A Climate Sermon in Drag
Recent HEATED Article Encapsulates the Woke Religion Taxonomy Almost Perfectly
A recent article published in HEATED, titled “Fossil Fuel Billionaires Are Bankrolling the Anti-Trans Movement”, is many things: a conspiracy theory, a piece of activist “journalism,” and a religious cultural artifact of these insane, yet hopefully waning, times.
Do be sure to read to the end, because there’s at least a photo of a cute (planet-killing) puppy.
This article is a near-perfect illustration of the first three categories in the Woke Religion Taxonomy created by
and Michael Shellenberger.
The HEATED piece insists that fossil fuel billionaires and conservative Christian organizations are not just opposed to climate regulation but are actively promoting anti-trans legislation as a distraction.
The evidence is speculative, the logic circular, and the emotional pitch intense.
It’s also incredibly one-sided, given the billions in dark NGO money both the climate catastrophist groups and the trans pharmaceutical industrial complex contribute.
Given that much of their reporting focuses on Colorado (RMI is also “based” in Colorado), it’s further ironic they don’t mention the massive Progressive Colonist dark money takeover that’s turned that state upside-down.
Colorado is also ground zero for not just climate crisis hysteria, but also the transinsanity, interestingly enough funded by the same dark money groups.
It further fuses climate catastrophism with trans and racial identity politics into one unified moral theology, with fossil fuels, gender binaries, and political “conservatism” as all agents of evil—and salvation comes only through ritualistic affirmation of progressive orthodoxy.
It also encapsulates much of what Andy West said in The Grip of Culture, which provides a social-psychological model for how cultural entities form, spread, and dominate rational discourse—especially in the climate domain.
West sees the same trends too in what he calls genderism.
Here are a few spicy highlights.
Sacred Victimhood and the Canonization of Trans Identity
From the article:
The oil and gas industry uses its dirty money to harm trans folks, some of the people most vulnerable to climate change impacts.
Here, trans people are not only victims of discriminatory policy, but also elevated to the frontline victims of climate collapse.
This is not based on data or epidemiology, but on emotive assertion. The sanctification of trans identity is evident — it is no longer a civil rights issue but in Sowellian terms - a cosmic injustice- where harm against them resonates on a spiritual scale.
West explains that cultural entities often work by establishing a hierarchy of approval: some groups are cast as inherently virtuous victims whose suffering confers moral legitimacy, while others are branded as inherently suspect or evil.
Trans individuals, in this framework, become canonized saints of the new moral order — invulnerable to criticism and always righteous. The climate hysterics have moved The Holy Greta (عَلَيْهَا ٱلسَّلَام) aside and now focus on a new sacred victim.
Apocalyptic Eschatology
“Even if you were unmoved by the humanity, just at a purely tactical political level, the opposition to climate action is using anti-trans rhetoric to build its base,” said Philip Newell, the other researcher who is the communications working group co-chair for the Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition, which organizes against disinformation and misinformation on climate change. “If you want climate action, you’re going to have to fight back.”
That line, buried late in the article, contains the full emotional payload. This is not just about policy anymore. It’s a call to spiritual war with the State as their Supreme Diety. Climate action and trans affirmation are now co-dependent conditions for salvation.
If you don’t fight the right culture wars, you can’t save the planet.
In West’s analysis, this is a classic example of a "catastrophist narrative" — a story structure that invokes doom to mobilize belief. The emotional freight carried by climate collapse is now yoked to the “trans rights” movement, effectively uniting two disparate causes under a shared eschatology.
This strategy isn’t just emotionally potent; it’s strategically unfalsifiable.
If the world ends, they were right.
If it doesn’t, it’s because we didn’t believe hard enough.
Moral Dualism and Demonology
Keeping trans people in the margins is the whole point, though. The fossil fuel industry has a vested interest in maintaining the cultural status quo: the white-picket fence in the suburbs where the white wife stays home to take care of her white kids and her white husband drives to work in his gas-guzzling car.
Queer families, especially queer families of color, don’t fit this image.
In this framing, there is no room for good-faith disagreement against degrowth, unreliable energy, sterilizing children, unfair competition in women’s sports, etc, and they insert another canon of the Woke Religion into the fire - race.
The Koch brothers, Phil Anschutz, and other “conservative Christian” donors aren’t just wrong (and of course racist)—they are agents of moral corruption, funding hate to protect their planetary destruction racket. The HEATED “journalists” of course leave out the masses who disagree with their cult - regular working class people of all origins of life and thought.
Andy West explains that cultural narratives polarize their participants into heroes and villains, removing nuance. This is what makes cultural belief systems so difficult to debate: anyone outside the belief system is morally tainted.
The fossil fuel industry isn’t just profit-seeking; it is a demonic institution working to enforce transphobia, patriarchy, white supremacy, and climate collapse all in one breath.
Gnostic Revelation and Hidden Truth
The fossil fuel industry has a real interest in funding panic over transgender people: It distracts the public from the very real and ongoing risks that climate change creates.
This is the classic gnostic claim: there is a hidden order behind the chaos, and only the enlightened few can see it. The HEATED article positions its authors and sources as those who have uncovered the web of deception Q-Anon/Blue-Anon-style linking fossil fuel money and anti-trans rhetoric.
This isn’t journalism.
It’s revelation.
And like all revelation, it’s not subject to empirical challenge. Such belief systems gain traction not through scientific inquiry, or philosophical arguments, but by providing compelling emotional narratives that reward believers with exclusive access to moral truth.
Intersectionality as Totalizing Theology
If we care about climate, we’re going to have to care about trans rights.
This is perhaps the most revealing line in the article. It’s not a plea for alliance or empathy—it’s a doctrinal requirement based on the woke tenant of intersectionality. The intersectional worldview doesn’t allow for modular belief. You can’t just be a climate advocate; you must also affirm every tenet of gender ideology, racial equity, land acknowledgment, and so forth.
This is the fusion strategy of cultural entities, where movements blend their causes into a single, emotionally coherent narrative. The result seeks not to broaden coalitions, which one would think need be necessary to solve a global issue, but instead it mandates orthodoxy.
Either you affirm it all, or you're part of the problem.
Final Benediction
What the HEATED article ultimately reveals is that we’re not dealing with policy or persuasion, but dogma and denunciation. This isn’t a conversation; it’s a confessional booth—except only one of us is allowed to talk, and the other must self-flagellate with a combination of pronouns in bio, composting, and with a daily two-minutes hate against the cis-white-petroarchy.
The sacramental elements have been served: one part fossil fuel demonology, one part trans sanctification, all sprinkled liberally with apocalyptic urgency and the blood of carbon-spewing infidels.
Andy West’s warning was apt: when cultural belief systems mimic religion but deny they are religions, they wield the fervor of crusades without the self-awareness of catechism. The result is a deeply irrational moral monoculture that asks not for your ideas, but for your repentance.
Crazy to an entirely different degree…. It must be hard to find enough legitimate readers to even justify publishing that garbage. Paid for by NGO money I’m guessing?? Who else would “buy” into that nonsense.
Wow. I'm flabbergasted by the display of juvenile idiocy the authors of the trans/climate change buzzword collection put forth. Anyone that buys into one single bit of that garbage is totally batshit crazy.
I wonder if they know that 99 percent of medicines produced, including some of their vaunted hormone blockers, I'm sure, can only be manufactured because of fossil fuels?