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Morano (dis) Honored as one of Newsweek’s ’50 Most Prominent Climate Heretics’ – Joins Gates, Bezos, Musk & Rogan in mag’s list – Nov. 4, 2026

https://www.newsweek.com/revenge-of-climate-heretics-50-leading-eco-policy-dissenters-12651706

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

Excerpt:

Marc Morano

Morano worked for Rush Limbaugh, then ran communications for Senator James Inhofe, a prominent opponent of climate regulation. In 2009, he founded Climate Depot, a website challenging mainstream climate science and policy. In 2016, he produced the documentary Climate Hustle, which called climate change a scientific con.

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By Christopher Roberts – Global Publishing Editor
Excerpt: 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.
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Sampling of other entries: 
Bill Gates
The Microsoft co-founder wrote How to Avoid a Climate Disaster in 2021. Early in 2025, Breakthrough Energy, the climate investment group he founded in 2015, cut its policy and advocacy staff in the United States and Europe. That October, days before COP30 in Brazil, he published a memo arguing that climate change will not lead to humanity’s demise and that improving human welfare should take priority over temperature and emissions targets. Trump claimed it as a victory on Truth Social.
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Mark Carney
As U.N. special envoy on climate action and finance, Carney launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero in 2021. At its peak, its members claimed $130 trillion in assets. His 2021 book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, argued that markets had failed to price the climate crisis. Yet on his first day as prime minister of Canada, in March 2025, he signed the order ending its consumer carbon tax. In October 2025, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, part of the network he built, voted to shut down. Weeks later, he signed an agreement with Alberta to advance a new oil pipeline to the Pacific coast.
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Larry Fink
In his 2020 letter to chief executives, the CEO and chairman of BlackRock wrote that climate risk is investment risk. In January 2025, the world’s largest asset manager withdrew from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative. The initiative suspended its activities days later. Texas and other Republican-led states had pulled billions of dollars of public money from BlackRock over its climate positions. In 2023, Fink said he had stopped using the term ESG because it had been “weaponized.”

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Lee Zeldin

As a New York congressman, Zeldin joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. As Environmental Protection Agency administrator, he rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding, the legal basis for federal limits on greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and factories. In March 2025, he announced 31 deregulatory actions in a single day.

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Elon Musk

Musk built Tesla on a mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. In 2017, he quit Trump’s business advisory councils in protest at the first withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. In his August 2024 livestream with Trump, however, he said the transition could take 50 to 100 years and argued that the oil and gas industry should not be vilified.

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Jeff Bezos

The Amazon founder has pledged $10 billion to fight climate change, yet his larger worldview rejects the environmental politics of scarcity. His answer to humanity’s ecological problem is not retreat but technological abundance: cleaner energy, enormous innovation and ultimately an economy expanding beyond Earth. The Bezos Earth Fund has already awarded $2.4 billion across 371 grants, making Bezos one of the clearest exponents of the idea that prosperity and environmental protection need not conflict.14. Jeff Bezos

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Judith Curry

Curry chaired the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech for more than a decade before resigning her tenured post in 2017, citing the politicization of her field. In 2025, she joined Steven Koonin on the DOE working group whose report was published in support of the proposed repeal of the endangerment finding. She now leads the Climate Forecast Applications Network.Judith Curry

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Bjørn Lomborg

Lomborg is a former Greenpeace member who accepts that warming is real and caused by humans. His argument has been about money: that adaptation, innovation and development deliver more than emissions cuts. His 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, led a Danish scientific-dishonesty committee to rule against him in 2003. The Danish science ministry later overturned the ruling. A 2025 academic study credits his work with shifting the debate toward cost and prioritization, while noting extensive scientific criticism of his interpretations.

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Roger Pielke Jr.

In 2015, Representative Raúl Grijalva sent a letter to Pielke’s university seeking information about his funding. The inquiry followed Pielke’s congressional testimony that disaster losses had not risen because of climate change once growth in wealth and population was accounted for. He remains a prominent critic of claims linking individual extreme weather disasters to climate change. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder and writes the newsletter The Honest Broker.Roger Pielke Jr.

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Steven Koonin

Koonin was BP’s chief scientist before Barack Obama appointed him undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy. His 2021 book, Unsettled, challenged how climate science is presented to the public. In 2025, he coauthored a DOE report arguing that the dangers of greenhouse gases had been overstated. He has also served as provost of Caltech.Steven Koonin

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Joe Rogan

In January 2020, Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders, who was campaigning on the Green New Deal. His podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, among the most popular in the world, has repeatedly hosted climate skeptics, including multiple appearances by the writer Randall Carlson. Analysis of leading U.S. online shows has identified Rogan among the prominent figures circulating misleading climate claims. His Spotify deal, renewed in October, was reported to be worth an estimated $250 million.

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