A few issues have galvanized the political left in recent years, such as climate change alarmism. But after a string of electoral defeats, the left’s “climatism” movement now appears to be more demoralized and politically weak than ever before.
For much of the 2010s and early 2020s, progressives poured untold amounts of money, energy, and resources into convincing the public that the world is on the doorstep of a fiery apocalypse. This apocalypse can only be averted, we are told, if left-wing politicians and the “expert” class are empowered to control every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat to what car we drive. Democrats and the corporate media have smeared anyone who has denied this worldview as “anti-science” and even “racist.”
But despite these extraordinary efforts, the climate movement has utterly failed to convince the American people that “climate change” is the existential threat they claim it is. In fact, the public seems more exhausted than ever with the constant fearmongering.
The left’s failure to turn climate change into a political winner is not for lack of trying. In fiscal year 2024 alone, the World Bank Group spent a whopping $42.6 billion “to help countries address climate change”—a 10 percent increase from the previous fiscal year. In 2019 and 2020, perhaps the zenith of the left-wing climate movement, 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 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 as one of the “top problems” facing the country.
Likewise, a February 2023 Pew Research poll found that “dealing with climate change” ranked remarkably low in a list of Americans’ top priorities—and based on every indication, the issue was not remotely close to being a top issue for voters in the 2024 presidential election.
In 2023, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger – who himself believes climate change is an existential threat – slammed left-wing climate change efforts as not going “anywhere.”
“Cause no one gives a s*** about that,” Schwarzenegger put it bluntly. An opinion columnist in the left-wing Los Angeles Times echoed that sentiment in a fall 2022 op-ed, writing that Americans simply “don’t care about climate change.”
Much of Americans’ apathy toward the so-called “climate crisis” can almost certainly be traced to the fact that the left-wing expert class has been forecasting impending environmental catastrophe for more than half a century.
In 1970, for instance, 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 that 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.
Perhaps most famously in recent political history, Al Gore repeatedly 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.
But at this juncture, it appears that even the left’s most ardent adherents no longer believe their incessant doomsday rhetoric.
The waning energy behind the climate movement is evident not only in public opinion polls but also in the fading visibility of its former activists. Once a dominant narrative in the corporate media, the climate agenda now struggles to maintain its prominence. For instance, child activist Greta Thunberg, who once commanded global attention, has drifted off into obscurity. Major climate protests have also seen declining participation and momentum.
Additionally, legislative priorities have notably shifted. The Green New Deal, once touted as the cornerstone of the progressive political agenda, has failed to gain traction in Congress—even when Democrats held both chambers. Meanwhile, global climate summits like COP27 and COP28 garnered far less media coverage and public interest than earlier iterations, reflecting a mounting fatigue among the American people.
Of course, the left’s failure to convince voters that the 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 this point in time, it has become entirely clear that the left’s environmental fearmongering is losing the little effectiveness it had. 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 EVs, and gas stove bans.”
With Donald Trump just days away from assuming office, the United States is poised to once again exit the Paris Accord and roll back the Biden administration’s climate change policies.
In the realm of politics, the American people have much to celebrate in 2025—not least among them the demise of the left-wing climate cult. With its credibility shattered and its influence sinking, climatism is finally fading into history, paving the way for a renewed focus on the issues that truly matter to most Americans.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
