This article was originally published by Connor O’Keeffe at The Mises Institute.
Ten years ago, as the world’s governments met in Paris and agreed to eventually force policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions on their respective populations, combating climate change was seen as a major political issue.
Then, when Trump and other populist right-wingers began finding political success, climate arguably became the primary issue that helped unify the establishment centrists, moderate left-liberals, and far-left progressives who made up the broad anti-Trump, anti-populist coalition.
Fanatical climate alarmism became a way to demonstrate one’s anti-Trump credibility and a way for Trump’s opponents in media, academia, and politics to portray the president as not just out of touch but as a significant threat to the survival of the human species.
The moral panic accelerated considerably during Trump’s first term. A 2018 UN study reported that, unless there was a serious reduction in global emissions by 2030, the world would surpass the UN’s 2015 goal of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The media and politicians then stretched the findings of the study as much as they could get away with in order to convince everyday people that humanity would literally go extinct in a generation or two and nearly everyone below the age of sixty would die grisly, climate-related deaths unless we allowed the government the power to control nearly every aspect of our lives.
As a response, progressives like AOC introduced the Green New Deal—sweeping legislation that basically just forced “democratic socialism” on the country under the assumption that it would somehow stop the climate apocalypse.
While the bill went too far for establishment Democrats and was therefore set aside, climate change was still a central issue in the Democratic primary in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Two candidates centered their entire campaigns around climate. And, when Joe Biden won, his administration quickly got to work enacting as many of the green policies Democrats had dreamed up during the campaign as possible.
That culminated in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The name was chosen to minimize the political damage the Democrats were suffering as inflation climbed to 40-year highs. But after its passage, Democrats did their best to rebrand it as “the biggest climate bill ever,” which was accurate.
In total, through the IRA and other bills and executive orders, Biden helped facilitate the transfer of over a trillion dollars to climate-related programs, rolled out stringent environmental regulations, and worked with state and local governments to prop up the production of many “green” products like solar panels and electric cars. The overwhelming sense one got was that an extensive, environmentally-focused industrial policy had been put in place, which would ensure that, going forward, the effort to combat climate change would be an ever-present part of American public life.
Yet, only two years later, after Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic nominee in the 2024 election, the topic of climate change was virtually absent from her campaign. When Trump won and immediately began rolling back most of what Biden had implemented through executive action, the outcry was quite muted and mostly confined to small climate-focused outlets.
A similar reversal has happened, again with little public outcry, in the corporate-led climate movement as ESG efforts were wound down or rebranded—the most recent example being the Net Zero Banking Alliance, which shut down in October after the big banks pulled out.
And other companies have been announcing rollbacks of the previously ramped-up production of “climate-friendly” products. For example, Ford Motor announced Monday that it’s rolling back production of electric pickup trucks that the government had encouraged it to build, now that it’s become impossible to ignore that buyers don’t want them.
In recent weeks, the remaining climate alarmists experienced another setback when a highly cited study in the journal Nature was retracted after it was revealed that the authors had used flawed data to significantly overstate the economic impacts of climate change.
And finally, in perhaps the most telling sign, the climate-obsessed billionaire Bill Gates published a surprisingly reasonable memo that highlighted many basic truths that climate alarmists have long been demonizing people for pointing out—like the fact that there is no scientific basis to expect anything even close to an apocalyptic scenario if recent climate trends continue unabated and that the problems often blamed on climate change are really problems of poverty that go away as societies grow more prosperous.
What is happening here? Has the world finally woken up to the fact that climate change isn’t the threat it’s been made out to be? Or that the cost of the policies being rolled out in the name of stopping it are unacceptably high? Is the great moral panic over climate change finally behind us?
I wouldn’t be so sure.
It’s important to understand that the climate hysteria of the past decade was not a grassroots movement fueled by environmentalist activists or educated news consumers following the latest developments in climate science.
Those groups were, without a doubt, an active part of the coalition pushing for a more interventionist climate policy. But the reason the climate movement was so ubiquitous and inescapable was because it enjoyed the backing of powerful groups who recognized that they stood to benefit if the government pursued a sweeping climate policy.
Those groups included, of course, the many government bureaucrats who stood to gain more funding and to exert more power over more people and resources. And it included politicians who also always want to acquire more power and who enjoy characterizing themselves as firm, resolute public servants willing to do hard things in order to save the world.
Outside of government, the legacy media also loved all the focus on the “climate catastrophe” since scary-sounding stories tend to get good engagement, and the politicized nature of the issue transformed every natural disaster into a highly-charged national event.
The push to “address” climate change also gave many academics a level of relevance, funding, and power they had rarely seen before. Climate scientists specifically went from being members of a small, somewhat obscure discipline of atmospheric physicists trading theories on the incredibly complex climate system to the vanguard of a global movement to save the world, with all the money, resources, and prestige that brings.
Energy companies, too, who had long been the primary villain to climate activists, made a clear pivot in the late 2010s and early 2020s to embrace some aspects of the climate movement. These massive corporations clearly saw that some degree of climate interventions was inevitable, so they sought to maneuver themselves to benefit from these policy changes while lobbying for specific laws and regulations that would be good for them and bad for their competitors.
Finally, there were the managerial elites. Officials at the top of global organizations like the UN or the WEF, who quite literally think they can and should run the world, had clearly recognized that the climate change narrative offered the best path to securing greater and greater control over the world’s governments.
Together, this loose but driven coalition of powerful government, corporate, media, and academic groups made a deliberate effort to terrify everyday people—especially those in younger generations—into believing that we were hurdling towards human extinction, and that they only way to avert it was to allow governments and “global governance” organizations to grab a tremendous amount of power over all aspects of our lives.
The elites pushing this narrative did not behave like they truly believed what they were saying. They behaved like they had discovered a useful way to justify a power grab.
So why did this all reverse course? Why did climate change seem to fade away into irrelevance in the last couple of years? In short, because it stopped being useful—at least in our current moment.
We could speculate endlessly as to why. No doubt the loss of trust in the federal bureaucracy and global managerial elites during the COVID pandemic played a role—when the government tried to mandate any health measure that stood to make well-connected companies a lot of money and stigmatize any alternatives that didn’t.
There’s also a “boy who cried wolf” effect at play. People can only be bombarded with so many stories about how we’re only a few years or months away from missing the opportunity to avoid extinction before people grow desensitized.
Israel’s actions in Gaza also diverted the attention of a lot of the young, far-left activists who had been the reliable foot-soldiers of the climate movement and turned them against a lot of the domestic and global elites they had been allied with.
And finally, the escalation and genuine, widespread concern over the “affordability crisis” have made it much harder to get the population to accept new laws that will explicitly make life less affordable.
All that to say, for various reasons, it does not currently make sense for the American and global political class to use climate alarmism to continue scaring the population into accepting more and more of their power grabs. That time and energy are better spent elsewhere.
That is, to be clear, a good thing. The policies rolled out in the name of addressing climate change have been so damaging that any pause or reversal will result in meaningful improvements in the quality of life for everyday people.
But we need more people to understand the true motivations behind the top-down push to “address” climate change. Otherwise, once the political winds change or revert, we’ll be right back in the thick of that crony, deceptive, and perilous moral panic.
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