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, which published a piece under the headline “In 2025, climate policy was shoved aside even as extreme weather intensified” 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.
As for "voting", pretty much all western nations are at end-stage democracy (see Alexander Tytler's thesis on how all democracies die) where (democratically responsible) bankrupt welfare states transition to tyrannies. As for the oxymoronic concept of "net zero", - “When people want the impossible, only liars will satisfy them.” - Thomas Sowell
If Carney admits that Canada will not reach its climate targets for 2030 or 2035,why does he still insist that we can and must reach Net Zero by 2050?!The sacrifices required would send us back into the Stone Age.
"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"
Brilliant sentence about climate policy. I read about 70 climate and energy articles per week. This was the best sentence of them all.
https://honestclimatescience.blogspot.com/
On democracy: "And for all its obvious defects, it has dramatically outperformed every other system ever tried", this is not true.
Democracy is not the cause of prosperity. Democracy is a symptom of wealth and prosperity and ultimately leads to its demise. The only things it is outperforming in are bureaucracy and a nasty form of corruption at the top that goes undetected by the masses for too long until the only way out is to burn it to the ground and start over.
Also, many places claim to be democratic but they are not, to name a few: EU (the President of the European Commission does not get elected but appointed by a committee), China (obvious but they still claim to be), as well as many currently in-conflict areas.
Perhaps the greatest strength of "Net Zero" is how easily it can be communicated. It can literally fit on the front page with the largest font! However, it is the proverbial 'perfect' solution that prevents 'good enough' from materializing. I would posit that there are feasible ways to reduce emissions by 60-80% from an OECD, coal heavy level, e.g. in my country of Denmark, or even USA. Replacing ancient, inefficient coal plants with CCGT firing natural gas can yield as much as 60% reduction. And gas-backed wind power can make sense in some areas, provided eco-zealots do not prohibit the use of this carbon-light fuel. A greater switch to nuclear for baseload also seems to be a logical path for an advanced civilization. Nuclear plus solar would be a great option in large parts of the world - where most people live.
And while we do that, we must let poor countries industrialize using cheap indigenous coal to establish industry, as all industrialized nations have done before them.
As nature is currently absorbing about 50% of the CO2 emitted from fossil fuels, it would stand to reason that halving the emission would stop atmospheric concentration from rising. It's not that simple but almost, as the absorption by nature depends on atmospheric concentration and not annual emissions.
In conclusion: There is a hard-to-communicate, and perhaps agree on, pathway to a prosperous society without rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and perhaps even slightly falling. And if not that, then at least highly reduced annual growth in CO2 concentration, allowing us to 'monitor the situation' and assess whether further measures need to be taken.
Hr Pedersen, I agree completely but wonder what we should do with the remaining 85% of primary energy where the majority is fossil fueled? I wonder if the reducing of half the CO2 from the electrical CO2 (currently ca. 15% of the total) would register on the Global Average Temperature measurement?
I suggest that we keep all our electric generation stock, including coal, and replace them when the economics dictate (the natural end of life)... and we replace with affordable Dispatchable Emissions Free Resource technology (nuclear being the only affordable option at present).
I also recommend that we prove using data and predictions that we truly understand natural variability, and that i. CO2 is anthropogenic, ii. CO2 warms the atmosphere, iii. warming atm causes bad weather to be worse, iv. warming atm will definitively cause material impacts on human flourishing (and can cause polar ice to melt materially, on a material timescale, impacting sealevel , lower SW pH can impact sealife flourishing, etc etc)