The liberal establishment is lamenting the collapse of the climate agenda as political and industry leaders shift focus and ESG investing dies a well-deserved death. The media wants you to think this is catastrophic news for the environment, but there’s no need to fall into climate doomer-induced depression just yet.
The truth is, a weakened climate movement may well be the best thing to happen to the environment. After all, when environmentalists try to solve problems, they often make everything worse. To update an old phrase from Ronald Reagan, the eight most terrifying words for planet Earth are “I’m an environmentalist, and I’m here to help.”
We’ve seen it before. From the 1970s to the 1990s, saving the trees was all the rage. In the face of rampant deforestation, activists shamed people to reuse paper and cut down on copying. Governments subsidized recycling while forests were defended with frenzied litigation.
But nothing they did worked—paper consumption kept rising, recycling was insufficient, and, in response to burdensome regulations, production moved from responsibly logged North American timber to environmentally catastrophic deforestation in South America and Asia. Not only did environmentalists fail to save the trees, but they also made the environment worse.
Then, suddenly, paper consumption plummeted—not because environmental activists finally broke through, but because the Internet was invented. People simply needed less paper. The Internet wasn’t created to save the trees, but it did more than any environmentalist could have ever accomplished.
Or take whaling in the 19th century. When whale populations collapsed as demand for oil lamps and lubricated machines rose, it wasn’t a professionalized conservation movement or a global whaling summit that saved the whales from extinction. Oil saved the whales. Innovators found a cheaper, better fuel, demand for whale oil collapsed, and whale populations rebounded. Innovation didn’t merely outperform activism — it made the problem obsolete.
This same tale could be told today about climate change concerns, except instead of the Internet and kerosene, we have President Donald Trump. Just like in the past, environmentalists today shame the world to reduce carbon emissions, the government subsidizes its preferred methods to cut greenhouse gases, and lefties attempt to impose their restricted vision of a carbon-free world through duplicitous litigation, international agreements, and judicial and executive fiat.
Of course, none of it has worked. Instead of doing anything to influence the climate, environmental radicals only plunged the West deeper into debt, cultivated a backlash against bureaucratic micromanagement, and forced industrial production away from America’s relatively clean economy to much dirtier nations with nonexistent environmental protections, like China. Just as before, jobs and pollution were both outsourced, making the problem worse.
Then came President Trump. President Trump doesn’t care one iota about climate change scaremongering, calling it a “con job” and a “green scam” that is “made up by people with evil intentions.” Nobody would ever accuse Trump of willfully trying to reduce carbon emissions. But his policies may end up doing what green grifters continually fail to achieve
Take his energy policies. Trump has gone all in on American oil and gas while aggressively promoting nuclear energy. Energy abundance is essential to his goals of achieving affordability, improving national security, and winning the energy-intensive Artificial Intelligence race.
But MAGA-style energy dominance also impacts the climate. Just like how a natural gas boom in President Trump’s first term helped bring carbon emissions to a 25-year low, increased American oil and natural gas will reduce the need for higher-emissions foreign fuels. Likewise, nuclear facilities (which environmentalists have traditionally vehemently opposed) and innovations like small modular reactors can power homes and industry, but they also have zero emissions. It’s a win-win that left-wing environmentalists are too stubborn and impractical to ever achieve.
The President’s aggressive support for transformative AI could also provide the innovative game-changer that inadvertently puts concerns about our impact on the environment behind us, whether AI is used to unlock the infinite, pollution-free energy of cold fusion, drive unforeseen advances in efficiency, or generate a new technology currently unimaginable.
Even President Trump’s economic policies and tariffs focused on reshoring manufacturing will benefit the environment. China is a global manufacturing powerhouse in part because it ignores environmental protection, emitting more carbon than all other industrialized countries combined. Moving manufacturing out of China and back to America with our much cleaner way of doing business will be a boon for the climate.
In short, even if the left’s constant goalpost shifting on climate metrics and endless predictions that Florida will be underwater “in the next 10 years” do turn out to be accurate, the best thing they could do for the climate would be to support President Trump and innovation-minded leaders like him.
It’s impossible to know the exact environmental impact of the Trump agenda or future technologies. But that’s the point. The command-control tactics of the global elite lock people into preferred strategies or technologies—whether it’s recycling or EV mandates—even when those means are ineffective. Meanwhile, market signals, innovation, and American ingenuity allow for the unplanned and overcome the unforeseen, producing wins for consumers and planet Earth alike.
Trump doesn’t care about climate change talking points, he cares about profit and cheap, abundant energy—and that may end up being the best way to ensure a clean, stable environment for future generations.
Chris Johnson is President of the American Energy Leadership Institute, a conservative advocacy organization championing America First energy policy. He also serves as a senior adviser to the National Federation of College Republicans.
