While climate alarmists are prone to claiming we deniers are venal swine driven by greed, we can’t help noticing that the funding on their side is orders of magnitude larger. So if we had no scruples, we’d change our tune and cash in. But our concern about our choice of field isn’t driven by that noble consideration. Rather, it’s a new piece by recovering liberal Michael Shellenberger and our friend Roger Pielke Jr. saying “Climate change is going to fade from view like overpopulation did” leaving us nothing relevant to debunk. Well, we’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it. But it is certainly hard to argue with their claim that “Lack of protests over Trump’s action on energy shows how little anyone ever really cared about global warming”. We have long believed, and said, that people tell pollsters they’re worried about climate change because they know they’re supposed to and there’s no cost to sending up that particular little wisp of virtue signal, but that when you ask them how much they’ll pay even in theory, and especially if you actually ask them to pay it, you discover that they vote with their dollars that there’s no problem. Which rather makes you wonder how this alarmism hijacked public policy.

There’s no doubt of its continuing grip on the great and the good. And the United States may be an outlier here as it so often is. For instance Just Stop Oil has apparently declared victory and withdrawn in Britain:

“Climate protest group Just Stop Oil said it will no longer carry out disruptive protests as its initial demand to end new licenses for unexplored oil and gas fields is now government policy in the UK. Protestors will be “hanging up the high vis” at the end of April, the group said in a press release on Thursday, but will continue to support its members who are currently being prosecuted in the court system. It is “the end of soup on Van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets,” the group said in a press release.”

Plus everybody hated them including the courts. And you can’t really argue with Shellenberger and RPJ’s point that:

“Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the United Nations Paris agreement on climate change, unleashed fossil fuel production, cut climate subsidies that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and chosen as his Secretary of Energy an oilman who helped create the fracking revolution. Given that Democrats have spent the last 20 years describing climate change as an “existential threat” and making climate policy their highest priority under Biden, one would expect there to be significant protests and other actions by progressives.”

Especially as such people are not, as a rule, shy about taking part in protests. Instead:

“we’ve seen no significant climate change protests since Trump took office two months ago. No Greta Thunberg marches — she’s moved on to Palestine. No drumbeat from the news media. No Extinction Rebellion activists blocking traffic in DC. “Climate emergency” was not among the words chosen by Democrats in Congress to put on the little placards they held up during Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month. In fact, to the extent there have been protests by Democrats, they have been against the world’s most pioneering electric car manufacturer, Tesla, and have nothing to do with climate change.”

Indeed. People may have strong feelings about Elon Musk and DOGE though, again, we think inefficient expensive bureaucracy is a strange standard around which to try to rally the public and regain the ground progressives have lost in recent years. But the very fact that those who ostentatiously bought Teslas to show their concern for climate provided there was a sufficient rebate are now denouncing them, reselling them and in some especially obnoxious cases vandalizing them makes one suspect that their commitment to drive an EV come what may was never very deep.

The same appears to be true of plant-based meat, with The Atlantic in a swoon over Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly tucking into fries cooked in beef tallow not “seed oil, which he falsely claims causes illness” while:

“A convergence of cultural and nutritional shifts, supercharged by the return of the noted hamburger-lover President Donald Trump, has thrust meat back to the center of the American plate. It’s not just MAGA bros and MAHA moms who resist plant-based eating. A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat.”

And intriguingly, the story gets around to lamenting that people were only pretending to be vegetarian/vegan:

“Glynn Tonsor, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University… runs the national Monthly Meat Demand Monitor, which asks survey respondents to self-declare their diets and then report what they ate the day before. ‘The number that tell me they’re vegan or vegetarian - the true number is about half that,’ Tonsor said. In some years, the misalignment is even more glaring: In 2023, 7.9 percent of people who filled out the survey self-declared as vegan or vegetarian, but only 1.8 percent actually ate that way consistently. (The survey is partly funded by the meat industry.)”

Now there are those who would say that the elite having bullied ordinary people into pretending to be ashamed of their lifestyles was a failure of the elite or at best a Pyrrhic victory. And others who declare that:

“The embrace of meat isn’t just about food, but also about what meat represents: tradition, strength, dominance, muscles – values championed by the right…. Efforts on the right to reestablish conventional gender norms create an environment for gendered eating habits to thrive…. As [Peter] Singer, the ethicist, puts it: ‘Most people can easily continue doing something they believe is wrong as long as they have plenty of company.’ Now no one has to keep up the charade.”

Driving normal people to fire up a gas barbecue, throw on a steak, and throw in The Atlantic.