The Climate Crisis Clashed With Affordability, and Affordability Won

Politicians and CEOs are muting their climate alarms. The good news is, emissions are likely to decline anyway.

By Greg Ip. Excerpts:

"The share of respondents calling climate and the environment their most important issue has dropped from 14% in early 2020 to 6% now" 

"25% describe inflation that way."

"climate advocates routinely . . . cast global warming as a doomsday machine that required an immediate, whole-of-society response."

"Biden officials implicated climate in everything from racial inequality to civil strife in Syria and Yemen. Democrats pressured financial regulators to discourage lending to the fossil-fuel industry."

"In a letter to investors in March, BlackRock’s Fink wrote: “Prosperity is once again defined by our ability—and our willingness—to produce and consume more energy.” He did not mention climate."

"Roger Pielke, a longtime climate scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, notes U.S. emissions have been remarkably impervious to presidential terms: relative to economic output, they have declined steadily for decades."

"Natural gas from shale hastened the demise of coal"

"Climate advocates used to claim that without radical policy shifts, temperatures would rise 4.5 degrees. But Pielke notes that those predictions were never plausible, and today few subscribe to them."

"the statement released at the end of last month’s climate conference in Belém, Brazil said the world was headed for a rise of 2.3 to 2.5 degrees by 2100. Pielke called that “serious, but not the apocalypse.”"