The Economist “The Climate Issue” bids 2025 farewell (sorry, no link available that we could find) with “It has been a rocky year for climate, starting with Donald Trump’s renewed residency in the White House and the resulting dismantling of American climate policy”, the New York Times “Climate Forward” warns of “How Trump’s First Year Reshaped U.S. Energy and Climate Policy” and Canary Media deplores “Trump’s year of offshore wind carnage”. But if this stuff were working half as well as they promised for the last 20 years, how could one obtuse politician make it all stop so quickly? And why are voters ok with the change, not just in America but across the democratic world? It just doesn’t make sense.

At least Euronews didn’t go right for the Trump in announcing that “As the planet warmed, politics wobbled: The defining climate moments of 2025”. And the issue was also raised in the Japan Times, under the headline “In 2025, climate policy was shoved aside even as extreme weather intensified” published a piece that started “For environmentalists and climate scientists, 2025 was a nightmare” before devoting four straight paragraphs to… trashing Trump. But there’s a real mystery here. That Euronews item begins:

“Record warming met weak political resolve as climate pressures mounted this year. 2025 was a challenging year for climate politics, and a challenging one for our warming planet. In the past 12 months, climate change has been impossible to ignore, whether we would like to or not.”

And the mystery is why, if climate “pressures” mounted, political resolve weakened even though “climate change has been impossible to ignore”.

We are not naïve about politics including voters. Very often they ignore what seem in retrospect to have been obvious serious problems for bewilderingly long periods of time while panicking over fluff. As for the politicians they choose, as a future Prime Minister of Canada once commented to one of us about first being elected to Parliament, “You spend two weeks wondering how you got here and the rest of the time wondering how everyone else did.” But if democracy is not folly, it must be the case that people are logical even if, as J. Budziszewski says, logical slowly. If citizens cannot be relied upon eventually to grasp what is happening and do something rational about it, we should not let them vote.

Even political choices that strike us as mistakes, for instance Americans electing Franklin Roosevelt as president repeatedly, must have some underlying logic that is not demented or determined by some socioeconomic process unrelated to rational thought, or we should abandon self-government. And for all its obvious defects, it has dramatically outperformed every other system ever tried. But if we are right on this matter, then climate alarmists have to put forward some kind of explanation for why the evidence keeps getting stronger yet the political resolve keeps getting weaker.

The explanation cannot be that Trump is a moron and Americans are yahoos, even if you believe both things. For starters, Americans can’t be brilliant when they elect Biden and Congress passes the Inflation Reduction Act, then idiots when they change their minds. Moreover, the problem is obviously not confined to the United States.

The New York Times “Climate Forward” just complained that “Europe gets cold feet”:

“Patricia Cohen and Eshe Nelson reported Tuesday that the E.U. is poised to water down its plans to ban the production of gas- and diesel-powered cars by 2035. Members of Parliament voted on Wednesday to delay the rollout of a groundbreaking deforestation law that would affect far-flung corners of the globe. And early this year, lawmakers chipped away at the scope and scale of new disclosure requirements meant to force companies to be more forthcoming about the environmental impact of their operations.”

Even sanctimonious, still-committed-to-expensive-climate-policy countries like Canada have failed to meet targets they once touted as easy as well as crucial. Indeed, Climate Home News kicked off the New Year with a complaint that:

“Both the strength and weakness of the Paris Agreement is that it doesn’t force governments to do very much. One of the few things governments are required to do is submit a climate plan – known as an NDC – every five years. With Paris agreed in 2015, most countries submitted their third NDC in 2025, setting targets for 2035. But, with the year now up, just over a third of countries – including three G20 nations – have failed to do so.”

We might whisper in their ear that incentives matter and no government is “required” to do something it faces no meaningful sanction for not doing. Or shout that most of the plans that are submitted are worthless, failing to get to Net Zero even if implemented and also impossible to implement. And the online item to which that not-posted email newsletter links does concede that after “The UN’s Paris Agreement Compliance Committee – made up of climate negotiators from different governments” had spoken to the laggard governments:

“that missed the February deadline, it found a host of obstacles including insufficient financial support; technical challenges like a lack of data or problems coordinating across sectors and including different groups; and other issues like political instability or genocide.”

Genocide could be an issue. But talk of “problems coordinating across sectors and including different groups” makes it sound like a lack of bureaucratic capacity or sufficient commitment to DEI rather than that alternative energy doesn’t keep the lights on.

Now The Economist then whistles “But there has also been some encouraging news” such as that:

“0%: the growth in fossil-fuel generation that Ember, a think-tank, projects for 2025 as a whole. That would make this year the first without an increase since the covid-19 pandemic.”

As they concede, “It may be a fluke”. Plus it didn’t actually happen yet and may not. But in any case it’s beside the point. The problem is that the high hopes of 1992, and 2015, the blithe promises, have not worked out, and the climate apocalypse predicted if we didn’t act fast has not appeared either.

Even if you still believe we must reach Net Zero, and trouble’s a-brewin’ with regard to temperature and weather, you need to conclude, and defend publicly, either that the evidence is not as strong as you think or that voters are fools and democracy is a bad idea.

What makes it all especially weird is that the same people who apparently see no connection between facts and electoral outcomes are also completely mesmerized by the politics of climate policy not, again, the engineering, physics or economics of it.