As the late Andrew Breitbart often and wisely said, politics is downstream of culture. Those who have tried to change climate policy without first changing public thinking have found their efforts remarkably frustrating. But once public thinking changes, it’s a whole different story. As for instance with Politico noting that “Climate backsliding comes for blue-state governors”. Once proudly green against the dreaded orange, they’ve suddenly realized their constituents have other concerns and guess what happens. Likewise, Climate Depot cites a couple of posts from Bjorn Lomborg about how “For a decade climate change has been one of the most important issues in the EU Not any longer” and “Young Swedes: Climate no longer engaging/ New Swedish study finds ‘the social issue that has lost the most engagement since 2019 is climate’”. And on that one there’s not much of a gender divide: for young women it’s down from 51% to 15% and for young men from 34% to 13%. Oh, and looky here: a third Lomborg post quotes another Politico headline “EU countries agree on weakened 2040 climate goal and target for COP30”. The winds have indeed shifted.

Even in what was until recently Justin Trudeau’s green utopia. Rupa Subramanya writes that Canadian Prime Minister “Mark Carney has far more political wiggle room to fast-track major energy and infrastructure projects than any prime minister in more than a decade”, including with polls showing 60% support for a pipeline from landlocked Alberta to the Pacific coast of British Columbia, as against just 37% support for the similar Northern Gateway proposal 11 years ago. And she asks:

“When did Canadians stop caring about climate change? They haven’t, but their priorities have been ‘rearranged twice over’ since the Covid pandemic, said Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute. ‘Health and inflation pushed everything else aside,’ and since last year, ‘anxiety about sovereignty, defense, and economic security has surged to the top of the list,’ thanks in no small part to President Donald Trump.”

Boo Trump! But don’t forget, along the way, that Canadians have been hearing apocalyptic predictions of disastrous future weather, and even apocalyptic characterizations of the current stuff, for a long time now and just possibly they have looked out the window and gone nope, not really happening.

When it comes to rearguard actions, Roger Pielke Jr. optimistically declares that:

“Climate cancelling had a good run – but my Cornell lecture showed it’s finally over.”

As he noted, the usual suspects tried to get the director of the Cornell Atkinson Institute for Sustainability fired just for inviting him. Gavin Schmidt said Gavin Schmidt stuff and Michael Mannn ranted Michael Mann stuff about a flat Earth. But he thinks they’ve lost traction.

His friend and colleague Benjamin Zycher, in a guest post on Pielke Jr.’s “The Honest Broker”, begged to differ, not only because the usual suspects said the usual stuff about his talk as if nothing had changed but also because of the odious “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change” adopted at COP30. In it the UN included the usual ominous rhetoric about controlling information and discussion, such as:

“the growing impact of disinformation, misinformation, denialism, deliberate attacks on environmental journalists, defenders, scientists, researchers and other public voices and other tactics used to undermine the integrity of information on climate change … diminish public understanding, delay urgent action, and threaten the global climate response and societal stability.”

Without urging that anyone go to sleep on such threats to freedom of speech on this and a host of other topics, we do incline toward RPJ’s view that such declarations are increasingly falling on deaf ears. The public is not nearly as sympathetic to this kind of politics and headlines like “World faces ‘catastrophe after catastrophe’ if climate talks fail” are increasingly feeble self-parody. And there’s a very important reason.

What’s changed is their ideas. Though not, oddly, those of Mark Carney, whose windy bloviations still seek to have it both ways and end up saying almost nothing. But if the public parade changes direction, the politicians leading it will scramble to the new front and boldly go wherever it was now going.

Ideas have consequences. Never forget it.