HEADLINE: “The Fearmongering About Man-Made Global Warming Has Failed, and the Movement Is Dying A Slow Painful Death”, by Jeff Reynolds

“It’s implausible, impractical, and the opposite of urgent. The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has proven to hold little importance for the citizens of the world…”

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The Fearmongering About Man-Made Global Warming Has Failed, and the Movement Is Dying A Slow Painful Death

JUL 14

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Guest Post by Jeff Reynolds of

It’s implausible, impractical, and the opposite of urgent. The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has proven to hold little importance for the citizens of the world and now that Donald Trump has reascended to the White House and targeted green energy boondoggles for elimination, the world has started to take his lead. Perhaps the UN hasn’t noticed, but the Trump effect is real and has given cover for leaders across the globe to quietly back away from the insane spending required to make green energy remotely comparable to conventional combustion-based energy production.

This process has also revealed a truth as the tide goes back out: Nobody believes the fundamental premise of global warming anyway, despite the decades of panic fomented by globalists, totalitarians, and grifters hoping to cash in.

We may very well be witnessing the death of the green panic as a meaningful societal and political movement.

The People Never Bought the Theory

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway described the process of going bankrupt: Gradually, and then suddenly. The same description holds for the death of the climate narratives. Ever since then-Sen. Al Gore (D-TN) brought up the concept of global warming at the U.S. Senate hearing in 1988, it has been marked by myth-making more than science. To commemorate this “birthday”—the hearing was held on July 23, 1988—the CO2 Coalition recounted the story of how it came to be:

This first hearing was convened by former Senator Timothy E. Wirth, along with a young Senator from Tennessee named Al Gore. It was no coincidence that the hearing was held on this date.

“We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer,” explained Senator Wirth. “So, we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room.”

That hearing began a nearly 40-year run of unimpeded misinformation linking carbon dioxide to unusual and unprecedented warming.

• Consensus science replaced the scientific method.

• Censorship of contrary evidence was nearly complete.

• No debate was allowed because the science was settled.

Born of a PR stunt and backing by a few fringe scientists, the theory then morphed into a driving principle of the professional Left. Massive pseudoscience campaigns emerged to support the spurious claims of impending planetary doom in the media, which has incentivized politicians to adopt punitive and confiscatory public policies. The voters routinely ranked climate change near the bottom of their priorities in public opinion surveys, but that didn’t matter to the power- and money-hungry politicians and bureaucrats.

The history of public climate policy from that point on has involved ever increasing spending by federal and state governments, ever tighter industrial regulations, and “investments” in financially foolhardy projects—remember Obama’s failure with Solyndra?

Fast forward to 2019, a banner year for climate hysteria. In February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced the Green New Deal, a deliberate throwback to another massive federal spending boondoggle. And then in September, the teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg addressed the UN Climate Action Summit, accusing world leaders of stealing her future and saying we could only ever add 420 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere before we start seeing “chain reactions beyond human control.” She gave us 8 ½ years from that point.

The murals of St. Greta started popping up in blue cities almost immediately, representing the high-water mark for the movement.

Media outlets, corporate board rooms, and Big Philanthropy ramped up their all-out campaigns. ZeroHedge reported that media stories about climate change skyrocketed in 2019 and beyond.

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Green Energy and Climate Lawsuits Expand the Grift

The politicians have used the pseudoscience and malinformation campaigns to sell their “green energy” schemes on the promises of affordability and job creation. When carbon-based energy like gasoline or natural gas outcompete wind or solar in the marketplace, they fall back on the old excuse that Big Oil gets too many government subsidies for “green energy” to compete.

Meanwhile, activist legal groups use the court system to punitively pursue Big Oil and electricity producers for all sorts of novel legal theories of liability, reflected in the #ExxonKnew social media campaign and other activist strategies to hold large corporations accountable for the climate.

None of these baseline assumptions hold water. But they do share a common feature: Extensive funding via leftist dark money. From the foundations funding the pseudoscience and media campaigns, to the leftist legal megafirms filing nuisance lawsuits, the resources thrown at this know no limit. Billionaire Tom Steyer went so far as to buy his way into the Democratic National Committee and use his position to add the climate change plank to the party platform in 2016.

These campaigns use their expansive resources to impede progress in every aspect of the energy sector. From protests to shut down pipelines, to lawsuits against fracking, to overregulating the expansion of America’s electrical grid, vast wealth has been expended on loud but unpopular campaigns to hinder our energy sector, vital for a life in modern America that even most environmentalists don’t want to give up. After all, how could they foment all those protests without the rare earth elements that run their social media accounts on their cell phones?

Americans have gotten increasingly sick of all of it.

Panic Only Works for So Long

No matter how much money the professional Left spends to buy access to media, corporate policies, and party platforms, they have failed to move the needle among a sufficient segment of the voting populace. The more they’ve failed, the more outlandish their claims of doom. UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres expressed this frustration when he declared in a 2023 speech that the world had surpassed global warming and had officially (from his telling) entered the era of “global boiling.”

The needle stubbornly continued to fail to move.

That needle probably noticed all the failing narratives around global warming when it decided to stay stuck in neutral. I’ve documented the collapsing narratives surrounding bee populations that have failed to decline, polar ice caps that stubbornly refuse to shrink, the idea that natural sources don’t affect atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the myth of increasing numbers of more intense weather events, and many more.

As the narratives collapse, the public panic continues to refuse to take hold. Meanwhile, the demand for more and more electricity continues to grow across residential and commercial sectors. Especially considering the rapid growth and development of the artificial intelligence sector, power demands have ramped up significantly as we begin the second quarter of the 21st century.

And as that demand grows, it becomes more obvious by the day: Green energy cannot sustain the current demand, never mind a near-term future of massive server farms, a renewed focus on domestic manufacturing, and growing residential populations.

The Iberian Nightmare—the nationwide blackout in both Spain and Portugal—proved this on April 28. Less than two weeks after boasting that they had reached 100% renewable energy on their electrical grid, Spain experienced a 100% blackout, which caused a cascading effect in Portugal as well. The rest of Europe was spared from a similar fate only by automated systems kicking in to protect France from the power surge.

“Renewable” energy fails because it cannot provide the baseline power load required by residential and industrial uses. Depending on wind and solar can never provide consistent, steady production on a stable frequency. Battery storage comes with a host of problems that don’t appear to have solutions. And since dams are out of favor with fish biologists, we can’t include hydroelectric in our suite of renewable options. (Apparently ornithologists and marine biologists are cool with wind, though.) Anyway, voters see through the cognitive dissonance and contradictory messages by conservationists about the supposedly environmentally friendly sources of electricity and have largely rejected the nonsensical premise.

One industry report suggests over half of North America faces the risk of blackouts in the next decade due to skyrocketing demand and the retirement of gas and coal power plants. So, independent of the funding issues with the new administration, state power regulators have retreated from their zeal to achieve net-zero goals (net-zero carbon emissions) in favor of reliable power supply.

This, along with a host of other failures in green energy and predictions of doom that have never come true, have forced even some Democrats to start backing away from their net-zero plans. Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently took note of this, and gave the reason:

Cost and reliability is what voters really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey, 37% of voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 36% said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Meanwhile, just 19% thought that the effect of their energy consumption on the climate was most important.

They also see through the promises that wind and solar are free, or at least cheap. The land footprint of wind and solar farms is far larger than that of a nuclear or coal plant; the materials used in turbines, blades, and panels often cannot be recycled or safely disposed of; and the infrastructure—especially the amount of reinforced concrete in wind turbine bases—can create a so-called carbon footprint larger than that of conventional power plants.

For many reasons, the Trump administration has pulled back on the government’s commitments to the green movement. In place of massive subsidies for failing green energy projects, Trump and his team have refocused the federal government on reliability and energy independence. These issues resonate with voters in the 21st century who see the AI revolution currently underway and who realize that America’s aging energy grid needs massive upgrades—upgrades that have been held back for decades by overregulation by bureaucrats.

As this new focus on energy independence progresses, government grants have dried up, causing green stocks to tank. The rest of corporate America has quickly followed suit. The Wall Street Journalrecently reported that annual shareholder reports have gone silent on climate issues:

American Airlines highlighted its focus on “ambitious climate goals” in a report last year.

In a similar filing a few weeks ago, that phrase was gone.

The airline is among a wave of companies across industries tweaking—sometimes overhauling—what they say about their sustainability and climate efforts in proxy statements, an investor filing released every year ahead of a business’s annual shareholder meeting.

The writing is on the wall. State governments, corporations, and stock markets are all following the lead of the Trump administration’s more rational, America First approach to energy. The purveyors of climate panic haven’t realized it yet, but the billions poured into this movement by Big Philanthropy haven’t made a dent in public opinion. Public policy is poised to make an about face, cheered on by a majority of voters. People just don’t buy the faulty premises of the supposed problem, or the purported solutions to it.

In short, we are witnessing the end of the green panic and the dawn of a new age of energy and environmental rationalism.

This article originally appeared at RealClear Energy.

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