In 2021, it became clear that Big Oil was ramping up its “wokewashing” efforts, co-opting the language of social justice to shore up its social license to operate. This is just a fancy way to say that the oil industry wants to look like it cares about the people it pollutes so people won’t hate them for that whole polluting thing. In the years (before and) since, we've noted wokewashing in California, Canada, and conservative media, and the latest example comes from the CO2 Coalition's Vijay Jayaraj and the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal.
As we've explained before, Jayaraj, who is from India, is a compelling spokesperson to deliver the 'energy poverty' narrative that Peabody Coal got caught pushing and that we're used to hearing from white American fossil fools like Alex Epstein. Basically, the argument says that fossil fuels are good for the developing world. (Nevermind that they're dirty, expensive, and unreliable.)
In a podcast recorded at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Jayaraj gave an oddly liberal-aimed critique of climate policy.
Echoing a recent post from fellow disinfo-spreader Bjørn Lomborg, Jayaraj said, "There is a growing sentiment among the leaders in the developing world about imperialism and reemergence of colonialism." He claimed that world leaders consider "climate alarmism" as "infringing upon the rights of the poor people" and their "hopes about having a future where they can have reliable energy access."
Now, given that CPAC attendees weren't sure what woke was last year and still aren't this year, but just know they're against it, it's a bit jarring that Jayaraj was there to give a decidedly woke pitch that American conservatives should care about the well-being of people in countries that their de facto leader considers a "shithole."
This is not to say that Jarayaj doesn't otherwise toss some red-meat-denial to the industry-funded Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal audience. He claims that there isn’t more pushback on the climate consensus from the academic community because doing so could cost people their jobs. Actually, the opposite seems to be true, as evidenced by climate denier Matthew Wielicki, who like Jordan Peterson, wasn't pushed out of academia but instead opted to leave his professor job and instead pursue the disinfluencer path.
Then Jayaraj contradicted himself, claiming that people would lose funding or their job if they questioned the climate consensus but also saying that "we do have a lot of peer-reviewed scientific journals that are not talked about in the mainstream media."
Which is it? Do researchers have to accept the consensus or lose their jobs, or are they questioning it frequently in the scientific literature and merely being misrepresented by mainstream media?
Jayaraj says that it's the latter, and "all people have to do is access Google Scholar and search for the terms that they're interested in, their [sic.] wide range of articles and scientific publications that do not agree with the current dominant climate narrative."
So we took his advice, went to Google Scholar, and put in a search term we're interested in: climate consensus. It turns out there are lots of studies confirming that scientists agree on climate change!
Then we tried another Google Scholar search: Vijay Jayaraj. No results!
It seems that even by his own metric of relying on science and not biased media, no one should bother taking Jayaraj's wokewashing seriously.