Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
It is factually correct and mainstream that both oil-and-gas production and energy demand are increasing. But here comes climate alarmist Bill McKibben, climate writer at the New York Times, promoting a false narrative of fossil fuels declining in supply and in demand.
It is a strange development. McKibben previously ranted about the lack of climate action in the face of a crisis. He seemed ready to throw in the towel if the political world would not get better. But what is a spent climate alarmist to do? Create a message of hope.
McKibben’s is an old page from the energy-subtraction Progressive Left. Remember what Amory Lovins stated nearly a half-century ago?
“The long-term prospects of selling more electricity are dismal.”[1]
“Prominent exploration experts have recently predicted that total world production of liquid oil will peak by about the end of this decade-or a few years later if production does not rise much-and will decline thereafter.” [2]
Wrong and wrong–and time and again. But McKibben does not know or want to know this history.
But a report out this morning from the good folks at Oil Change International … makes clear that the industry is running out of the really cheap stuff—the fracked gas from the Permian and Appalachian shales that it’s been pumping for the last two decades. Many of those wells are playing out fast, and now it’s going to need to turn to the more “geologically complex” Haynesville shale of east Texas and Louisiana, and that will drive up costs—especially since more and more of the gas is, at least theoretically, going to be exported to Asia as the industry builds out massive shipping terminals along the Gulf of Mexico.
He quotes from the study:
If industry succeeds in locking in unprecedented demand for U.S. gas by expanding exports and domestic consumption, U.S. supply may be pushed to its limits. Gas supply can only meet such high levels of demand if prices rise to cover the higher production costs of marginal gas supplies. This connects rising dependence on gas to rising energy costs. U.S. consumers and those in LNG-importing countries must push policymakers to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to reliable, affordable renewable energy.
The “the easy stuff has been found” refrain–more than a century old–fails to comprehend how high-cost supplies become low-cost with new technology and free market incentives and capital. Resourceship under market incentives explains the paradox of increasing ‘depletable’ supply.
… it’s been clear for some time that oil is not a growth industry. The rapid rise of EVs in most of the world undercuts projections of future use—we’re at or near the top of the plateau now, and by 2030 or so the amount of oil we use should be going down.
Not in the U.S., which represents approximately one-fourth of the global economy. And never mind that China is losing money on its (centrally planned) EV program, a burden that might lead to a policy reversal.
The narrative that renewables are the future, not fossil fuels, has had a few proponents in the oil industry. “Demand will take a long time to recover if it recovers at all,” remarked Ben van Beurden, CEO, Royal Dutch Shell, six years ago. (July 30, 2020) Meanwhile, the world produces and consumes record amounts of oil and gas, with coal not far behind.
Reality bats last. The data will continue to show that consumers are winning out against government climate “mitigation” policies. What will Bill McKibben say next?
Footnotes
[1] Lovins, The Soft Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977, 1979), p.96n.
[2] Lovins, World Energy Strategies: Facts, Issues, and Options (New York: Friends of the Earth International, 1975), p. 26.
“There’s a thing out there called a ‘climate husher.’ Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ – people who think Dems should stop talking about climate.” – Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
Climate messaging is a mess as the Progressive Left tries to square the energy circle with affordability. Traditional messages have flunked. Complained one activist:
Maybe the problem isn’t climate denial. Maybe it’s climate messaging. We’ve been attempting to scare or shame people into caring, and it’s not effective. Is it time to completely rethink how we talk about climate and sustainability? We’ve spent years trying to influence people through fear, data, and moral urgency. The results? Mixed.
The latest despair comes from Bill McKibben in his Earth Day post, Let’s TALK Climate. “The so-called ‘climate hushing’ among Democrats is a product of political consultants looking at polling data,” he complained. McKibben then quotes from Claire Barber’s essay, which summarized a report by Searchlight Institute (a Democratic think tank), “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”
“While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them,” the report said. Similar to the American Mind Survey, Searchlight found that a majority of Americans believe that climate change is a problem, but rank it below other key issues, like affordability. Searchlight also found high partisan (Democratic) association with the terms “climate” and “climate change” and suggested jettisoning mentions of both altogether.
McKibben then provides some context:
The phenomenon really dates, I think, from the 2024 presidential campaign, and Kamala Harris’s abbreviated run for the White House. Climate campaigners were perfectly happy to shut up during that run for an obvious reason: Joe Biden had given them, in the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA], most of what DC could provide: a massive infusion of funds for the energy transition we require.
The job was to pull Harris across the finish line so that her administration could continue the work well underway with the IRA. We failed at that: her message, on the politics of joy and the dangers of Trump ran aground on frustrations with inflation. Climate played no discernible part in the election…..
Wimp-out. Climate and energy were an issue to Republicans, independents, and libertarians, along with the overreach of the Democrat Party elsewhere. The IRA, notably, was an attempt to create too-big-to-fail, rent-seeking wind, solar, battery, and EV businesses. That horrendous bill threw deficit dollars at the worst energies, pure misdirection and waste that is now being undone by a new administration.
Back to McKibben:
In the wake of their defeat, Democrats have seized on “bread and butter issues,” and left supposed culture war clashes behind. That’s come at a real cost. Corporations, feeling only pressure from the right, have backslid dramatically on their climate commitments. (The big tech guys, who just a couple of years ago were noisily pledging they’d go net zero, are currently planning gas-fired data centers that Wired reports today will produce more emissions than mid-sized European countries). And journalists are, not surprisingly, wandering away from the whole area: the wonderful Amy Westervelt yesterday described a dour meeting of environmental reporters where, among other things, she learned that not just the Washington Post but also Reuters was laying off its climate desk.
Good news, right? The hyperbole and strongarming for bad over good, exaggeration over realism, encouraged at the federal level by a new Administration, was removed. Amway-eyed McKibben can see only red instead of green (as in less wind/solar/battery blight/sprawl).
Meanwhile, funders of climate journalism are largely folding, too, opting to back comms projects instead or simply stay away from anything as “controversial” as climate and journalism altogether. The cowardice is breathtaking.
Our research has found that online news coverage of climate change has been trending down. A search of the term “climate change” in Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 248 online outlets, found that there was almost 32% less climate coverage in 2025 than 2024. This trend is similar in TV news. A recent Media Matters (3/4/26) study found that climate coverage on major US commercial broadcast TV networks was down 35% in 2025….
McKibben fools himself, something that Richard Feynman warned against decades ago.
What’s interesting about all this is that it’s not being driven by some change in the basic underlying politics of climate [wrong]. New polling data makes clear that Americans are as concerned about climate change as they ever have been [wrong].
Polls? Ask the question in terms of priorities or in terms of monetary sacrifice. Sure, it is easy to want a freebie to make X or Y better. But consider the reality that climate change and the environment are way back of, yes, bread-and-butter issues.
“Americans’ assessments of the environment are particularly bleak ahead of Earth Day,” McKibben continues, “as a record-low 35% offer a positive rating of the environment’s quality and two-thirds say it is worsening.” But that is largely from exaggeration from a political takeover of natural/social science around the issue. The neo-Malthusian consensus has been wrong since at least the 1960s on a variety of related issues. Bottom line: people are not the problem, they are the solution. Julian Simon lives in death. Paul Ehrlich is intellectually dead in death.
McKibben advises what the Republicans would like to see happen.
The key data point here, for political thinkers, is that the increase in worry about the environment is being driven by independent voters, precisely the people who will determine how the midterms go.
I doubt it. The Green New Deal Scam is exposed. “Climate” is code for energy inferiority, don’t eat meat, and don’t be temperature-comfortable indoors. Self-sacrifice, in other words, is a nonstarter from the U.S. to France. McKibben’s alarmism is just too tired and old. [1] Time’s up: Get real or get out.
———————–
[1] McKibben ends on his regular alarmist note:
So, especially as the climate disasters of this hot summer start to mount, and as the El Niño [a natural phenomenon?] starts to scare people anew, I’d spend some time if I were campaigning making fun of the president on this score….
… with a killer fallacy and magical thinking on stilts:
I’d couple [the pitch] with a full-on assault about affordability…. a quick move to clean energy drives down prices. If I were preparing ads for congresspeople, I’d definitely have one about how a solarized Australia will, in June, start providing electricity free for three hours every afternoon to all its citizens. Talk about affordability!
“These are very interesting times–and at the New York Times. The climate writers and editors are daring to ask or allow hard questions about a politically losing narrative. It’s a start.”
“These are very interesting times–and at the New York Times. The climate writers and editors are daring to ask or allow hard questions about a politically losing narrative. It’s a start.”
The New York Times op-ed, “Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore” (May 9, 2026) is yet another marker that the debate is widening over the economic and political feasibility of climate alarm and forced energy transformation. [1] Matthew Huber wrote:
For the past several months, Democratic elites have been debating how much to talk about climate change, if at all — in part because these new candidates have narrowed their focus to energy affordability to win back the working class. It is a striking shift from a few years ago, when many Democratic politicians thought the promise of a Green New Deal would build a coalition based on green jobs and fighting inequality.
So how did the Progressive Left take this (small) dose of reality? New York Times climate opinion editor Eliza Barclay invited comments on social media:
Love to see all of the chatter about Matt Huber’s provocative essay about why Democratic candidates campaigning for the midterms should focus on affordable (and clean) energy rather than the climate crisis.
A hard line was taken by David Fenon:
This headline: Pearl Harbor Bombed. Democrats Shouldn’t Talk About it…. This is a big part of why the public doesn’t make it a top voting issue. This essay is capitulation to catastrophe…. Don’t talk about it, then the public won’t know about it, then you can’t run for office on it and the country won’t act on the emergency. And if a Democrat wins without a public mandate for action, she won’t be able to get legislation passed to deal with the crisis. Suggest you look at Senator Whitehouse’s response. And this kind of essay keeps appearing–urging Democrats to be “moderate” and support fossil fuel production, you know, Moderate Destruction. With respect but now exasperation too.
Scolding (bullying?) Barclay, Jim Bernfield, a communications expert for the alarmist cause, commented:
The author’s historical analysis was at best questionable, his political bona fides weak, and his argument fairly mundane, even for a NYT op-ed. But the clickbait headline — likely your responsibility, Eliza Barclay — was unadulterated garbage. You’re the climate editor, l am going to assume you can do better than this.
A variation on this theme, my piece for POLITICO Europe. Instead of leading with climate, flip the script: Rather than leading with data and promoting health, safety and economic “co-benefits” as bonus add-ons, climate advocates need to flip the script.
Is a civil war developing on the Left? Also see [here].
These are very interesting times–and at the New York Times. The climate editors and writers are daring to ask or allow hard questions about a politically losing narrative. It’s a start.
——————–
[1] My own op-ed in the Houston Chronicle is a smaller marker of a new era of open debate on the underlying science, economics, and public policy of a once closed mainstream media.
In his 1999 piece (often tied to a Wall Street Journal op-ed or CEI-related commentary around Earth Day 2000), Fred Smith proposed renaming April 22 “Resourceful Earth Day” explicitly to celebrate Simon’s vision:“The problems of famine, overpopulation, poverty, and disease are resolvable. In fact, they have been resolved in the United States and other places where human ingenuity is free to solve them.”
In his 1999 piece (often tied to a Wall Street Journal op-ed or CEI-related commentary around Earth Day 2000), Fred Smith proposed renaming April 22 “Resourceful Earth Day” explicitly to celebrate Simon’s vision:
“The problems of famine, overpopulation, poverty, and disease are resolvable. In fact, they have been resolved in the United States and other places where human ingenuity is free to solve them.”
Smith critiqued the shift in Earth Day from any early optimism toward a gloomy “day of atonement” focused on humanity as a “cancer” on the planet. He highlighted the environmental movement’s embrace of the “Terrible Toos”: too many people, too much consumption, too much reliance on poorly understood technology. This led to calls for stasis, population control, reduced growth, and “wilderness” that excludes human activity—contrasting sharply with Simon’s view that free people continuously improve both the economy and the environment.
Smith critiqued the shift in Earth Day from any early optimism toward a gloomy “day of atonement” focused on humanity as a “cancer” on the planet. He highlighted the environmental movement’s embrace of the “Terrible Toos”: too many people, too much consumption, too much reliance on poorly understood technology. This led to calls for stasis, population control, reduced growth, and “wilderness” that excludes human activity—contrasting sharply with Simon’s view that free people continuously improve both the economy and the environment.
Editor’s Note: Today has been celebrated since 1970 as Earth Day. With the Progressive Left all but abandoning its significance, the opportunity is to rebrand April 22nd as Resourceful Earth Day. Human ingenuity, despite Statism, has proven optimist/realist Julian Simon correct, as noted by CEI founder and longtime head Fred Smith in this 1999 tribute.
“The problems of famine, overpopulation, poverty, and disease are resolvable. In fact, they have been resolved in the United States and other places where human ingenuity is free to solve them.”
April 22, once associated with the optimism of revolutionary Marxism (as the birthday of Lenin) and then with the pessimism of modern Malthusianism (environmentalism’s Earth Day since 1970), merits redemption. A new label, Resourceful Earth Day, is appropriate as we enter the 21st century, a title selected to honor mankind’s increasing ability to solve environmental as well as economic problems.
This title, of course, is inspired by the late Julian Simon, author of “The Resourceful Earth,” who combated with passion and power those who viewed man as the cancer of this planet and his future as bleak and austere.
Resourceful Earth Day also signals a hope more appropriate to spring, marking a return to a positive view of man’s role on this planet. Indeed the old Marxists, convinced that they would dominate the future, optimistically favored economic and technological change. The forces of change, they believed, would move man toward heaven here on Earth.
That optimistic element has disappeared. The environmental establishment has grown increasingly gloomy, convinced that the Earth is suffering from the “Terrible Toos” — too many people, too much consumption, too great a reliance on technology which is understood too little. Earth Day has become a day of atonement for man’s criminal assault on our planet. That pessimism reflects, in part, their realization that history is no longer on their side; thus, change is no longer in their interest. Stasis must be the order of the day.
With attacks on things like biotechnology, automobiles, suburban opportunity and trade, they now seek only, as Aaron Wildavsky noted, “an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.” Had God not expelled man from the Garden of Eden, so the story goes, the “greens” certainly would have. And, indeed, their ideal land use is “wilderness,” defined as an area from which man is excluded.
Simon was a wonderful critic of all this foolishness. He investigated and refuted the gloomy projections that Western Civilization was a failure, that our civilization was non-sustainable and doomed to inevitable decline as the planet’s finite resources were depleted.
But the finite nature of the Earth’s material resources pose no great problem, he argued, because the Earth’s most precious resource is infinite and organic. It is its people, contributing to the ever-growing stock of useful human knowledge. When people have been free to apply their intellect, they have always found ways to meet needs and answer crises, and always will.
Simon pointed out that, while people are born with stomachs, they are born with brains and hands as well. The latter allow them to create far more than they consume. People, after all, are not ciphers, which helps explain how the growth in the world’s food supply has outstripped the growth in the world’s population.
The problems of famine, overpopulation, poverty, and disease are resolvable. In fact, they have been resolved in the United States and other places where human ingenuity is free to solve them. The calamity criers of the green movement predicted great disasters afflicting the planet by the year 2000. The Carter administration’s Global 2000 Report forecast global calamity, and Paul Ehrlich claimed on the Johnny Carson Show, “If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Unfortunately for the eco-catastrophists, as we approach their due date for disaster, the planet is in increasingly good shape. This point was recently conceded by America’s arch-druid. “Not only do we have the healthiest economy in a generation,” said Vice President Al Gore, “we also have the cleanest environment.”
On this Resourceful Earth Day, we may hope that Gore and his fellow foot soldiers in the environmental brigades will ponder these points and rethink the wisdom of the current policy of placing all one’s faith in federal political solutions. The greens’ constant calls for massive government controls, forced population limits, harsh curbs on economic activity, and a curtailing of technology threaten to produce exactly the results that such actions seek to avoid —a world of ecological and economic disaster. On this April 22, let us commit to both a freer and a cleaner world; they go together after all.
“Don’t get tangled up in your own underwear,” an old saying goes. Such applies to the carbon management schemes created by governmental anti-CO2 policy.
“Low-quality carbon offsets are undermining global decarbonisation efforts. Around 40% of existing carbon pricing schemes allow the use of offsets, most with no effective limits on quality or quantity. Recent analysis shows that fewer than 16% of more than 2,300 offset projects actually delivered the emission reductions they promised.” – Johan Rockström, (Potsdam Institute)
“Don’t get tangled up in your own underwear,” an old saying goes. Such applies to the carbon management schemes created by governmental anti-CO2 policy.
You reap what you sow. If you politicize an issue by introducing government intervention into voluntary market transactions, then expect suboptimal outcomes. Call it government failure in the attempt to address alleged market failure.
Shame that Big Green does not see itself as the problem rather than “wrong” public policies. And here we are: the Progressive Left complaining about bad climate policy decades after they themselves went political.
Lisa Sachs (Columbia University)
Lisa Sachs, Director of Columbia’s Center on Sustainable Investment, stated:
Thanks to all who engaged w/ my post explaining why there are no credible carbon offsets. I’m pulling together some important points from the comments:
1 Offsets aren’t just reductions elsewhere. Companies aren’t honestly reporting challenges of decarb & buying credits altruistically to help achieve reductions elsewhere. They buy credits to falsely report fewer emissions than actually emitted – hence “offsetting.” [this is the result of the misguided emphasis on emissions reporting – more below]. If companies weren’t allowed to use credits to ‘cancel’ emissions, they wouldn’t buy them. A more credible way to have emitting companies pay for other reductions is to implement a levy- that incentivizes reductions & allows public investments to be made at scale w/out false accounting.
2We need all mitigation & all removals. Real Net Zero requires full decarbonization, capture/sequestration of the very limited non-abatable emissions, AND preserving/enhancing (degrading) natural sinks AND DAC. We need all. There’s no room for offsetting. The attached pic is best I could find to show effect of using sinks as offsets.
3Offsets don’t make projects financeable. Neither RECs nor offsets have ever made a large RE project bankable; offset revenues are too small & uncertain for financing. The real enablers of finance are cost-competitive technologies, long-term offtake, mandates/incentives/subsidies & de-risking mechanisms.
4Nature & land-use projects need real financing. Restoration & regenerative land use require landscape-scale planning & public financing. Carbon markets are not the only way to leverage private finance; the public sector can borrow (affordably) & issue other innovative debt/catalytic instruments.
5Markets can/should finance much of the transition. Finance is already flowing to many sectors where there are buyers, sellers & cost-competitive technology. Where the transition faces friction (from new technologies, infrastructure gaps, or cost differentials), we need to diagnose the challenge (market risk, regulatory uncertainty, cost of capital, technology premium, etc.) and structure appropriate solutions w/relevant, targeted commitments of off takers, suppliers, public entities, etc.
The defeatism is striking: many suggest its offsets or paralysis. In reality, coordination works (even in the US!): it’s practical, proven, & achievable. But it’s undermined when critical actors can opt for easier alternatives.
And this is perhaps the core issue: by evaluating corporate climate commitments primarily via emissions footprints, we’ve undermined what matters most. What’s most valuable — collective engagement, innovation, and collaboration across sectors & supply chains — isn’t rewarded/incentivized when companies can simply buy credits to “cancel” emissions. The net effect is less cooperation, slower transitions & misplaced confidence that accounting equivalence will substitute for real decarbonization.
Academics at the University of Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania have conducted the most comprehensive review of evidence on the effectiveness on carbon offsetting to date and concluded the practice is ineffective and riddled with “intractable” problems.
Carbon offsets are projects that generate credits meant to represent the reduction, avoidance, or removal of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the atmosphere. The first carbon offset was generated in 1989. The authors call for the phasing out of most credits except those generated by permanent carbon dioxide removal.
“We must stop expecting carbon offsetting to work at scale. We have assessed 25 years of evidence and almost everything up until this point has failed,” says co-author Dr Stephen Lezak, researcher at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. “The present market failures are not due to a few bad apples but rather to systematic, deep-seated problems, which will not be resolved by incremental changes.”
“We hope our findings provide a moment of clarity ahead of COP30: These junk offsets—the ones not backed by permanent carbon removal and storage—are a dangerous distraction from the real solution to climate change, which is rapid and sustained emission reductions,” says lead author Dr Joseph Romm, Senior Research Fellow at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.
The most severe issues uncovered by the research are nonadditionality (generating credits without reducing emissions), impermanence, leakage, double counting, “perverse incentives,” and the “gameability” of crediting systems, where bad actors have been able to routinely circumvent even well-designed rules. Far from solving these problems, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which was finalised at COP29, simply restated “long-ignored tenets of carbon market development, with the specious expectation that this time the outcomes might differ significantly,” the authors say.
“Despite efforts to implement safeguards, carbon offset projects continue to face documented cases of weak accountability, risking the perpetuation of neocolonial patterns of appropriation. While nature-based projects can deliver local benefits, these should be financed through mechanisms other than carbon credits, such as contribution claims where projects are financed while still ensuring that purchasing entities are responsible for reducing their own emissions,” says co-author Amna Alshamsi, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies. Previous research has shown how offset programs routinely overestimate their climate impact, in many cases by as much as a factor of ten or more.
Going forward, all offset markets should prioritise developing high-integrity, durable CDR and storage—with long-term measurement and verification—the authors conclude, while recognising that effective and scalable CDR may not be possible, and will certainly require intensive research and investment.
This approach aligns with the Oxford Offsetting Principles, which encourage companies to reduce emissions first and foremost, and to transition to durable, carbon removal offsetting for residual emissions.
Johan Rockström, (Potsdam Institute) Johan Rockström, Director at PIK- Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; Professor Earth System Science, University of Potsdam, referencing a recent Nature Communications study, wrote:
Low-quality carbon offsets are undermining global decarbonisation efforts. Around 40% of existing carbon pricing schemes allow the use of offsets, most with no effective limits on quality or quantity. Recent analysis shows that fewer than 16% of more than 2,300 offset projects actually delivered the emission reductions they promised. In our new Nature commentary, we highlight how this lack of integrity erodes trust in carbon markets and why aligning investments with rigorous, science-based carbon assessments must become a priority. Strengthening credibility and accountability in carbon markets must be central to COP30 discussions and to global decarbonisation efforts ahead.
Carbon offsets is a major divide within the Progressive Left, Big Green machine–the Climate Industrial Complex to a lot of us. Another civil war regards nuclear acceptance, a story for another day.
Nothing strikes as much fear through the establishment’s fact-checkers and hate-vanquishers as the rise of ‘populism’. Democratic backlashes against dominant ideologies and policy agendas are the natural and inevitable reaction to the intransigence of those who advance them.
Nothing strikes as much fear through the establishment’s fact-checkers and hate-vanquishers as the rise of ‘populism’. Democratic backlashes against dominant ideologies and policy agendas are the natural and inevitable reaction to the intransigence of those who advance them. These reactions, which look likely to sweep many populist parties to power in elections this year, are seen by incumbents as the re-emergence of ‘dark historical forces’, but our leaders have no other words for the challenges to their authority than ‘far-Right’. The reason they cannot grasp what’s really going on – indeed, one of the causes of their unpopularity – is that they’ve placed too much faith in what has turned out to be really bad science.
According to the narrative of anointed pundits, tractors on their way to Europe’s capital cities and the EU Parliament are like so many Nazi tanks rolling across the continent. The EU Parliamentary election is at risk of a ‘far-Right takeover’ as polling shows voters beginning to reject the liberal consensus. This paranoid fantasy is not wholly without a basis in fact – the benighted really are changing the political landscape. Following Giorgia Meloni’s 2022 victory in Italy, Geert Wilders’s PVV became the largest party in the Netherlands last year but has been unable to form a Government. Since 2020, AfD has doubled its polling to around 20%, pushing Germany’s SPD and Greens into third and fourth places. The German Government is now contemplating banning the party, so bereft of ideas is it about how to counter its criticisms in the public square. France’s longstanding spectre haunting global blobists, Marine Le Pen’s party, would, according to recent polling, win a majority of seats in the National Assembly if an election were held tomorrow.
According to the establishment view, science is at loggerheads with the populism now sweeping across Europe. But to pit science against ideology in this way is false. Science has been used to legitimise numerous contemporary political agendas, invoked in the same way that God used to be to legitimise a particular political platform. Most notably, ‘climate science’, which is invoked by increasingly remote elites struggling to overcome yawning democratic deficits claim that ‘saving the planet’ is in the best interests of their electorates. Yet, to those being forced to pay the price for these economically ruinous policies, it’s obvious that the Net Zero agenda is, at root, an ideological crusade designed to advance the interests of wealthy elites. And many are now wondering if the ‘climate change’ we’re constantly being warned about will be as devastating as the policies designed to mitigate its effect, which seem to require the suspension of democracy, the transformation of society and the draconian regulation of lifestyles insofar as they require energy.
As politicians and others have met resistance to their agendas based on ‘unimpeachable science’, they have sought an explanation. The answer they found is epitomised by a 2011 article by liberal science warrior Chris Mooney, who helpfully set out ‘The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science’. Neuroscientists and social psychologists, explained Mooney, had identified differences in the structure of brains owned by liberals and conservatives, which made the latter more prone to ‘motivated reasoning’ and therefore to ideology, whereas liberals were biased only towards truth. This explained why Republicans were more sceptical of climate change then their Democrat counterparts who obediently recognised the authority of ‘the scientific consensus’. Mooney’s essay, which followed his 2005 book, The Republican War on Science, was itself worked into a book in 2012, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality.
Mooney’s work, born in the pre-Obama era of ‘muscular atheism’ and a regrouping of Left-of-centre ideas around scientism, though largely inconsequential, marked the completion of cognitive and behavioural scientists’ entry into the political sphere. Only somebody with insufficiently developed neural circuits – a.k.a. Republicans – could disagree with climate propaganda, or they were funded by Big Oil, or both. It didn’t really matter, because Science had spoken.
But Mooney’s confidence was misplaced. Whereas the scientific consensus on climate change had been broadly (and falsely) reported as being as indubitable as ‘basic physics’, the new lab-coated recruits of this political, and increasingly cultural war, could not claim anything so tangible. First, studies confirmed that academic psychology was experiencing a ‘replication crisis’ – barely a third of published science in the field could be reproduced experimentally. Second, psychological science was revealed to be dominated by Left-wing scientists, with measurable impacts on peer-review. Conservative scientists were less likely to be published. A soft science – and perhaps the softest science – was now being used to supposedly explain why more people didn’t believe in hard science, although, to complicate things, the hard science wasn’t that hard after all.
In Britain, where politics was less polarised under a suffocating Blairism, this naked scientism had a much easier ride into the establishment. A consensus on climate change – and pretty much everything else – had formed in Westminster, excluding any inconvenient influences from politics. In a 2010 report, jointly produced by the Cabinet Office and the Institute for Government, Cabinet Secretary, then Sir, now Lord Gus O’Donnell, who had commissioned it, wrote in the foreword:
Many of the biggest policy challenges we are now facing… will only be resolved if we are successful in persuading people to change their behaviour, their lifestyles or their existing habits.
The report, citing “major advances in understanding the influences on our behaviours” argued that “influencing behaviour is central to public policy”, and that in tackling “crime, obesity or environmental sustainability, behavioural approaches offer a potentially powerful new set of tools”.
But there had been no development in the behavioural sciences – they remained mired in the depths of the replication crises and obvious ideological bias. The only change that occurred was a dim view of individuals’ competences had developed and become fashionable within policy circles, displacing a view that had hitherto constrained technocratic paternalism. Barely a year following its publication, Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness had become the British Establishment’s operating manual. The Nudge Unit, properly known as the Behavioural Insights Team, was born.
After all, something had been lacking in public life since before even Blair’s triumphant arrival at Downing Street and politicians struggled to put their finger on it. In the early days of New Labour, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott declared that the state’s performance would now be measured by a ‘quality of life barometer’. Even the amount of birdsong – a metric of ecological sustainability and subjective wellbeing – would be measured. Sadly for Prescott, the plans for happiness were shelved in favour of a ‘War on Terror’, and so it was a touchy-feely David ‘hug-a-husky’ Cameron who finally seized the therapeutic initiative. He had convened a Quality of Life policy group in 2007 to investigate the policies required to make us adjust our behaviour to make life better for everyone, e.g. use less fossil fuels. And having taken office in 2010, the nudgers were the very group to help him make the ‘difficult’ choices required to save the planet.
The coalition ‘greenest Government ever’ brought together the two opposition parties that had convinced themselves they were planet savers. But the strongest constituency in Britain (ever) had a very different idea about what was lacking in politics. Worse, the Leave vote having won, no less an earthquake in the form of Donald Trump sent a second panic through the anointed classes. How could the nudgers, either side of the Atlantic, have got it so wrong? In the wake of these catastrophes, psychologists set to work developing new hypotheses to explain the public’s lack of gratitude.
Then, the most curious intervention from psychologists in the years between the Referendum and the Covid pandemic came from the green quarters. In 2018, an obscure 2016 paper by clinical psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon came to the attention of climate protesters. The paper called for the creation of a “climate emergency movement”, which would “lead the public into emergency mode”. This “mode is the mode of human psychological functioning that occurs when individuals or groups respond optimally to existential or moral emergencies”, claimed the psychologist. Thus, having had the ‘truth’ of the ‘climate emergency’ explained to them, the public would rise up and force governments to act to save the planet. Klein-Salamon’s hypothesis spawned Extinction Rebellion and its franchises, and Greta Thunberg’s Schools Strike movement. But the public, in their millions, stayed at home. Rather than rising up, they became impatient with the failure to clear the mere dozens of protesters from the streets.
A more successful intervention by social psychologists was the infamous survey which claimed that 97% of academic papers on climate change supported the consensus position. Cook et al.’s 2013 study was routinely cited by Obama as representing the “overwhelming judgement of science”. It’s authors believed, like Klein-Salamon, that the public would be more receptive to the ‘climate emergency’ scaremongering if they knew it had the backing of most climate scientists – a contentious hypothesis of science communication known as the Gateway Belief Model. “An accurate perception of the degree of scientific consensus is an essential element to public support for climate policy,” explains the paper’s introduction. The paper was not accurate, but it created an article of faith around which its adherents could organise their arguments. It was political communication, not science communication.
But how effective has this psychological ‘science’ been?
It’s beginning to look like the advice of behavioural ‘scientists’ about how to engage the public on Net Zero and other policies is a bit duff. Big promises are made by these academics about their ability to influence the public. But what are they really capable of achieving?
Extremely limited evidence underpins behavioural scientists’ claims. The classic example of ‘nudge’, for example, is the discovery that the image of a fly painted onto a urinal helps men to take better aim, thereby leaving conveniences in better condition. Away from the toilet, psychologists discoveries are difficult to quantify in wider society. Some psychologists, observe their critics, have used exotic and inappropriate statistical methods to report greater effects than can realistically be detected and expressed in conventional terms. Even in the lab, an attempt to quantify the Gateway Belief Model found that consensus messaging yielded just a +1.7% change in support for climate policies. This result was later disputed by other researchers in the field, who conversely found ‘reactance’ in studies of consensus messaging – an awareness of being manipulated, which increased rather than overcame polarisation.
It is a peculiar debate between academics on the green-Left about how best to manipulate climate-sceptic conservatives, rather than have it out with their enemy in the democratic open. And this cod-science’s hostility to democracy and the hoi polloi, which is conceived of as an unthinking, malleable mass, is reproduced in countless governments’ policies and communications. Perhaps then, they have not merely failed to manufacture consent but have actually helped to turn electorates against their would-be masters.
It would be too much to say that the global ‘populist backlash’ is wholly caused by green blob head-shrinking. But behaviourists’ work seems more intended to legitimise intransigence and to justify draconian policy to politicians than to win over the public, whose reaction to it does not require a PhD to understand. Many millions are poured by governments into research which hasn’t merely produced some ‘reactance’ but ultimately looks set to be near-terminal for the green cause, if progressive governments and politicians suffer the catastrophic defeats at the ballot box that many predict. If the intention was to win over the public, then the psychologists are even more out of touch than their clients. Academic psychology epitomises, rather than rescues, elite intransigence.
People can be hectored and punished into lockdowns and forced by high prices to reduce their energy usage, and democracy can be slowly eroded. But academic psychologists have been unable to turn insight about men peeing on flies into preventing a pissed off public reciprocating official sentiments.
When presented with actual choice, rather than one dictated by ‘choice architects’, the public do not choose either heat pumps or EVs, nor green technocratic globalists. Britain, for the moment, looks set to buck the trend sweeping the rest of the planet. But that’s partly because successive Conservative governments have placed far too much faith in propaganda informed by behavioural science, just like their progressive counterparts abroad. There’s a lesson here for Keir Starmer – but you can bet your bottom dollar he’ll ignore it.
Subscribe to Ben Pile’s The Net Zero Scandal Substack here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.