The Real Hoax: Why Climate Denial Persists—and Who Profits from the Delay

How Climate Denial Fuels Profit, Power, and the Politics of Collapse

James B. Greenberg

May 06, 2025

Trump’s climate denial isn’t a lapse in judgment. It’s a calculated defense of an industry that knows exactly what it’s doing. His “drill baby drill” mantra, his war on renewables, his rollbacks of environmental safeguards—they all serve one purpose: to extend the life of fossil fuel profits for as long as possible. And time is running out. Clean energy is getting cheaper, more efficient, and harder to ignore. The fossil fuel industry sees the endgame, which is why it’s racing to extract every last dollar before the transition becomes irreversible.

They know climate change is real. They’ve studied it, modeled it, planned for it. But the costs—flooded homes, scorched forests, broken supply chains, failed harvests—aren’t borne by them. They’re externalities, passed down to workers, taxpayers, and the world’s poorest. Meanwhile, the profits remain privatized and protected. That’s the business model. And Trump’s policies aren’t about protecting the future—they’re about protecting that model.

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Anthropology teaches us to look beyond slogans and ask who benefits, and at whose expense. Fossil fuel corporations—like the empires before them—have always relied on sacrifice zones: regions, ecosystems, and populations written off as expendable. Whole communities have been displaced, polluted, and poisoned in the name of growth. Fossil fuels didn’t just power industrial society—they shaped a way of life defined by extraction, inequality, and the illusion of limitless consumption.

And that way of life has become deeply embedded in American politics. What’s being defended in Trump’s rhetoric isn’t just oil or coal—it’s a fantasy of freedom built on domination of land, labor, and resources. It’s the myth that prosperity requires no limits, that nature is there to be used, that anyone who questions this order is a threat. Climate denial has never really been about facts. It’s about defending a worldview—racialized, nostalgic, and aggressively anti-regulation—where fossil fuels stand as symbols of power, independence, and divine entitlement.

But the cost of maintaining that illusion is rising fast. We’re already paying it: in megafires that burn through suburbs, in seas swallowing coastlines, in aquifers running dry, and insurance markets breaking under the strain. The poorest communities suffer first, but the damage is spreading. Ecosystems are collapsing. Crop yields are falling. Migration is accelerating. Entire regions are becoming uninsurable. To pretend this isn’t happening is no longer just delusion. It’s a death spiral.

And still, they shout “drill.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. We have the technology. We have the science. What we lack is the political will. A real plan would start by ending subsidies to fossil fuel companies and reinvesting in public infrastructure for the energy transition: wind, solar, geothermal, energy storage, modernized transmission. It would electrify transit, retrofit homes and buildings, and ensure that clean energy is accessible to everyone—not just the wealthy. It would create jobs that are tied not to extraction, but to regeneration. That’s what a just transition really means—not slogans, but systems change.

But we won’t get there through facts alone. We need a movement that reclaims the story. That says clean air and clean water are not luxuries. That a stable climate is not a partisan cause. That climate justice and economic justice are not separate fights, but one and the same. If we treat this like just another policy debate, we’ll lose. If we treat it as a defining test of what kind of future we want—and who gets to belong in it—we still have a chance.

Because the real hoax isn’t climate change. It’s pretending we can survive without changing.

Suggested readings:

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014.

Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso, 2016.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Park, Thomas K., and James B. Greenberg, eds. Terrestrial Transformations: Political Ecology of Our Planetary Crisis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.