The last year has seen some monumental changes in world attitudes toward climate change. It’s not only the election of Donald Trump and his subsequent dismantling of 30 years of American climate policy. The shift is worldwide and is not confined to climate skeptics in the U.S.
Trump last week announced that he’s withdrawing from two UN climate agencies. The U.S. pullout from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes both agencies basically irrelevant.
“The UNFCCC underpins global climate action,” EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said in a post on X. “It brings countries together to support climate, reduce emissions, adapt to climate change, and track progress.”
Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords on the first day of his second term. But UN observers are bemoaning Trump’s latest move away from the international climate lobby.
The U.S. “has some of the world’s best climate scientists (and more of them than anywhere else) & has contributed disproportionately to understanding the climate system,” University of Hawaii climate scientist David Ho said in a Bluesky post.
The sudden withdrawal of the United States from these agencies demonstrates just how dependent the world had become on U.S. “soft power” in climate change research, science, and administration, as well as funding.
“There’s no hand-waving about how ‘We want to cooperate on climate,'” oil historian and S&P Global vice chairman Dan Yergin said in an interview with Axios. “It’s, ‘We’re slamming the door on that issue.'”
“Climate policy was facilitated by multilateralism, globalization and the sense nations had a common agenda far more than the world we live in right now,” Yergin said.
Catch up fast: The last year has seen an epic reversal that spread quickly from governments to boardrooms to pop culture.
Trump has aggressively and comprehensively dismissed climate change as a problem.
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, once one of the world’s most vocal climate advocates, is now repealing his country’s climate policies.
Bill Gates circulated a memo criticizing the climate movement while shifting much of his money and focus back to public health — just four years after publishing “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”
Ford pulled back sharply from its EV ambitions, becoming a case study in the risks of betting on whipsawing government policies.
The Gates memo landed like a bomb on the climate movement. He called out the climate hysterics for concentrating on “near-term emission goals” while ignoring “the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
“Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries,” he wrote in October.
The cries of “traitor” and “betrayal” did not lead to Gates’ excommunication. He’s too rich and has too big a megaphone to shut him up.
The bottom line is that Gates’ criticism, Trump’s withdrawal from climate agencies, and the automakers’ retrenchment on electric vehicles have led to a collapse in government and private industry funding of the green agenda.
These reversals represent a retreat from the goal of “net zero” emissions by 2050 — but not a wholesale retreat from climate action itself.
Instead of banning gasoline cars by 2035, the European Union now requires a 90% reduction in tailpipe emissions by then. Translation: It’s a pullback from a maximalist goal — but still an aggressive one.
Though it deleted many Inflation Reduction Act climate provisions, Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act preserved support for geothermal, energy storage and other technologies and would still rank among the biggest cleantech laws ever passed.
By the numbers: Global venture capital investments in climate and clean tech deals have dropped nearly 50% since their high of 2021, according to PitchBook data compiled for Axios, but even this fall is far higher than earlier periods. [Author’s emphasis]
This doesn’t mean the end of the climate change movement, but the hysterics will have to take their wins where they can get them. The coming boom in nuclear power generation, driven by the massive electricity demands of artificial intelligence, will inadvertently reduce CO2 emissions. Other forms of clean energy, like geothermal, are getting a shot in the arm as the U.S. and other nations seek to diversify their energy sources.
Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey sums up the damage done to the public’s trust as a result of the deliberate lies and exaggerations by “Global Warming, Inc.”
However, the real culprit in the death of Global Warming Inc is … Global Warming Inc. For the thirty-four years of the UNFCCC, we have heard nothing but how the world only has twelve years to save itself! We have been warned that we’d see cities swallowed up by rising oceans, a theme that gave us at least one cheesy cinematic guilty pleasure (Waterworld) and another film so bad that it’s unwatchable (The Day After Tomorrow). Every human conflict has been tied to global warming, as though wars only started with the internal-combustion engine and that religious and territorial disputes only went back to the launching of Standard Oil. Every hurricane and tornado is treated as evidence that the sky is falling, while the actual decline in the numbers of both are treated as, well … just weather.
Trillions of dollars in climate mitigation investments aren’t wasted. Much of that money was spent on basic research, which history shows has always paid off, usually in unexpected and life-altering ways.
But the gravy train has reached its last stop. No doubt there will be revivals of the hysteria as every hurricane (and even large earthquakes) is used as “proof” that climate change is “real.”
It will scare very few people. More to the point, the power of the climate change lobby has been smashed and will probably never regain its potency as a leading world issue.
The new year promises to be one of the most pivotal in recent history. Midterm elections will determine if we continue to move forward or slide back into lawfare, impeachments, and the toleration of fraud.
PJ Media will give you all the information you need to understand the decisions that will be made this year. Insightful commentary and straight-on, no-BS news reporting have been our hallmarks since 2005.
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