By Valerie Richardson – The Washington Times –
Excerpt: Climate-change activists haven’t run out of steam yet, but the formerly red-hot movement is looking increasingly gassed.
President Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the global-warming apparatus as he supercharges oil-and-gas development; Europe is walking back its net-zero emissions targets; and climate guru Bill Gates shook the movement last year by repudiating its “doomsday” scenarios.
Even Greta Thunberg has moved on.
The world’s best-known climate activist has pivoted to other causes such as the Gaza War, before reemerging last month as an ardent defender of the communist Castro regime in Cuba.
What happened? Lee Zeldin, Environmental Protection Agency administrator, gave a hat-tip Wednesday to the crowd at the Heartland Institute’s 16th International Conference on Climate Change, an annual gathering of climate skeptics and realists.
“This morning and today, all of you gathered here in D.C., is a moment to celebrate,” Mr. Zeldin told attendees at the sold-out conference, titled “Climate Realism Rising.”
“It is a day to celebrate vindication,” he proclaimed.
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Critics of the climate movement argue that the issue is collapsing under its own weight after 20 years of dire warnings and trillions of dollars spent on reducing emissions with virtually no measurable impact on global temperatures.
Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot, a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, said that the administration has been “the most consequential dismantler of the entire climate agenda since its inception.”
“I have been on the climate beat for over 25 years, and I have never seen anything like this,” he told The Times. “Trump is gutting everything the climate movement has ever stood for. Billionaires are silent or reversing themselves on climate, and even Democrats in Congress have been mostly silent as Trump crushes the climate movement. There has been no pushback!”
He pointed out that “Lee Zeldin routinely labels climate a ’cult’, a ’scam’, and a ’religion’, and he doesn’t even get pushback from reporters,” Mr. Morano said.
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Behind the scenes, however, Democrats are being advised to keep the climate at arm’s length in the 2026 midterm election.
The liberal Searchlight Institute cautioned Democratic candidates against using the term “climate change,” citing polling showing that the issue isn’t resonating with swing-state voters.
Only 6% of battleground-state voters said that climate change is their top issue, according to the institute in a September analysis titled, “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”
“While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them,” the institute said. “While some policies that help fight climate change are modestly popular, Americans care far more about energy affordability than they do about climate.”
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“I think we’ll still be fighting this battle for a while,” said Mr. Mooney, an investigative reporter for Restoration News, a publication of the conservative Restoration of America Foundation. “If it’s not climate, you’ll see a new avenue for collectivism and leftism.”
In the meantime, he encouraged the Trump administration to stay the course.
“This is the big domestic success story coming out of the Trump administration: dismantling the climate-industrial complex,” Mr. Mooney said. “The administration from my point of view is aiming its arrow in the right direction. I wouldn’t say the movement is dead, but it’s in its death throes.”
