As Europe bakes in record breaking heat, an assortment of rightwing politicians, social conservatives and Trumpian fossil-fuel executives gathered in London to play down the threat of climate change.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) conference claimed to bring together over 4,000 people from around 100 countries, including controversial figures such as columnist Melanie Phillips, US energy secretary Chris Wright, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and his head of policy James Orr.

Arc, now in its third year, has been described as “Glastonbury for climate science deniers, Trump acolytes, manosphere enthusiasts and nihilists in general” and the “anti-woke Davos”. It was founded by Canadian intellectual and carnivore Jordan Peterson and Sir Paul Marshall, owner of GB News. It is funded by Legatum Ventures, a Dubai-based investment group, and has previously received funding from a host of fossil fuel interests.

The attendees, who had paid up to £1,500 for a ticket, were a well-heeled and international crowd. There were anti-abortion activists, far-right influencers and Christian Zionists on delegation from Israel (“I’m still on Jerusalem time!” one told me before heading off to get a coffee).

“It’s all about the networking,” said one attendee, declining to give his name. “I think the purpose is to shift the dial. You notice that things that were being talked about at Arc three years ago, Westminster is now talking about.”

But Arc’s reach isn’t limited to SW1. Luke Torry, a 50-year-old doctor who had travelled from Perth, Australia, to attend the event with his son, told Novara Media: “Last year I watched the conference online and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I felt, ‘I have to be here’. I want to shake the hands of the people who have done the work to tell them they are having an effect 15,000km away.”

The glue binding Arc attendees together seemed to be western chauvinism and a belief in “Judeo-Christian values”. “We are turning against our own values,” Torry said. “We look at colonialism and only focus on the negative. We look at patriarchy… We look at racism…. We forget the extraordinary advances that western civilisation has made… Much better than any other civilisation that’s ever existed.”

The event intended to help turn this shift around, and set out a positive vision for the future. “Decline is not inevitable. Life can be a glorious adventure,” Baroness Philippa Stroud – a Tory peer and executive chair of Arc – wrote in the conference programme. Based on the content of the speeches made, this vision was also one of “family values” – including scepticism around same-sex parenting and “trans ideology” – and accepting the reality of climate change with a casual shrug of the shoulders.

The question of the climate seemed inescapable. Travel to the first day of the conference was delayed for many as much of the train network in London had been disrupted following a portentous thunder storm, which caused housefires and flooding. Elsewhere in Europe, France endured its hottest ever day, while Italy told construction workers and delivery riders to pause work due to extreme temperatures. Met Office scientists predicted London could see highs of 45 degrees by 2056.

Meanwhile, at Arc, speaker after speaker made jokes about how air-conditioning is the pinnacle of western civilisation. Complimentary copies of the Spectator magazine carried the strapline: “The end of the climate cult”. A leaflet from lobbying group the Great British Business Council said: “Oil refining produces the products we use every day,” including things such as the waterproof jacket, the carbon fibre bicycle and the ballistic missile.

Rightwing figures competed to lambast politicians seen to have tried to address the climate crisis. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch laid into energy secretary Ed Miliband, saying there is a “villain in Britain’s deindustrialisation… His name is Ed Miliband and he has made our country poorer.”

“I say to young people: ‘The hope is coming’,” Badenoch told attendees, promising to “bring common sense back” – meaning repealing the Climate Change Act 2008, which legally requires the UK to achieve a net-zero economy by 2050.

Farage, in turn, blamed the Conservatives. Asked how he would kickstart productivity in the UK economy, he said: “Energy, energy, energy, energy, energy,” – (perhaps channelling Tony Blair’s “education, education, education”). Farage then said: “The idiotic path: vote blue, go green. That was the Tories.

“They even wrote net-zero into law, and they shouldn’t be forgiven for it, in my opinion.”

Undoing policies to mitigate climate change is crucial to the right’s vision of the future. Toby Rice, CEO of gas producer EQT Corporation, called “energy abundance” a “wrecking ball that will knock down the wall of poverty” as opposed to “energy scarcity”. “Demand the benefits of abundance,” he told Arc.

This is how the right is reframing climate chaos. While the green left has tried to create a positive vision for a future of mitigating climate change – a just transition, green jobs, cheap renewable energy, more community – actually-existing government policies to tackle climate change have happened in a context of economic stagnation, declining living standards and a cost of living crisis. The situation is ripe for a backlash – and the right is keen to create one. The Tories’ rare victory in a recent Aberdeen byelection, where the party centred concerns over job losses from the city’s declining offshore drilling industry, suggests that it’s a strategy that could have some success.

Chris Barnard, president of the American Conservation Coalition who serves on the youth advisory council of the US Republican party, told Arc young people had been demotivated by climate doomerism.

“Most young people don’t want to be associated with the people blocking traffic or throwing soup at paintings,” Barnard said. “It’s an opportunity for us to inject a new narrative that is laced with hope and takes them away from all the anxiety that they’ve been fed.”

This is not just climate denial. It’s energymaxxing and hopemogging – a delusional vision of the future. In the event of an extreme heatwave, relax and turn up the air-con. Don’t worry about your electricity bills – more fracking will sort them out. And if fracking makes climate change worse and there are more heatwaves, just turn the air-con up another notch.

As the conference centre’s own air-con struggled and we became uncomfortably hot, I could only think of the meme of the dog sitting in a burning house, saying “this is fine”.

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