Do western publics make ‘demands’ for environmental policy that they have no desire to see enacted? The thesis that they do has been put forward recently by advocates of the ‘post-ecologist’ paradigm such as Ingolfur Blühdorn. Taking the example of climate change, this article assesses survey results that provide indicative evidence that such ‘simulative’ demands may exist. I suggest that such demands are, however, best explained through conceptual tools available from game-theoretic and rational-actor models of political behaviour, in particular rational ignorance and rational irrationality, rather than with the societal-level accounts preferred by Blühdorn and others.