AMAC Exclusive – By Aaron Flanigan
During January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, former Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore went on what was described as yet another “unhinged” rant about “boiling the oceans” and “rain bombs,” going so far as to make the preposterous claim that rising global temperatures will threaten Americans’ ability to govern themselves. “We have to act!” Gore shrieked. But after decades of similarly alarmist rhetoric and one unfilled doomsday prophesy after another, it looks like most people just aren’t buying it anymore.
In recent years, no policy area save perhaps “racial equity” has received more attention, more money, or more mass hysteria from the left than climate change. In fiscal year 2022 alone, the World Bank Group spent a whopping $31.7 billion “to help countries address climate change”—a 19 percent increase from the previous fiscal year. In 2019 and 2020, governments and intergovernmental organizations reportedly spent $321 billion, corporations spent $124 billion, and private investors spent $8 billion in the name of defeating climate change.
Yet despite the left’s full-fledged campaign to convince Americans that the world is on the brink of destruction unless they greenlight colossal socialist bills to “reimagine society” like the Green New Deal, most people have responded with a collective shoulder shrug. In poll after poll, climate change falls low on the list of issues Americans most care about. In a December 2022 Gallup poll on Americans’ most important issues, the environment was tied for last, with only three percent of respondents mentioning it among the most important problems facing the country. Meanwhile, issues like dissatisfaction with government and inflation continue to dominate the focus of most Americans.
Likewise, a February 2023 Pew Research poll found that “Dealing with climate change” ranked remarkably low in a list of Americans’ top priorities. Climate change was also similarly seen as overwhelmingly unimportant in last year’s midterm elections. According to CNN, despite last year’s “major climate change legislation, that issue ranked last among the seven issues CNN asked about.” As even the left-wing Los Angeles Times bluntly put it in a fall 2022 op-ed, Americans simply “don’t care about climate change.”
Part of Americans’ apathy toward the so-called “climate crisis” is likely due to the fact that the left-wing expert class has been unsuccessfully forecasting impending environmental catastrophe for more than half a century. In 1970, The Boston Globe reported that “scientists predict a new ice age” by the start of the 21st century. In 1978, The New York Times said there was no end in sight to the then-30-year global cooling trend. Americans were told by various supposedly authoritative sources that oceans would be dead by 1980, rising sea levels would “obliterate” and “wipe nations off [the] face of the earth” by 2000, New York City would be underwater by 2015, the Maldives would be completely submerged by 2018, children soon wouldn’t know what snow is, and Britain would become Siberia by 2024.
But the most well-known example of the left’s climate fearmongering in recent years comes from Gore himself. In his 2006 book-turned-documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore warned that global warming is “a true planetary emergency” and claimed that, absent “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, “the world will reach a point of no return” by 2016.
Ultimately, the left’s failure to convince voters that environmental apocalypse is just around the corner does not mean that Americans do not care about environmental stewardship and safeguarding our planet’s natural beauty. But by now, it has become clear to the American people that the left’s environmental fearmongering is a trojan horse with which to impose sweeping left-wing federal policies like the Green New Deal. As conservative commentator Logan Hall aptly observed on Twitter, conservatives’ concern for the environment is rooted in “beauty, nature, stewardship, [and] preservation,” whereas left-wing environmentalism is marked by “poverty, wind turbines, unaffordable [electric vehicles], [and] gas stove bans.”
In the end, for someone who has dedicated decades of his professional career to warning Americans about an environmental apocalypse that has failed to come to fruition time and time again—and almost certainly won’t anytime soon—Al Gore’s temper tantrum in Davos is perhaps unsurprising.
Unfortunately for the former vice president, the American people are increasingly seeing straight through his act. And after years of raking in millions of dollars off environmental hysteria, it appears Al Gore’s jig may finally be up.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
