As the country moves from win to win, Democrats are looking at the 2026 and 2028 elections with growing apprehension. They seem to be nearing the "throw everything against the wall and see if any of it sticks" stage already, and when nothing does, they're blaming everything but their ideas, their policy positions, and their message. Oh, they have a message, or rather, they have a few messages: "We hate Trump, we want dudes in girls' sports and their locker rooms, and the planet will catch fire if we don't all start eating bugs and accept having electricity only four hours a day." All right, I'm exaggerating a little, except for the hating Trump part, and the dudes in girls' sports, and... OK, well, maybe I'm not exaggerating.
The latest culprit in this horse squeeze-a-palooza is William S. Becker, a Clinton creature who, at one time, was a U.S. Department of Energy official and founded the Energy Department's "Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development." Becker recently took to a friendly forum - The Hill - to warn us, once again, of some climate doom impending unless we act, and by act, we can be sure he means "more government control of everything we do."
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D, an actual expert, is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. He has some facts to drop on William S. Becker, and it's a sight to behold.
“We know from decades of scientific research, and now from brutal experience, that global climate change is real,” writes William S. Becker, former U.S. Department of Energy official who founded its Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development under then President Bill Clinton. “Few, if any, places in the U.S. are safe from its many consequences. They are as quick as flash floods and as slow as rising seas, but they are undeniably real and growing worse.”
“One result is personal and society-wide cognitive dissonance — the mental and emotional discomfort we feel when our actions clash with reality or beliefs. a recent Gallup poll shows that 63 percent of Americans believe global warming is underway, and that 48 percent — a record — believe it will seriously threaten their way of life,” Becker continues. “Yet more Americans are moving into places with high risks of climate-related disasters rather than out of them.”
Becker is wrong, there is no cognitive dissonance in peoples’ positions, but rather it reflects a rational assessment of the relative importance of climate change as a threat to their lives and well-being when compared to other issues, like the economy, jobs, health care, education, crime, and illegal immigration.
In other words, people are making decisions in their own self-interest, as people always have done, as they always should do, and the fact is, most people aren't too worried about climate change. This is no doubt in part because of all the breathless predictions of all the climate scolds over all the years having been wrong. I'm old enough to remember when the "environmental movement," as they called it in those days, was issuing panic-tinged pronouncements about an imminent ice age. And, of course, there's Al "ManBearPig" Gore, and his laughable predictions about the polar ice caps and his carbon hectoring, done from his expansive Tennessee mansion.
Read More: Al 'North Polar Ice Cap' Gore Crawls Out of the Woodwork to Attack Trump Energy Policies
Climate Scolds Are Losing the Discussion: They Think It's the Messaging, Not the Message
The arguments of the scolds just aren't sticking to the electoral wall, as we have seen time and time again. Mr. Burnett adds:
Indeed, as recently as early July CNN’s senior data reporter, Harry Enten, reported on a new Gallup poll on climate change and natural disasters which found that the percentage of Americans “greatly worried” about climate change had declined by six percentage points since 2020, down to just 40 percent. That’s the same percentage of people surveyed who expressed worry about climate change in Gallups 2000 survey asking the same question. Meaning that despite 25 years of mainstream media constantly warning of climate doom, the public is largely unmoved.
This is because the public is seeing what's actually happening, and it's not much. Not on the timescale we are concerned with. People's concerns are more immediate, and they should be. And, as is generally the case, at some point, facts start to crack through the hand-wringing and the panic-mongering.
To start, for a broad range of extreme weather, even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits to having low confidence that trends have changed or gotten worse, and for most classes of extreme weather events. The IPCC also does not forecast any such signal to arise by 2050 or 2100, either. Data provides no support for claims that during the recent period of modest warming floods, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, or drought, have become more frequent or severe, despite what misleading headlines and unresearched stories in the mainstream media might lead one to believe. Globally sea level rise is not uniform, and the best evidence from tide gauges and historical analyses suggest that the present rate of warming is not unusually rapid historically.
Of course, William Becker doesn't care about any of this, and neither does his receptive audience at The Hill. But voters are paying attention, or at least, they aren't buying the panic-mongering. Everyone has bigger fish to fry than a 3-degree increase in average global temperatures over the next century, especially when, through most of the planet's vast history, it's been warmer than it is now, and somehow, life always found a way.
Watch for the left to keep pushing this line of attack through the midterms and into the 2028 presidential election. Like the "transgender athletes" issue, like Trump Derangement Syndrome, like "we want to tax everything that moves and even some things that look like they might move at some point," it's all they seem able to come up with. They'll keep bringing out more "experts," they'll keep trying new angles, they'll keep worrying about how they are presenting their messages and why they aren't sticking to that big, beautiful electoral wall - and if we, as a nation, are very fortunate, they'll never figure out that it's the message, not the messaging, not even the messengers, that are so laughably and catastrophically wrong.
