Leaked guestlist shows oil execs and conservatives from Canada and U.S. gathering at Jordan Peterson's conference
Canadian psychologist at the 2023 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London. Credit: Credit: ARC Forum / Flickr (CC0 1.0)
This article first appeared on DeSmog. It is reprinted here with permission.
Executives from some of the world’s biggest oil and gas firms are listed as attendees at a conservative conference in London whose keynote speakers include the leader of the Heritage Foundation – the group that published the Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term.
Representatives of BP, Koch Industries, Valero Energy, Energy Transfer and other fossil fuel producers will be at the event hosted by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), according to a leaked list of attendees viewed by DeSmog.
The three-day event, which was convened by conservative Canadian influencer Jordan Peterson, kicks off on Monday with a panel including U.S. House Republican speaker Mike Johnson and UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch.
Billed as an effort to “re-lay the foundations of civilization,” the conference will feature panels about energy and environment that are filled with prominent deniers of the climate crisis, as DeSmog has previously reported.
That includes Vivek Ramaswamy, a former contender for the U.S. Republican presidential nomination, who has referred to the “climate agenda” as a “hoax,” as well as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who has called for the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions policies to be “scrapped” entirely. President Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who has been praised by climate deniers, is also slated to speak.
Those discussions are taking place alongside speeches from right-wing leaders such as Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which led the way in creating the 922-page guide to radically transforming the U.S. government known as Project 2025.
The leaked list shows that these senior right-wing figures will be attending alongside leaders of major religious right groups closely linked to Trump, including Alliance Defending Freedom, Focus on the Family, and Family Research Council.
They will be joined by representatives of prominent climate denial organizations including the CO2 Coalition, libertarian think tanks such as the Cato Institute, right-wing Silicon Valley figures like Palantir founder Peter Thiel, and anti-immigrant European political parties like Spain’s VOX and France’s National Rally.
It might not seem like oil companies have much in common with evangelical organizations, tech ideologues, or far-right politicians. But they can all benefit from working towards a shared political vision, said Adrian Bardon, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University who has studied evangelical movements and climate denialism.
“The bigger your coalition and the stronger the solidarity within the coalition, obviously this is going to turn into political power and influence,” he told DeSmog.
ARC is backed by the UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group and British hedge fund millionaire Paul Marshall, who together own the right-wing broadcaster GB News. Marshall provided £1 million in funding to ARC in 2023, which is run by Conservative peer and UK government advisor Baroness Philippa Stroud.
Speaking to the Financial Times ahead of the conference, Marshall claimed that Britain is “going bust” in its pursuit of net zero. As revealed by DeSmog, Paul Marshall’s hedge fund held £1.8 million worth of shares in fossil fuel companies – including in oil and gas giants Chevron, Shell, and Equinor – as of June 2023. One of Marshall Wace’s biggest investors, U.S. private equity firm KKR, also has a large fossil fuel portfolio, including 188 assets in oil, gas, and coal.
Big Oil’s Presence
Thousands of people from around the world are gathering this week at the ExCel Centre in London for ARC’s 2025 conference.
Among the attendees on the list viewed by DeSmog are two executives from the U.S. oil and gas refiner Valero Energy. The list also includes Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who is registered as a consultant for the pipeline company Energy Transfer, builder of the controversial Dakota Access project. Energy Transfer is currently suing the environmental campaign group Greenpeace.
The London-based oil and gas major BP is featured on the list through its director of UK government affairs – as is Equinor UK through its principal analyst for risk management.
Equinor said that the staff member in question was attending in a personal capacity. “As a company, we do not dictate how employees spend their private time,” a spokesperson said.
The list includes four people working at the director or counsel level for Koch Inc.. The oil and gas conglomerate was founded by libertarian billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David, who have a long history of contributing to groups that dispute the existence of human-caused climate change.
Also registered for the ARC conference is a board advisor to QatarEnergy, a director of regulatory affairs for the Canadian oil sands producer CNRL, and the director of global government relations for the company Air Products, a gas and chemicals company which is involved in the liquefied natural gas industry.
These aren’t the only major corporations represented on the attendees list, which includes senior figures from AstraZeneca, Blackstone, Citadel, Deloitte, JP Morgan, KKR, Kraft Heinz, Liberty Steel, Macquarie, McKinsey, Meta, Neom, Palantir, PwC, and others.
The ARC conference once again reveals “the close links between fossil fuel companies, the far-right, and climate disinformation,” said Jolyon Maugham, executive director of the UK-based Good Law Project.
ARC declined to comment on the record.
Rubbing Shoulders With the Religious Right
Oil and gas companies, like most corporations, generally avoid publicly linking their brands to controversial cultural issues. But the corporate representatives at the ARC event are on the same attendees list as influential religious right activists that have campaigned aggressively, and successfully, against abortion and LGBTQ rights.
That includes a senior vice president with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal activist group that was responsible in 2022 for helping convince the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to an abortion. The group is reportedly expanding into the UK.
The Southern Poverty Law Center legal advocacy group argues that ADF should be deemed a “hate group because it has supported the idea that being LGBTQ+ should be a crime in the U.S. and abroad.”
Also on the ARC attendee list is an executive with the Canadian arm of Focus on the Family, a longtime religious right group that reportedly helped mobilize millions of Christian voters to cast their ballots for Donald Trump in the recent U.S. election.
That executive is registered for the ARC conference along with the vice president of policy and government affairs for the evangelical activist and political group Family Research Council, which is also designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Project 2025 Leader’s Keynote
The Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom were both official advisors to Project 2025, as were other groups represented at this year’s ARC event, including Hillsdale College and the Heartland Institute.
Project 2025 calls for a broad assault on the federal U.S. bureaucracy, including shuttering offices, repealing regulations and laying off thousands of public sector employees. This radical plan to reshape the American government was disavowed on the campaign trail by Trump but is now reportedly helping to guide his second administration.
On Monday evening a key figure behind the project, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, will give a speech at an ARC event themed around “collaborating and driving change” in the U.S., Canada and South America.
Project 2025 proposes banning contraceptive pills and “explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care”. It is full of “handouts to the oil and gas industry,” according to the U.S. non-profit Center for American Progress.
“Instead of benefitting the majority of the country, these policies would make CEOs and investors richer through exploiting the country’s natural resources,” the Center for American Progress claimed last year in an analysis of the project.
European Ties
ARC’s conference will also play host to politicians, commentators, and think tanks from across the UK and Europe.
In addition to Badenoch and Farage, the listed speakers include a number of journalists for The Spectator and GB News – conservative outlets owned by ARC patron Paul Marshall.
According to the attendees list, UK government officials will also be joining the conference – including from the Treasury, Foreign Office, and Home Office – consorting with radical right-wing politicians and campaign groups.
At least a dozen UK parliamentarians will also be attending, drawn almost entirely from the Conservative Party. Their contingent will include Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith, the influential pro-Brexit campaigner Lord Matthew Elliott, and former Health Minister Lord James Bethell.
Credit:
ARC Forum (CC0 1.0)
They will be joined by far-right politicians from the EU. The attendees will include elected representatives from radical right-wing parties based in France (National Rally), Denmark (Danish People’s Party), Estonia (Conservative People’s Party), Hungary (Fidesz), Iceland (Centre Party), Netherlands (Forum For Democracy), Norway (Progress Party), Poland (Law and Justice), Spain (Vox), and Sweden (Sweden Democrats).
The attendees list also features a former leader of the far-right German party Alternative für Deutschland.
A number of influential conservative European think tanks have sent their most senior executives to the conference, including from Poland (Ordo Iuris), and Bulgaria (Institute of Right Wing Politics), while there will be a substantial Hungarian contingent at the event.
Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) Brussels, a fossil fuel funded think tank, will be represented by its executive director, and the Budapest-based Danube Institute is planning on sending its president.
Both groups have close ties to Viktor Orbán’s far-right Hungarian government, which has severely restricted political, media, and judicial freedoms in Hungary over recent years, and is a global sponsor of anti-climate groups. The attendees list also includes one of Orbán’s senior advisors.
“Given that the fossil fuel industry wrote the book on climate denial, it’s no surprise to find its lobbyists under this particular rock,” Philip Evans, senior campaigner for Greenpeace UK told DeSmog.
“What’s more shocking is to see them hobnobbing so publicly with Nigel Farage’s pals – from Trump supporters to Europe’s far-right and religious groups who would like to see contraceptives banned and LGBTQ+ people put in prison.
“Like eager new recruits at a pyramid scheme meeting, these attendees are only out to enrich themselves and leave our communities poorer. Instead of supporting the solutions that will cut energy bills, create the jobs of the future, and ward off the very worst floods and storms, they continue to peddle outdated ideas that belong in the last millennium.”
February 17th 2025
Comments
Dembicki: "It might not seem like oil companies have much in common with evangelical organizations, tech ideologues, or far-right politicians."
On the contrary. The link between the oil industry and religion has been established for decades.
Oil is not merely a commodity, it's a religion.
"Places like Texas, Saudi Arabia and Oklahoma have interpreted the extraction of fossil fuels as an act of divine providence. They are God's people."
"Politicians Offered a Choice between Climate Fantasies as Our Future Grows Bleaker" (The Tyee, 2019)
"Fred Palmer, a career climate denier, ran the "ICE" campaign while at the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal utilities and suppliers. He later worked as Peabody Coal's Senior Vice President for Govt Relations, before joining the climate denying Heartland Institute where he runs their coal campaign. Palmer once said 'Every time you turn your car on, and you burn fossil fuels, and you put CO2 in the air, you are doing the work of the Lord'." (Desmogblog, 2018)
"Oil-patch evangelicals: How Christianity and crude fueled the rise of the American right" (Washington Post, 2019)
"Vice President Pence beamed in mid-April while touring an independent energy company's new rig in Texas. There, he heralded the 'three pillars of American greatness': faith, freedom and 'vast natural resources.' Pence promised that 'developing the vast, natural, God-given resources that we have' will make America great again.
"By invoking God, Pence tapped this oil patch's homegrown religiosity: a blend of fervent libertarianism, 'traditional' family values and religious nationalism that fuels the Republican right. This mingling of oil and faith in a fiercely individualistic wildcat ethos has long extended beyond the realm of business to shape a distinctive strain of American Christianity, one that the White House seeks to marshal for political gain.
"… Texan oilers championed a theology of personal encounter with scripture and an active Higher Being. They heralded church autonomy and gospel teachings about prosperity and end times, a message that anticipated the violent disruptions of the oil age and the need to save souls and reap God's — and the earth's — riches before the world's end.
"… Exuding an audacity that the oil patch embraced, Reagan traveled to Texas and mingled with preachers and petroleum kings, promising them that the nation would be great again as soon as Washington bureaucrats let rugged wildcatters open up new frontiers of extractive wealth and God-fearing pioneers raise their children in communities calibrated to the morals of an honorable past. In the pulpits and pews of the Southwest, Reagan's calls for Washington to protect local oil producers' rights to drill, drill, drill were a potent and effective rallying cry that has since become a staple of the Republican Party."
"The Gospel of Oil" (Boston Review, 2019)
"…the search for fossil fuels has itself long been overlaid with Christian commitment. Oil executives themselves historically have been among the most active and enthusiastic promoters of apocalyptic Christianity in the United States, their zeal to drill representing their religious passion as well as their quest for self-enrichment. Over the course of U.S. history, oil companies 'openly embraced the theological imperatives that informed their chief executives, aligned their boardrooms with biblical logics, and sacralized their operations as modes of witness and outreach.' Because of the heavy investment of the industry in religious faith, oil has become more than just a commodity or an energy source. Its 'grip on the human condition' is 'total'; it has become 'an imprint on America's soul.'"
"…Their desire to become phenomenally wealthy was often inextricable from their longing to carry out what they saw as God's work on earth."
Entire books have been written on the subject:
"Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America" (2019)
"American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" (2005)
"Andrew Scheer, a conservative Catholic, offered a rehashed version of Stephen Harper's oil evangelism, based on deregulating the fossil fuel industry, demonizing environmentalists and promoting a Matthew Effect social agenda: let those who have more already earn even more.
"Canada's petroleum evangelicals now wrap themselves in the flag and demand that we drill more with fewer regulations, even though the market is oversupplied and the climate has reached a tipping point.
"Conservation and reduced energy use are ignored.
"...Only religious fervour allows people to blindly ignore the economics of supply and demand as well as the aging nature of the west's hydrocarbon bounty. And it takes religious fervour for Alberta's oil and gas cult to ignore the red elephant in the room — $260 billion worth of leaking wells, pipelines and old gas plants that need to be cleaned up.
"...The province's biblical ardour makes it hard for the rest of Canada to understand the incessant hand-wringing and complaining in a province that has failed to collect royalties that would have given citizens fair payment for oil and gas resources; failed to save for a rainy day; and failed to manage its resources wisely."
"Politicians Offered a Choice between Climate Fantasies as Our Future Grows Bleaker" (The Tyee, 2019)
Great comments Geoffrey, much appreciate your work.
I grew up in oil-saturated Alberta with one of my parents being evangelical.
I moved out of the province in my 20s and became a secular humanist who thinks the world should electrify and diversify away from one-sided Big Brother influencers, whether from corporate boardrooms or the pulpit.
Nature or nurture? Clearly, nurture failed to mold me into forms my independent mind couldn't tolerate in adulthood.
What strikes me here is how women are lumped in with people who identify as "LGBTQ," and although throwing the latter in jail is stunning and shocking, banning the birth control pill along with outright denial of abortion and the morning after pill takes half the population back to a time when women were denied the most basic of human rights-- control over their own bodies.
Kamala Harris' slogan, "We're not going back" resonated strongly we thought, but not with the "bros" apparently. Enough of this woke DEI crap that is the societal evolution of "affirmative action," itself a result of sixties feminism, initially introduced to help women get a toehold and hopefully shake up entrenched male hegemony in business and everything else.
Subjugating women is an integral part of the patriarchy, which is itself an integral part of all religious doctrine, AND Project 2025, which people knew about before the election, but since so many are "religious," that means no one can criticize it, enabling it to stroll right into the White House.
The irony is that neither Trump or Musk are adherents, but Christian Nationalists show their true colors, i.e. never mind the teachings of Jesus, what they REALLY want is power over women in particular and infuriating non-believers in general. So in order to be OBEYED, they are quite willing to "follow many a cloven foot."
And since Trump and his ilk are as amenable to using it for control as male leaders have been all through history, it's a match made in heaven so to speak.
If only Harris and the Democrats had had something to offer people to address the outrageous inequality that they were in large part responsible for...
I wonder how it is that the whole lot of 'em haven't yet been named a terrorist organization.