pre-indus­tri­al era. Those were among the eye-pop­ping and often-con­flict­ing views expressed yes­ter­day at the Heart­land Institute’s 13th Inter­na­tion­al Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence, a gath­er­ing of cli­mate change deniers that took place at the Trump Hotel in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., just blocks from the White House.

Panelists argued that the fossil fuel industry is under unfair attack, while the Green New Deal is a totalitarian communist plot to steal American liberties and cast the world into “energy poverty.”

The vast major­i­ty of the world’s cli­mate sci­en­tists agree that cli­mate change could prove dev­as­tat­ing to life as we know it unless we take swift and sweep­ing action to decar­bonize the econ­o­my . But those ​“wild pre­dic­tions have been pro­nounced­ly exag­ger­at­ed,” accord­ing to the British gad­fly Lord Christo­pher Mon­ck­ton, who holds the title 3rd Vis­count Mon­ck­ton of Brenchley.

One of the more col­or­ful fig­ures in the cli­mate denial uni­verse, Mon­ck­ton ticked off a list of prob­lems sci­en­tists have linked to cli­mate change that Mon­ck­ton says we real­ly don’t need to wor­ry about. Accord­ing to him, the world is see­ing less, not more, drought; sea lev­els are falling not ris­ing; for­est fires are caus­ing less dam­age; hur­ri­cane activ­i­ty is decreas­ing, too; and car­bon diox­ide is actu­al­ly improv­ing the glob­al envi­ron­ment by ​“green­ing” places like Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. ​“That’s why we need more CO2, because it greens the plan­et,” he declared.

Oth­er con­fer­ence pan­elists joined Mon­ck­ton in cycling through a series of the­o­ries long debunked by peer-reviewed sci­ence. Some believe, like Mon­ck­ton, that car­bon diox­ide lev­els in the atmos­phere are grow­ing but pro­vide more ben­e­fits than threats. (One Her­itage Foun­da­tion offi­cial went so far as to sug­gest car­bon diox­ide emit­ters should get paid a sub­sidy rather than face the kind of car­bon tax scheme pol­i­cy­mak­ers have dis­cussed; of course, the oil indus­try already does receive bil­lions in sub­si­dies.) Oth­ers argued that CO2 lev­els are in fact not ris­ing, while still oth­ers say we should be more con­cerned about a com­ing ice age.

“The real prob­lem is we have a lot more to wor­ry about with glob­al cool­ing than with glob­al warm­ing,” said Rodger Bezdek, an ener­gy ana­lyst and Heart­land pol­i­cy advisor.

If the speak­ers and audi­ence mem­bers don’t all agree on why we shouldn’t wor­ry about cli­mate change, the few hun­dred peo­ple assem­bled in a hotel ball­room yes­ter­day do share a num­ber of oth­er ideas: chiefly, that the fos­sil fuel indus­try is under unfair attack and deserves pub­lic sup­port, while the Green New Deal is a total­i­tar­i­an com­mu­nist plot to steal Amer­i­can lib­er­ties and cast the world into ​“ener­gy poverty.”

Kevin D. Dayarat­na, a senior sta­tis­ti­cian at the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, told the audi­ence the Left had already begun to take con­trol of the coun­try and would con­tin­ue its author­i­tar­i­an advance with a Green New Deal.

On the sur­face, times would seem to be good for Heart­land and the cli­mate change denial move­ment, with the world’s most promi­nent cli­mate change denier liv­ing in the White House. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has run with many of this group’s long­time demands such as with­draw­ing the Unit­ed States from the Unit­ed Nations’ Paris cli­mate accord and rolling back Oba­ma-era pol­lu­tion rules.

But the evi­dence has nev­er been stronger that cli­mate change is already hap­pen­ing and will have increas­ing­ly cat­a­stroph­ic impacts on human civ­i­liza­tion (not to men­tion oth­er species) unless the world takes action. Mean­while, the sur­pris­ing­ly fierce rise of chil­dren activists demand­ing cli­mate action has boost­ed pub­lic con­cern world­wide and helped sweep pro­gres­sive politi­cians sup­port­ing a Green New Deal into U.S. Congress.

This may be part of why cli­mate denial­ists (who pre­fer to be called ​“cli­mate real­ists”) appear to be strug­gling to remain rel­e­vant and attract younger fol­low­ers. Yesterday’s speak­ers and audi­ence mem­bers were over­whelm­ing­ly old, white and male. After the first pan­el ses­sion, there were so many white-haired men wait­ing for the men’s room that a long line snaked out the door, past the gold-plat­ed trash bins embossed with the Trump name. The line for the women’s room, by con­trast, was sig­nif­i­cant­ly shorter.

To recruit younger gen­er­a­tions, one audi­ence mem­ber sug­gest­ed warn­ing them that Green New Deal sup­port­ers want to take their iPhones away and return the coun­try to a time before elec­tric­i­ty — nev­er mind that elec­tric­i­ty, in the form of solar and wind, is cen­tral to the Green New Deal pro­pos­al. (Of course, pan­elists and audi­ences expressed extreme skep­ti­cism about renew­ables, as well.)

Not only does the cli­mate denial move­ment appear in dan­ger of aging out, rais­ing funds is get­ting more dif­fi­cult. Tra­di­tion­al­ly fund­ed by fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies, Heartland’s oil and gas mon­ey has dried up in recent years as the sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus around cli­mate change has grown stronger, putting oil and gas com­pa­nies under pres­sure from share­hold­ers and the pub­lic to stop fund­ing groups that deny the problem.

Ear­li­er this year the lib­er­tar­i­an Cato Insti­tute dis­band­ed its cli­mate denial pro­gram, the Cen­ter for the Study of Sci­ence. And yesterday’s Heart­land con­fer­ence had few­er than half the num­ber of speak­ers and pan­elists as its first Inter­na­tion­al Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence in 2008. The num­ber of spon­sor­ing orga­ni­za­tions has also fall­en by more than half since 2008.

Despite these devel­op­ments, cli­mate change denial­ism con­tin­ues to get more than its fair share of media cov­er­age, accord­ing to an analy­sis by the Pub­lic Cit­i­zen pub­lished Wednes­day to coin­cide with the con­fer­ence. The non­prof­it con­sumer advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion found that media cov­er­age of cli­mate denial by Heart­land, Her­itage and three oth­er think tanks increased from 2014 to 2018.

“The mounds of sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence … should lead to a rad­i­cal decline in the influ­ence of cli­mate deniers in the media,” Alli­son Fish­er, out­reach pro­gram direc­tor for Pub­lic Citizen’s cli­mate pro­gram, said in a press release. ​“Amaz­ing­ly, cov­er­age of the deniers’ mes­sages has risen over the past five years as the cli­mate cri­sis has wors­ened, with much of it being uncritical.”

It seems pos­si­ble to con­ceive of a time, not all that far off in the future, when the effects of cli­mate change will become so evi­dent and fre­quent that deny­ing it’s hap­pen­ing will no longer be an option. But that’s hard­ly a com­fort­ing thought.