Has the Left Moved on From Climate Change? | The American Spectator

No one cares about climate change anymore.

According to research by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, media coverage of climate change has dropped by half since 2023. The decline also shows up in Google searches for “climate change,” which have also decreased by half since 2023.

People, it seems, have simply gotten tired of the same old story of doom and gloom and melting ice caps. The fact that life has gone on normally — with GDPs continuing to increase and heat deaths decreasing — despite the fact that we’ve surpassed date after date of proclaimed catastrophic “tipping points” isn’t helping climate change activists, either. (RELATED: Bill Gates and the Redemption Racket)

Even Greta Thunberg has moved on from climate change, which seems to bore her now, in favor of going after Israel. Six years ago, Thunberg, in a climate change speech, told the U.N., “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” Given that she’s no longer a child and nothing has happened, that may have been overwrought.

Polling also shows that climate change simply isn’t among the issues American voters care most about. A report this September by the Democrat-aligned Searchlight Institute urged Democrats not to even say the words “climate change,” noting that voters prioritize climate change well behind issues like affordability, jobs, and healthcare. The group called on Democrats to instead focus on climate change under the banner of affordable energy costs. (RELATED: Trump Reloads an ‘America First’ Energy Agenda While Reasserting Sound Science)

“Advocates and elected officials should understand that their messages are actively weakened by a focus on ‘climate’ over affordability and low energy prices,” the institute said, “and that voters are looking for immediate help with rising costs rather than solutions to abstract problems.

Numerous Democrats have followed this script and flipped their climate change strategy from one of doom and gloom to a focus on how green energy can decrease the cost of electricity. For example, Democratic Reps. Sean Casten and Mike Levin recently proposed a bill called the Cheap Energy Agenda, which claims that the “cheapest” forms of energy are also the “cleanest.” Last month, Politico declared, “Climate change is out. Energy affordability is in…. Climate policy is decidedly unfashionable in 2025 — among Democrats.”

The reality that many alternative energy sources are simply more expensive than oil and natural gas is not stopping Democrats from pursuing the strategy. Their hope is that innovation will allow wind, solar, and the like to catch up before voters notice.

This shift comes from the party that pursued the alleviation of climate change as its top priority under President Joe Biden. The Democratic Party’s landmark legislation under Biden, the “Inflation Reduction Act,” was in reality just a climate change subsidies bill. In fact, $783 billion out of the bill’s $891 billion in spending went to fighting climate change.

Voters are not deceived by the fact that Democrats have made climate change their central issue. According to the Searchlight Institute, voters said that the top priority of the Democratic Party is climate change, followed closely behind by LGBTQ issues.

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In recent weeks, climate activists and scientists have adopted a posture of outright desperation. While they have had the rug pulled out from under them by the Trump administration, both from the president’s rollback of the Inflation Reduction Act and the EPA’s rescinding of the legal basis for many climate change regulations, and have been facing funding issues from the fact that interest in climate change has dropped precipitously, what happened last month has made them even more afraid. They now fear that even climate change stalwarts on the left no longer care about climate change. (RELATED: Solar Plant Closure Is Latest Sign California’s Green Agenda Isn’t Working)

Last month, Bill Gates penned a post on his website titled “Three tough truths about climate.” Gates, in a reversal of his previous stance, writes that climate change “will not be the end of civilization.” Our focus, he writes, should be on the totality of well-being for all people, and that pursuing the end of climate change as the end-all-be-all does not in fact achieve this. Instead, he writes, “improving agriculture and health in poor countries” is actually the most cost-effective means to improve overall well-being.

Gates notes that “using more energy is a good thing” “from the standpoint of improving lives” because this is “correlated with economic growth.” And, he writes, “Since the economic growth that’s projected for poor countries will reduce climate deaths by half, it follows that faster and more expansive growth will reduce deaths by even more.”

Gates said that what he views as the “doomsday view of climate change” is “wrong.” In fact, he says, it is causing climate change activists to focus on “near-term emissions goals,” thereby “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.” He said:

I’m not saying we should ignore temperature-related deaths because diseases are a bigger problem…. What I am saying is that we should deal with disease and extreme weather in proportion to the suffering they cause, and that we should go after the underlying conditions that leave people vulnerable to them. While we need to limit the number of extremely hot and cold days, we also need to make sure that fewer people live in poverty and poor health so that extreme weather isn’t such a threat to them.

In the Washington Post, George Will praised Gates for his “intellectual responsibility.” If Gates succeeds in pushing climate change activists away from “fanciful” goals like net-zero carbon emissions and toward helping people in developing countries, Will argued, he “will have helped save millions of actual lives, disproportionately young, rather than the hypothetical billions supposedly imperiled by a 2- or 3-degree Celsius global warming (from the pre-industrial level) by 2100.”

But Gates’s reasonability and proportionality are, of course, anathema to the climate change movement’s ideological insistence that one iota of warming will cause the world to melt down into a dystopian wasteland.

“Scientists are reeling after one of the world’s most influential climate advocates criticized what he labeled a ‘doomsday’ outlook by the climate community,” wrote Politico Pro. Gates’s post, wrote Politico, “has sent shock waves through the environmental and climate science worlds.” Apparently, climate scientists say that Gates’s memo “sends the wrong message.”

On Friday, Mother Jones’s Nitish Pahwa penned a piece titled “Respectfully, Bill Gates Needs to Shut Up.” Pahwa wrote that “Bill Gates was downplaying climate change” even as Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica and fretted over Gates’s lack of comment on the hurricane. Pahwa was outraged by Gates’s perspective, as he put it, “that there’s ‘too much’ emphasis on ‘near-term emissions goals’ as opposed to addressing ‘poverty and disease.’”

Gates, Pahwa wrote, is just part of “a vibe shift in how we talk about climate change.” This “vibe shift,” Pahwa said, reframes climate change “from the existential risk it actually poses to a less urgent, peripheral issue — even as the floodwaters reach our front doors.” (I checked my front door this afternoon. It did rain a bit, but no floodwaters, yet.)

Meanwhile, an op-ed in Fast Company said, “After 20 years positioning himself as a climate expert, Gates is now making straw man arguments and exposing the ‘audacity’ of a billionaire who thinks he can lecture the world.”

The doomsday cult will go on in spite of everyone’s fading interest. This week, they’re meeting in Brazil for the COP30 climate summit. Despite Bill Gates’s pleas, they are going with the same apocalyptic strategy. The U.N. secretary general opened the session by calling the world’s failure to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius a “moral failure and deadly negligence.”

Watch interest continue to fall. At a certain point, endless doom and gloom are too dull to even bother paying attention to.

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