Democrats spent decades demonizing, censoring, and ruining the lives of climate heretics. Now they’re using their language and gas-lighting the public. Their goal is to advance their apocalyptic and Malthusian anti-civilization agenda through more politically salient messages. https://t.co/OR8hQiHfnu
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) November 9, 2026
Michael Shellenberger: For three decades, Democratic leaders described climate change as an emergency that justified radically remaking the American economy. No challenge “poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” said Barack Obama in his 2015 State of the Union address. Kamala Harris said in 2019, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Climate change is “the existential threat of our time,” said Nancy Pelosi upon becoming Speaker of the House in 2019. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said around the same time, “the world is going to end” in 12 years without action. “Climate change is literally an existential threat to our Nation and to the world,” said Joe Biden, campaigning in New Hampshire in 2019, and said, “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.” In 2023, he said that “the only existential threat humanity faces, even more frightening than a nuclear war,” was warming above 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. Senator Chuck Schumer in 2021 urged Biden to declare “a national emergency on climate change.”
Today, Democrats have practically nothing to say about it. The share of House and Senate Democrats’ press releases that mention climate change declined from 28% in 2021 to just 2% in the first five months of this year. Where the House Democrats’ 2020 climate report used the words “climate change” more than 500 times, their September 2026 report used them just 22 times. Representative Sean Casten of Illinois, one of the most climate alarmist members in Congress, said, “You also don’t necessarily have to use the word climate to talk about all of those things, right?”
A few Democrats still raise the subject. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has given 308 “Time to Wake Up” speeches on climate, wrote in June that “the climate hushers are wrong about pretty much everything.” Six in ten Democrats call climate change a very big problem, which is roughly the same share as in 2016.
But Senator Ed Markey, who sponsored the “Green New Deal” in the Senate, hardly talks about it anymore. “Six years ago, Green New Deal was every phrase out of Ed Markey’s mouth every chance he got,” said a Democratic strategist in Massachusetts. “That is not the case now.”
What’s more, many Democrats now describe themselves as supporters of an “all of the above” energy policy that includes oil and natural gas.
As a Texas state legislator, James Talarico in 2021 sponsored a bill to cut Texas emissions 90% below 1990 levels by 2050. Those days are long gone. He won the Texas Senate race by campaigning on an “all-of-the-above” to protect “good-paying oil and gas jobs.” In a January podcast, he said, “Too many people in our party talk about eliminating oil and gas.”
Incoming Alaska Senator Mary Peltola campaigned on having pressured the Biden administration to approve a major ConocoPhillips’ oil project. “That’s why I took on my own party to secure the Willow project after years of delays,” she said in May.
Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania signed a pledge to end fracking in 2016. In May, he introduced a bill to protect liquefied natural gas exports. And when Schumer unveiled the Senate Democratic energy plan in March, he said, “And when I say, ‘clean energy’, I don’t mean only solar and wind.”
All of this is very strange behavior from people who spent 30 years attacking people who made similar remarks as “climate deniers,” imagined to be guilty of the worst moral crimes.
Democrats and their allies spent a decade demanding that anyone who questioned the climate emergency be demonized, sued, censored, and punished.
Democrats waged lawfare. In 2015, Whitehouse proposed a civil racketeering investigation of “the organized climate denial scheme,” essentially lawfare against people he disagreed with. The following year, Democratic attorneys general, including Kamala Harris, announced investigations of oil and gas companies for saying the same thing as Talarico and Peltola. In 2024, after a joint Senate and House investigation, Senator Whitehouse and Representative Jamie Raskin asked Biden’s Attorney General to investigate the oil industry and “take any appropriate legal action.”
Left-wing green groups successfully censored their enemies. In 2021, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund asked Facebook to “adopt a similar policy to what it created to eliminate COVID misinformation.” Google bent. In 2021, it announced it would demonetize content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
Politicians joined in the demands for mass censorship of accurate information about climate change. In 2021, Senators Whitehouse, Brian Schatz and Elizabeth Warren asked Facebook and Google to label or deplatform “climate disinformation” and to stop selling ads against sites that deny climate change. In reality, these were ads that raised legitimate questions.
The Biden administration demanded censorship of criticism of renewables. “The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser, in 2022.
Democrats demanded Facebook censor factual information about forest fires, coral reefs, heat waves, and pointed out that the world cannot run on renewables, which is identical to the “all of the above” energy messaging of Talarico and other Democrats. Climate disinformation was “seeding, basically, doubt about the costs associated with” clean energy, said McCarthy. But doubting the cost of renewables is exactly what Talarico, Fetterman, Peltola, and other Democrats are doing right now.
In a variety of ways, the Left sought to seriously damage the careers and lives of the most high-profile scientists, journalists, and others who pointed to facts that are inconvenient to the Left’s narratives. Some of the most attacked individuals include Roger Pielke, Jr., Bjorn Lomborg, Judy Curry, Steven Koonin, John Stossel, and me. Now the Left is preaching lukewarmism and “all of the above.” Why is that? What happened?…
For three decades, Democratic leaders described climate change as an emergency that justified radically remaking the American economy. No challenge “poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” said Barack Obama in his 2015 State of the Union address. Kamala Harris said in 2019, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Climate change is “the existential threat of our time,” said Nancy Pelosi upon becoming Speaker of the House in 2019. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said around the same time, “the world is going to end” in 12 years without action. “Climate change is literally an existential threat to our Nation and to the world,” said Joe Biden, campaigning in New Hampshire in 2019, and said, “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.” In 2023, he said that “the only existential threat humanity faces, even more frightening than a nuclear war,” was warming above 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. Senator Chuck Schumer in 2021 urged Biden to declare “a national emergency on climate change.”
Today, Democrats have practically nothing to say about it. The share of House and Senate Democrats’ press releases that mention climate change declined from 28% in 2021 to just 2% in the first five months of this year. Where the House Democrats’ 2020 climate report used the words “climate change” more than 500 times, their September 2026 report used them just 22 times. Representative Sean Casten of Illinois, one of the most climate alarmist members in Congress, said, “You also don’t necessarily have to use the word climate to talk about all of those things, right?”
A few Democrats still raise the subject. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has given 308 “Time to Wake Up” speeches on climate, wrote in June that “the climate hushers are wrong about pretty much everything.” Six in ten Democrats call climate change a very big problem, which is roughly the same share as in 2016.
But Senator Ed Markey, who sponsored the “Green New Deal” in the Senate, hardly talks about it anymore. “Six years ago, Green New Deal was every phrase out of Ed Markey’s mouth every chance he got,” said a Democratic strategist in Massachusetts. “That is not the case now.”
What’s more, many Democrats now describe themselves as supporters of an “all of the above” energy policy that includes oil and natural gas.
As a Texas state legislator, James Talarico in 2021 sponsored a bill to cut Texas emissions 90% below 1990 levels by 2050. Those days are long gone. He won the Texas Senate race by campaigning on an “all-of-the-above” to protect “good-paying oil and gas jobs.” In a January podcast, he said, “Too many people in our party talk about eliminating oil and gas.”
Incoming Alaska Senator Mary Peltola campaigned on having pressured the Biden administration to approve a major ConocoPhillips’ oil project. “That’s why I took on my own party to secure the Willow project after years of delays,” she said in May.
Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania signed a pledge to end fracking in 2016. In May, he introduced a bill to protect liquefied natural gas exports. And when Schumer unveiled the Senate Democratic energy plan in March, he said, “And when I say, ‘clean energy’, I don’t mean only solar and wind.”
All of this is very strange behavior from people who spent 30 years attacking people who made similar remarks as “climate deniers,” imagined to be guilty of the worst moral crimes.
Democrats and their allies spent a decade demanding that anyone who questioned the climate emergency be demonized, sued, censored, and punished.
Democrats waged lawfare. In 2015, Whitehouse proposed a civil racketeering investigation of “the organized climate denial scheme,” essentially lawfare against people he disagreed with. The following year, Democratic attorneys general, including Kamala Harris, announced investigations of oil and gas companies for saying the same thing as Talarico and Peltola. In 2024, after a joint Senate and House investigation, Senator Whitehouse and Representative Jamie Raskin asked Biden’s Attorney General to investigate the oil industry and “take any appropriate legal action.”
Left-wing green groups successfully censored their enemies. In 2021, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund asked Facebook to “adopt a similar policy to what it created to eliminate COVID misinformation.” Google bent. In 2021, it announced it would demonetize content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
Politicians joined in the demands for mass censorship of accurate information about climate change. In 2021, Senators Whitehouse, Brian Schatz and Elizabeth Warren asked Facebook and Google to label or deplatform “climate disinformation” and to stop selling ads against sites that deny climate change. In reality, these were ads that raised legitimate questions.
The Biden administration demanded censorship of criticism of renewables. “The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser, in 2022.
Democrats demanded Facebook censor factual information about forest fires, coral reefs, heat waves, and pointed out that the world cannot run on renewables, which is identical to the “all of the above” energy messaging of Talarico and other Democrats. Climate disinformation was “seeding, basically, doubt about the costs associated with” clean energy, said McCarthy. But doubting the cost of renewables is exactly what Talarico, Fetterman, Peltola, and other Democrats are doing right now.
In a variety of ways, the Left sought to seriously damage the careers and lives of the most high-profile scientists, journalists, and others who pointed to facts that are inconvenient to the Left’s narratives. Some of the most attacked individuals include Roger Pielke, Jr., Bjorn Lomborg, Judy Curry, Steven Koonin, John Stossel, and me. Now the Left is preaching lukewarmism and “all of the above.” Why is that? What happened?…
