Writing at Axios, energy writer Amy Harder says, “The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning—in speed, scale and scope.” [some emphasis, links added]
Harder quotes oil historian and S&P Global vice-chairman Dan Yergin as saying, “There’s no handwaving about how ‘We want to cooperate on climate.’ It’s, ‘We’re slamming the door on that issue.’ We’ve gone from over-indexing it to zero-indexing it.”
Polling has never shown climate change as being an issue of primary concern to American voters. Americans have consistently been more worried about issues that impact their daily lives today than about warnings from modern-day P.T. Barnums like U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres about some nebulous “highway to hell” and “the age of global boiling.
The issue had been slowly losing its effectiveness during the Biden years, even as that administration tried to memorialize the movement’s objectives in policy.
Even Democrat politicians have quit talking about the so-called “climate emergency,” which used to be a central plank in their talking points list.
When was the last time you heard New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, co-author with Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of the “Green New Deal” introduced in 2019, talk about the supposed need to force ordinary citizens to give up their cars, flying, and vacations, and spend trillions on a nationwide network of high-speed rails to save the planet?
When was the last time you heard any Democrat utter the phrase “Green New Deal,” for that matter? It simply doesn’t happen anymore.
One of the motivators for the political abandonment of the climate scam by Democrats came from a pre-election analysis from the center-left Searchlight Institute last November.
That memo advised Democratic candidates to avoid using the term “climate change” entirely, and to focus on the supposed cost savings to be obtained by switching to green energy solutions.
Never mind that such cost savings are a myth: The truth doesn’t matter. What matters is the ability to influence voters with the message.
Therein lies the central existential threat to the movement’s survival in the coming years.
For decades, liberal politicians and climate advocates were able to advance the climate alarm agenda by creating, well, alarm among the public that the world is going to end if we don’t stop putting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Always, the messaging had a deadline, claiming: “We only have X number of years to stop burning fossil fuels before it’s too late!” Over the past 40 years, that deadline to act has given the term “moving the goalposts” a new green meaning.
AOC claimed the drop-dead date was only 12 years in the future as she rolled out her ambition to control everyone’s daily lives in the name of climate alarm in 2019. But the very next year, in 2020, child activist Greta Thunberg moved the goalposts to a mere five years.
But wait: Just a year later, Joe Biden read a script from his teleprompter that set the deadline at 10 years. It’s all so darn confusing.
No doubt, these politicians and activists wish they could erase their past claims from everyone’s memory. Their trouble is, the Internet is forever.
Read rest at Daily Signal
