The Climate Crisis Narrative is Dead

In an op/ed at the Wall Street Journal titled “The Climate Crisis Fades Out,” former Obama climate advisor and author Steven Koonin says one reason why the prevailing climate alarm rhetoric is failing to move voters lies in the reality that “the energy transition’s purported climate benefits are distant, vague and uncertain while the costs and disruption of rapid decarbonization are immediate and substantial. The world has many more urgent needs, including the provision of reliable and affordable energy to all.”

Noting that the preferred, rent-seeking “solutions” to climate change offered by the ruling class aren’t really solutions at all – a theme I’ve written about for several years now – Koonin posits that we should be happy that the “crisis” narrative is failing and fading as it goes through what he refers to as the “issues-attention cycle.” As a result of this focus on these non-solutions, global emissions have continued to rise in this century. Fossil fuels still provide roughly 80% of primary energy now despite more than $12 trillion in renewable energy investments in just the past 9 years. Koonin points out that the “latest United Nations emissions report projects that emissions in 2030 will be almost twice as high as a level compatible with the [2015 Paris Agreement] aspiration.”

Koonin believes the public’s fading attention to the issue of climate alarmism “means that today’s ineffective, inefficient, and ill-considered climate-mitigation strategies will be abandoned, making room for a more thoughtful and informed approach to responsibly providing for the world’s energy needs.”

Sadly, sound advice like Koonin’s falls on deaf ears on globalist-run organizations like the United Nations. In his unending quest to constantly heat up fright rhetoric about climate change, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres last week referred to oil companies as “the godfathers of climate chaos” and urged national governments to place bans on their ability to advertise their products. Speaking to an event called World Climate Day, Guterres told attendees that “we are playing Russian roulette with our planet, adding, “we need an exit ramp off this highway to hell.”

The latter bit of hyperbolic nonsense was a reference to a bit of fright rhetoric he unveiled during the COP27 conference in November, 2022 held in Egypt. In that speech, Guterres warned, “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” He also warned, outrageously, that “We can sign a climate solidarity pact, or a collective suicide pact.”