What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?

"What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" is a cartoon by Joel Pett featuring an attendee at a climate summit arguing against addressing global warming in the face of the many environmental benefits.

The cartoon, which first appeared in USA Today in December of 2009,^[1] around the time of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, depicts a conference presenter listing the many advantages of curbing climate change including "energy independence, preserving rainforests, sustainability, green jobs, livable cities, renewables, clean water/air, healthy children, etc., etc.," only to have a climate change denier interject that if it were all a hoax, we'd create a "better world for nothing".^[2] Shortly after the conference was over, Pett got a request for a signed copy from former EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson, who framed the comic and put it on her wall. Pett has repeatedly gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups, in the United States, Canada and Europe to use the cartoon in campaigns. The Australian Greens used it in a campaign which resulted in the Australian parliament adopting the most rigorous carbon tax regime of any country in the world.^[3]

"I've drawn 7,000 cartoons in my life, but really only one," Pett said. "It's an example of one of these ideas I had in my head for 10 years before I realized I hadn't cartooned it...I was thinking, you know, 'It doesn't matter if global warming were a hoax, if the scientists made it up, we still have to do all that shit.'"^[4] Pett said in a 2012 editorial that in the 27 months since its first publication, not a week had gone by where he didn't have a request to use the image.^[2]

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