California governor Gavin Newsom, long a poster politician for rigid adherence to climate extremism regardless of its impact on real people, is suddenly begging the oil industry not to flee from the Golden State he has long tried to drive it out of. Why? Because the blithe promises he long made that alternatives could do the job did not pan out; instead power there is increasingly unaffordable and unreliable. In the same vein The Economist, finally recognizing growing popular opposition to madcap climate policy, argued “that, in the face of immovable politics, climate policy should instead focus on the art of the possible.” Which, yes, beats the art of the impossible and constitutes a backhanded admission that too much global warming zealotry has been of the former sort. But it still requires delving into two vexed questions: what actually is possible, and do their fellow-travellers know or care?

The Economist insists that “a politics of new possibilities can put climate policy on a more sustainable footing, as well offering hope.” But only if it really is possible and anyone cares. The latter is far less of a slam dunk than one might suppose. For instance The Atlantic “Weekly Planet” just produced a sneering piece about how “America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy”. And before we get to what they think they mean, we want to contrast that tone with The Economist’s unhappy but realistic opening recognition of:

“the growing objection to policies designed to force down emissions of greenhouse gases. Many proponents of this ‘greenlash’ do not believe that the strict net-zero targets are in their interest, or that they will bring benefits to anyone else. Some think they are being taken for chumps, paying good money to meet bad targets while businesses and people elsewhere are belching out carbon. Seeing an ever-more-powerful China emitting more than Europe and America combined makes resentful Western voters seethe.”

A critical component of a convincing or at least plausible argument is the “refutatio”, the part where you acknowledge your adversary’s case, show that you understand it, and attempt to demonstrate that it’s wrong and why. If you skip this part, sensible members of the audience will conclude either that you don’t know the contrary case and are a fool, that you do know it and are ducking it because you can’t answer it and are a rogue, or some queasy mix of the two.

In this case at least The Economist is neither. True, they persist in making a series of unexamined assumptions, some intellectual and some sociological, including an elbow in passing to Donald Trump’s “reckless attacks on climate science”. But they do so while acknowledging significant realities:

“In Europe the war in Ukraine has spurred growth in defence budgets, squeezing spending on green policies, which also face renewed political opposition. Some voters think the cost of cutting emissions is too high, or should fall on others. In poor countries, which have historically emitted far less than rich ones, many resent green policies they see as foreign and heedless of the desperate local need for energy. Sensing the political winds, big global firms have gone quiet about greenery, though many still pursue it. None of this deprives the world of its technical ability to decarbonise a great deal of its economy; on that score things have never looked better. The cost of clean energy is tumbling, as the demand for it continues to grow.”

OK, the last bit isn’t a significant reality. Indeed if it were, the backlash they already acknowledged would be puzzling, to put it mildly. Including in poor countries. But there is a strong sense out there that the cost of cutting emissions is too high, and with at least strong plausible reason.

As for Newsom, whatever he may know, say or do about climate, the nub of the gist here is that such policies are actually wreaking havoc even in a state so large and wealthy that, if it were an independent nation, it would have the 4^th-largest GDP in the world. Just imagine what it’s doing elsewhere.

Or don’t, if you’re The Atlantic. Its piece kicks off with that silly ICJ ruling about how a non-existent world government will and must make it all work. Big Climate is watching you:

“Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so – by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels – may ‘constitute an internationally wrongful act.’”

So pause and ask yourself, yes including you at The Atlantic, whether it is in fact the politics of the possible that the ICJ will overrule Donald Trump. No. No it is not. They don’t seem to think so. They continue by noting Trump’s determination to “rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change” namely the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding in 2009 that greenhouse gases are dangerous to the public and so are covered by the Clean Air Act. And then they wave the ICJ ruling in his face:

“The ICJ opinion was the first time the world court has expressly addressed climate obligations under international law, and it did so with unusual clarity. It removed what Leicht described to me as a legal fog that the world has existed in for decades by rebuking two of the main arguments that high-emitting countries and companies have made to avoid liability. The first is that the climate crisis is simply too big and complex to attribute to any particular entity, rendering individual accountability impractical and unfair…. Thanks in part to attribution science, a particular country or company’s contribution to the climate crisis can be assessed, and the fact that many entities are at fault is not an excuse to evade individual liability. The second argument – that only special climate accords, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, could dictate their climate obligations, and that even then those pacts were by and large voluntary – was also struck down. In its opinion, the court wrote that climate action is not, in fact, voluntary at all: Instead, because climate change threatens lives, degrades health, and deprives people of their home, both domestically and across borders, climate agreements are legally binding, and states can be sued for failure to uphold them.”

Go ahead. Sue the United States. See if they care. And see if this bit qualifies as the politics of the possible:

“An advisory opinion such as this one is not in itself legally binding. But the international laws it is meant to interpret are.”

Oh yeah? Tell it to the Marines. Because they do stand between you and forcing Americans to obey some UN body’s dictates about trashing their economy to fight a problem they do not think is real. Which is among other things not our definition of self-government.