A recent Gallup poll found that 66 percent of Americans believe the environment is getting worse — the highest level since 2008 and one of the most pessimistic readings Gallup has ever recorded. Yet by nearly every measure that can actually be tracked, the environment has only improved in recent decades and is getting better every year. So, what’s going on?
Air quality is one metric that especially stands out. According to the EPA, ambient carbon monoxide in the air has fallen by 87 percent since 1980. At the same time, sulfur dioxide has fallen by 94 percent, and airborne lead by 99 percent.
These improvements occurred even as the U.S. population grew by about 50 percent and the economy more than tripled in size. Americans added cars, factories, and homes — and the air got cleaner anyway.
Liberals are likely to respond that air quality is important, but the more potent threat is “climate change.” Even if one accepts the left’s argument about human-caused climate change and buys into the freakout over carbon emissions, however, things are getting better, not worse. As of last September, U.S. carbon emissions had fallen by 20 percent since 2005, even as overall energy consumption remained largely the same.
Researchers are noticing this shift. This spring, the scientists who supply the climate scenarios used by the United Nations retired a pathway known as RCP 8.5, the worst-case projection behind years of catastrophic headlines, concluding that it had become implausible.
So, why do we still see the widespread pessimism? Part of the reason is that warnings of impending doom attract more attention than positive news. A cleaner environment doesn’t create the same sensationalist and eyeball-grabbing headlines.
But a bigger part of the story is that prominent liberal institutions have become reliant on stoking public anxiety, and they have a vested interest in keeping people scared.
For decades, attention-hungry academics and politicians have capitalized on fear over a supposed “climate catastrophe” that is always “just a decade away.” The most notorious example is Al Gore, who in 2009 predicted that the north polar ice cap would be ice-free in the summer months in “five to seven years.” That prediction hasn’t even come close to coming true. Gore and his fellow climate alarmists similarly predicted that Manhattan and Florida would be underwater by now. But Miami and the Empire State Building are still safely on dry land.
It would be bad enough if the left-wing climate fearmongers were just making a quick buck and grabbing media attention based on dubious “science.” But the data increasingly shows that millions of Americans – especially in the younger generations – are suffering negative mental health effects from worrying about the climate crisis that they are told is an imminent threat to all human civilization.
A Lancet survey of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25, for instance, found that a majority of respondents were “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change, and nearly half said the anxiety affected their daily lives. Another 2024 study found that 52 percent of young respondents were hesitant to have children because of climate change.
It should be deeply concerning that activists have convinced an entire generation of Americans that they need to be worried about a looming environmental catastrophe that the data simply does not support, to the point where they are foregoing family life because of it.
But the dirty little secret is that perpetuating the climate anxiety crisis is enormously profitable for environmental activists and “green” energy companies, while Democrat politicians who weaponize environmental fears in campaign ads stand to gain politically.
One need look no further than the 2021 “Inflation Reduction Act” to see this perverse incentive system in action. Using decades of climate alarmism as justification, Democrats allocated a gargantuan $1.2 trillion in subsidies to “green” energy companies – most of whom had spent years filling Democrat campaign coffers.
Given the eye-popping sums in that legislation for everything from “environmental and climate justice” ($3 billion) to “climate pollution reduction grants” ($5 billion) and electric vehicle charging stations ($7.5 billion), it’s easy to see why the army of left-wing nonprofits and activist groups who lobbied for the bill were so eager to get it passed.
Just as alarmingly, the left uses climate fears to advance their vision of global government that would see Americans cede their sovereignty to foreign countries. Groups like Democracy Without Borders have highlighted polling on the creation of “a new global parliament that represents every country in the world,” with representation based on population rather than national governments at the United Nations. The body would supposedly handle “global issues like global peace, climate change, and emergency situations like pandemics” and, under certain circumstances, pass “legally binding laws to govern the world as a whole.”
Climate fear gives world-government advocates a convenient argument: if the crisis is planetary, then national governments are too small for the job. If you think government is unaccountable to the people now, just imagine if unelected foreign bureaucrats on another continent are making decisions that impact the everyday lives of the American people.
Americans rightly want clean water, clean air, and a healthy place to raise their families. Democrats and left-wing activists prey on this by trotting out politically biased studies and unreliable data suggesting that the only path to a clean environment is endless radical progressive policies – and of course ever-higher taxes to pay for them.
But before voters hand even more power to the climate change alarmists, they should ask who stands to gain from perpetuating a culture of fear – and whether the endless warnings of imminent doom are motivated by science or plain-old partisan politics.
Sarah Katherine Sisk is a proud Hillsdale College alumna and a master’s student in economics at George Mason University. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.
