Climate
change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in
the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible.
I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent
policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the
political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic
mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent
seekers.
Judged
by deeds rather than words, most national governments are
backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date
the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when
highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the
issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from
the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming
evident.
A
good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be
found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding”
pact declares that climate action must include concern for
“gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational
equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of
‘climate justice.’ ” Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at
the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in
which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be
addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social
injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades.
The
descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice
identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has
lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring
noise people are tuning out.
This
outcome was predictable. Political scientist Anthony Downs
described the downward trajectory of many political movements in
an article for the Public Interest, “
Up
and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’ ”
published in 1972, long before the climate-change campaign
began. Observing the movements that had arisen to address issues
like crime, poverty and even the U.S.-Soviet space race, Mr.
Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political
issues pass regularly.
The
first stage involves groups of experts and activists calling
attention to a public problem, which leads quickly to the second
stage, wherein the alarmed media and political class discover
the issue. The second stage typically includes a large amount of
euphoric enthusiasm—you might call it the “dopamine” stage—as
activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and
salvation. This tendency explains the fanaticism with which
divinity-school dropouts Al Gore and Jerry Brown have warned of
climate change.
Then
comes the third stage: the hinge. As Mr. Downs explains, there
soon comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of
‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” That’s where we’ve
been since the United Nations’ traveling climate circus
committed itself to the fanatical mission of massive near-term
reductions in fossil fuel consumption, codified in unrealistic
proposals like the Kyoto Protocol. This third stage, Mr. Downs
continues, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the
fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public
interest in the problem.”
While
opinion surveys find that roughly half of Americans regard
climate change as a problem, the issue has never achieved high
salience among the public, despite the drumbeat of alarm from
the climate campaign. Americans have consistently ranked climate
change the 19th or 20th of 20 leading issues on the annual Pew
Research Center poll, while Gallup’s yearly survey of
environmental issues typically ranks climate change far behind
air and water pollution.
“In
the final stage,” Mr. Downs concludes, “an issue that has been
replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged
limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic
recurrences of interest.” Mr. Downs predicted correctly that
environmental issues would suffer this decline, because solving
such issues involves painful trade-offs that committed climate
activists would rather not make.
A
case in point is climate campaigners’ push for clean energy,
whereas they write off nuclear power because it doesn’t fit
their green utopian vision. A new study of climate-related
philanthropy by Matthew Nisbet found that of the $556.7 million
green-leaning foundations spent from 2011-15, “not a single
grant supported work on promoting or reducing the cost of
nuclear energy.” The major emphasis of green giving was “devoted
to mobilizing public opinion and to opposing the fossil fuel
industry.”
Scientists
who are genuinely worried about the potential for catastrophic
climate change ought to be the most outraged at how the left
politicized the issue and how the international policy community
narrowed the range of acceptable responses. Treating climate
change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an
international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a
political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by
politics, die by politics.
Mr.
Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of
Governmental Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley.