https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/climate-turning-point
By JOHN H. COCHRANE – The Grumpy Economist
Excerpt:
Three excellent essays last month point to a turning point in climate with, I think, a broad political ramification. As people come to the realization that this boy shouted wolf once again, that this emperor has no clothes, that climate change though real is not the civilization-threatening disaster pitched at Davos, Paris, and the media, that hugely expensive climate policies do no good, they will just add one more notch to their view that the elite consensus has been disastrously wrong and politicized about just about everything, and one more impetus to our current global rightward political lurch into the unknown.
The essay that motivates this post is a surprise admission from the New York Times that not all is well, in the form of a magazine article by David Wallace-Wells. Yes search “climate” on the New York Times website, as I did to find the story, and you will be served up the usual sludge of misleading catastrophism. (“Wildfire Smoke Will Kill Thousands More by 2050, Study Finds. Pollution from fires, intensified by rising temperatures, is on track to become one of America’s deadliest climate disasters”; “Can Hybrid Grapes Solve the Climate Change Dilemma for Wine Makers?”; “The Trump Administration Is Dismantling Climate Policies… it flatly denies the science.”;…) But you will also be served this thoughtful essay. When the church starts to doubt the catechism, you know the game is up.
The way we were
Wallace-Wells does a good job reminding us just how the center of opinion has shifted in 10 years, and how weird 10 years ago looks to us now.
Barack Obama, applauding the agreement as president, declared that Paris represented “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.”…To many, it looked like the promise of a whole new era, not just for the climate but also for our shared political future on this earth. Back then, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, liked to talk about how sustainability would be for this century what human rights was for the previous one — the basis for a new moral and political order.
At Glasgow,
John Kerry called the conference “the last best hope for the world,” and Prince Charles — now king of Britain — described it as “literally the last-chance saloon.” In his opening remarks, Boris Johnson, then the British prime minister — a conservative, of course, who surfed into office on the nativist tide of Brexit — warned, “It’s one minute to midnight on that Doomsday Clock, and we need to act now.”
How quaint this all seems now.
He documents just how climate became a political and moral cause, not a scientific or technical one, and thus sowed the seeds of its demise once people figured that out.
..the [climate] crisis seemed to offer a kind of redemptive opportunity to the whole technocratic liberal elite, whose social status and moral claim on leadership had somewhat crumbled since the financial crisis. …with the global war on terror long since dissipated into tragic farce and a new Cold War not yet well crystallized in the public imagination, the American-led global order seemed to be missing some sense of purpose, too. Here came the existential project of climate action to fill that semi-spiritual void, at least for some of those who felt it.
The illusions of secular stagnation, stimulus, industrial policy, and free government debt helped
.Looking around for places to invest, a green transition seemed like one obvious choice, which is why anyone trying to blue-sky a brighter economic future for Europe invariably proposed huge increases in clean-energy investment and why American progressives conceived their ideal form of climate action at the scale and scope of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
And, a remarkable (for the Times) admission
There were also moralistic, or quasi-moralistic, elements. In the years following Paris came more and more talk of climate justice… This was just one of many similar reckonings with systemic social inequities in those years, and a green transition may have looked to world leaders like a more appealing and forward-focused way of expiating white guilt than, say, portioning out reparations for centuries of slavery or colonialism.
…rapid warming looked to some like comeuppance for cultural decadence and consumerist excess, with climate attaining sometimes apocalyptic features of a theological morality play
When a technocratic carbon dioxide reduction merged in to the great unicause; when the mantle of “science” was wrapped around de-growth, socialism, decolonization, and, to the almost comical extreme of Greta Thunberg’s flotilla of climate justice Hamas supporters, the median voter was sure to figure it out sooner or later.
As another example of that still mindset, still existent but accounting for the political demise of this project, Wallace-Wells writes
several of the most prominent architects of the whole diplomatic process that led to Paris published an open letter declaring the agreement’s architecture out of date and in need of major reforms.
I followed the link, which is a fascinating peek in to the part of the world that has not shifted in 10 years. The letterhead is “Club of Rome.” Yes that Club of Rome. You remember, overpopulation, crop failure, resource exhaustion, Soylent green, just around the corner? Most is uninteresting, but this is telling:
6. Recognise the interdependencies between poverty, inequality and planetary instability
New research from the Earth Commission and from Earth4All affirms the important linkages between ecological and social change processes. If the climate COP is to be more impactful, it must acknowledge that the current rate of nature loss (e.g. freshwater scarcity, land and soil degradation, pollination decline, ocean pollution) is affecting the stability of the planet. Moreover, planetary stability, now at grave risk, is impossible without decisive action on equality, justice and poverty alleviation. This is why we call for a Climate-Poverty Policy Envoy to ensure that these critical links are anchored in the negotiations and implementation actions, especially through dedicated spaces for vulnerable communities to advocate for these linkages.
My emphasis. Now I happen to agree that a huge cost of climate catastrophism has been lack of attention to pressing environmental problems, from plastics in the oceans to species extinction to air and water quality in poor countries. They “affect the planet.” But they don’t have anything to do with climate. The emphasized sentence is exactly how the cause lost the sensible middle. “Science,” which anyone who disagrees must be a “denier” of, now tells us that planetary temperature reduction requires “decisive action on equality, justice and poverty alleviation” — the latter through “dedicated spaces for vulnerable communities to advocate” whatever that means, not through the mechanism that has drastically reduced global poverty in our lifetimes, namely capitalist and fossil-fueled economic development.
As one indication of the mindset, HR McMaster tells in his book about being National Security Adviser under Trump 1.0 that previous advisers all counseled him, privately, that the US #1 security problem is… the climate crisis! Not China, Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation,
Today
A decade later, we are living in a very different world. At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP29)… there were few world leaders to be found. Joseph R. Biden, then still president, didn’t show. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris or President Xi Jinping of China or President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission. Neither did President Emmanuel Macron of France, often seen as the literal face of Western liberalism, or President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, often seen as the face of an emergent movement of solidarity across the poor and middle-income wor
The sense that the Great Cause is over is documentable
The retreat from climate politics has been widespread, even in the midst of a global green-energy boom. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year, according to the energy analyst Nat Bullard. In 2023, the number dropped under 200. In 2024, it was only 50 or so.
To our north, the former central banker Mark Carney … as his very first act in office struck down the country’s carbon tax, before storming to a landslide victory in the April election
(though that had a bit to do with Trump Tariffs. Pierre Polievre, who campaigned on “axe the tax” was set to win also by a landslide before “liberation day.” As with the Times though, that the former Central Banker for Climate at the Bank of England turns around is perhaps more significant.)
To our south, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, a former climate scientist, has invoked the principle of “energy sovereignty” and boasted of booming oil and gas production in her country — and enjoys one of the highest approval ratings of any elected leader anywhere in the world.
“What changed?” asks Wallace-Wells?
…In short, everything but the science, which continued to generate grim warnings about the speed and consequences of temperature rise even as the fever of climate panic appeared to subside.
The science did not change, but Wallace-Wells seems to miss what the actual science says. More on that later. He is more interesting on the social and political changes. A moral crusade runs out of steam faster than a scientific one.
at first, we got the pandemic…[which] seemed eventually to undermine the spirit of global solidarity that lay beneath the broader project. Climate protest almost disappeared, and when it returned a few years later, the numbers were much smaller, the reception much chillier. Climate activists were once venerated as moral authorities by heads of state and a broadly liberal mass media; now they are being given jail sentences stretching multiple years for the crime of merely planning protests that might block up commuter traffic or for throwing paint against plexiglass they knew would protect the artwork hung behind it — a victimless publicity stunt if ever there was one.
I think this misses the point. The pandemic taught people that there might be other more pressing existential threats than a degree of heat in 100 years. The pandemic taught people that another branch of “scientific” consensus was incompetent and polticized. No “science” did not recommend masking 2 year olds outside. And “the pandemic” coincided with George Floyd, and the unicause moving on to a several-year obsession with race, decolonization, diversity, and gender.
…
The “climate crisis” has been taught as gospel for 20 years. Now the average person can see their teachers have been preaching politics in the name of science. The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth—exactly as degrowthers wish—and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate. They will discover their stagnation, wonder that maybe air conditining now will address heat waves more than deindustialization in the hope of a somewhat less warm planet in 100 years. California voters can scratch their heads at the assertion that the way to mitigate wildfires, rather than forest management, is to force everyone to buy an electric car, which will make the planet only a tiny bit less warmer than it is already in100 years.
And they will ask who did this to us? Greta Thunberg was perfectly rational. If the world is going to end in 10 years from climate change and zero emissions degrowth and decolonization is the only answer, well we’d better get on it no? She was just the only one in her class who believed what she was being told. The others are now voting for right wing parties.
…
Full article here: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/climate-turning-point
On the climate scam, great stuff from John Cochrane:
"…the elite consensus has been disastrously wrong and politicized about just about everything
When the church starts to doubt the catechism, you know the game is up.
The sense that the Great Cause is over is documentable" https://t.co/vTBPkgyho6
— Tom Nelson (@TomANelson) September 21, 2025
