The Politico lament titled “‘We’ve lost the culture war on climate’” offers a rare moment of clarity from within the echo chamber of environmental orthodoxy.
“There’s no way around it,” admits Jody Freeman, former climate advisor to Barack Obama. “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement”.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/trump-biden-obama-climate-regulations-legacy-00395857
But she—and the authors—never pause to ask why the war was lost. The answer isn’t about political maneuvering or industry lobbying. It’s much simpler: the left sacrificed the last of its credibility during COVID, and no amount of apocalyptic climate branding can bring it back.
COVID: The Bonfire of the Authorities
The same people who now ask Americans to trust sweeping climate rules are the ones who insisted lockdowns would “stop the spread,” that cloth masks were life-saving talismans, and that vaccines prevented transmission. They suppressed dissent, gaslit the public, and rewrote yesterday’s lies into today’s mandates.
During COVID, the American public witnessed a catastrophic failure of expertise—not in science per se, but in institutional honesty. Bureaucrats contradicted themselves weekly, all while pretending infallibility. “The science” was less about the evidence and more about control. And when people began asking why, they were called dangerous.
Now those same voices return with charts, forecasts, and pleas for regulation, insisting that failing to curb CO2 will be a disaster.
“Failing to curb power plants’ pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity.”.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/trump-biden-obama-climate-regulations-legacy-00395857
Sound familiar?
That narrative structure—the breathless projection of catastrophe, the rigid insistence on compliance, the moral castigation of skeptics—is precisely what Americans no longer believe. Because they’ve seen the machinery behind it. And they’re not going back.
Market Reality, Not Mandates, Is Driving Change
Even Politico’s own article unwittingly undermines its narrative. It acknowledges that coal use has plummeted—from 48.5% of electricity in 2007 to just 15% in 2024—while emissions from power plants have dropped by 38%. These outcomes didn’t come from the Clean Power Plan, which never took effect. They came from natural gas abundance, fracking, and market evolution.
This makes Freeman’s despair particularly telling. It’s not that emissions aren’t falling. It’s that people no longer think we need the state to manage every molecule to make it happen.
Even the Supreme Court, hardly a bastion of climate denial, ruled in 2022 that agencies like the EPA can’t regulate major sectors of the economy without direct congressional authorization. That wasn’t climate skepticism. It was constitutional hygiene.
Likewise, the rollback of Biden’s power plant rules by Trump’s EPA isn’t radical. It’s the legal and political reality catching up to a skeptical public—one that now sees through the moral panic.
When Narrative Control Fails, the Spell Breaks
The left didn’t just lose the policy fight. They lost control of the frame. And part of that collapse came from an unexpected source: the decensorship of Twitter.
When Elon Musk took the reins of the world’s most influential digital square, he didn’t just fire a few moderators. He exposed a vast censorship regime—one in which government agencies, NGOs, and media gatekeepers worked to suppress dissent. This included not just COVID heresies but also climate skepticism, criticism of electric vehicle mandates, and questions about energy grid reliability.
Suddenly, voices long deemed “dangerous” were heard again. Questions that were once unspeakable became unignorable.
It wasn’t just about free speech for its own sake. It was about breaking the illusion of consensus. Musk didn’t create a movement; he let the light in on one that already existed, long denied by a rigged system. And once people saw it, they couldn’t unsee it.
Control Versus Trust
The Politico piece is filled with laments over lost tools of control. Court rulings. Congressional gridlock. Executive rollback. But the unspoken truth is this: those tools only worked when they were shielded by trust. And trust died not with a bang, but with a thousand flip-flops—on masks, on mandates, on lockdowns, on model projections.
Now, climate advocates find themselves in the same boat, still peddling apocalyptic certainty while the public shrugs. They’ve been told the end is nigh for decades. They’ve watched the goalposts move. They’ve endured every hot day being labeled a harbinger of doom—only to see emissions fall and prosperity continue.
They’ve also noticed that every “solution” somehow involves more regulation, less choice, and more power for the people who got it wrong last time.
You Can’t Guilt People Who No Longer Trust You
Politico’s article ends by framing the next four years as potentially “lost” on climate. But that assumes something essential: that the public still wants to be led by the same cast of characters. They don’t.
The war is over not because people deny that climate changes, or that humans play a role. It’s over because they deny the credibility of those claiming to solve it. The culture war wasn’t lost in a courtroom. It was lost in the empty supermarket aisles of lockdown-era America, and in the liberated feed of a post-censorship Twitter.
You can’t guilt people who no longer trust you. You can’t control a culture that no longer listens. And you can’t regulate your way out of a credibility crisis.
The only way forward is honesty, humility, and a firm end to the presumption that “the experts” always know best. Until then, the war is not just lost—it’s unwinnable.
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Public health has long treated its audience as mushrooms. The environmental movement has an even worse track record of hysterical claims of imminent doom, right soon now, that somehow never happened.
The wonder was that either retained any credibility.
Mushrooms??? Yep. They tried to keep us in the dark and fed us {male bovine metabolic end product}
I hear General Norman Schwarzkopf from the grave! “Bovine Scatology”. You took it to another level! Cheers!
Sure. Why take any public health actions to mitigate a pandemic. After all, COVID-19 only killed a million Americans.
Oh? Like masking outside? Or shutting down the economy?
Sweden did quite well concentrating on vulnerable people, and not shutting down generally. You get no credits for virtue signaling.
What an audacious scam. Trying to fool the whole world and planning on the truth never seeing the daylight nor the people figuring it out. It started when we weren’t even looking over half a century ago by buying the MSM ….. worldwide. And once they controlled the media they used it for all their plans to control. Covid was just one of them. But they never counted on the internet getting in their way and usurping their fake authority of the news with the truth.
Which is why they now want to control the internet, get access to encrypted messages and imprison people for wrongthink
A Ponzi Scheme only has to work long enough for the fraudsters to pocket the loot and then disappear. It does NOT have to stand up to long-term scrutiny.
Can anyone name a single alarmist scientist that has lost their job or paid any price whatsoever solely for making erroneous predictions?
(Guys like Mann have suffered slightly for defaming people and then not being willing to publish his methodology and data … which is the bare minimum to be considered an actual “scientist”. These are the exceptions.)
The Long March Through the Institutions was much more than capturing the MSM. The change in education to indoctrination, introducing woke, censorship and cancellation, and the capture of the professional societies also lead to the success of the scams for so long.
Those institutions are still captured.
Right. Why, COVID only killed one million Americans. As MAGA says: “What me worry, if a lot of people die?”
Whenever I hear the sneer that only climate scientists (or PhDs in transgender puppetry) are the experts, I tell them that I don’t have to be a climate scientist or have that useless PhD, because humans are good lie detectors. When one side consistently lies about penguin and polar bear extinction, I tune them out. When the paradigm switches from gender being fixed at birth and conversion therapy and female genital mutilation being immoral, to 57 genders and fluidentity and genital mutilation for 5 year old kids, I know who the liars are.
Gender is actually fixed at conception. It is most certainly not “assigned” at birth.
As with your good lie detector, training as an engineer, and being an engineer for 42 years, I have a rather well-defined “bullshit filter”, at least for technical matters.
Sex is fixed at conception. Gender is behavior, masculine and feminine.
Jeff:
Yes. We should think of sex as being diagnosed at birth, not assigned.
Sex is biologic and binary. Gender is cultural.
sex might be biological but it isn’t binary. A small but significant number of people have sex chromosome anomalies. No biological distinctions are simple and there is always a fuzzy boundary.
Just respect the fuzzy boundary – we don’t need 57 new gender definitions and their pronouns to appease 1% of the population.
We certainly do not need coercive legislation and punishment to ensure compliance.
The 1% need to get used to the 99% majority who don’t give a S…
You are 99% correct in your assessment of this gender issue, Trans people should have their rights as long as the rights of the vast majority are respected, especially in women’s sport. Males of any level of sexuality have no right to compete against real women and girls.
Anomalies from what? If you don’t have or define a “normal” population to compare to, you can’t have anomalies. Sex IS binary…male or female, that’s it. Chromosomal “anomalies” are defects from the normal male genes or female genes.
Humans have two arms and two legs. Often, people with birth defects are born without an arm or a leg, or poorly developed arms or legs. They are anomalies from the norm, but you don’t define new classes of people with various limb defects.
But they’re a very tiny minority. They are certainly are not the overwhelming majority of the currently modish “trans”.
It absolutely is binary. There is zero evidence to the contrary.
“Might” be biological?? Wow.
Those non-standard outcomes prove the rule. Two sexes.
That said, sexual characteristics beyond the genitalia do cover a spectrum. However the statistical mean and normal distributions of those characteristics are different for male than female.
It is improper to use a single datum to discredit the statistics of the full data set.
What is true is there is no pure male and no pure female. There are 8 billion variations on the theme.
Yes there are a few hermaphrodites and Siamese twins too. So what?
Sex is created at the moment of conception. Anyone with an ultra sound can determine the sex in vitro based on the images.
Sex is recorded at birth following a physical examination.
Correct with one small nit. Gender is a classification system originally used in language, such as Latin, to make language easier.
It was used after WWII in social studies trying to identify masculine, feminine, and neuter societal roles the help understand how society transformed with men fighting and women taking their places in the factories and when the war ended, it did not revert to the prewar understandings.
Gender applies to words in Latin languages, pipe fittings and cable connectors. Not humans. There has been a distortion of language to accommodate a Marxist agenda.
Actually it was censorship of Hollywood movies that did it.
Sex became a bad word so gender replaced it.
Last time I saw a movie with a woman referring to her sex was the 1959 Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Marxist agenda, distorting language. See it all the time.
By the way, where I came from cable connectors were refer to by sex and they were “mated.” Old time engineers definitely had a sense of humor that is sorely lacking in these days.
Re pipe fittings
Here (Oz you can order pipe SBE – screwed both ends
sorry, but you’re talking about SEX. (There are only two).. But GENDER is more complicated
– Richard P. Feynman
Throwing the shaman charlatans out on their asses is a return to the scientific mindset.
Feynman got it right. “Richard Feynman emphasized the importance of the scientific method and the need to question everything, including established knowledge. He believed that science is about making guesses, computing their consequences, and comparing them to experiments and observations. Feynman’s core principle was: “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong”. He also stressed the importance of reporting everything that might invalidate an experiment, not just what supports it.
Which is why this victory is somewhat hollow. In the process of the MSM and science and other institutions losing our trust, our trust was destroyed and people learned nothing about how science should be done.
Have the weaselly little snots who wrote fake science proving 99% agreement lost their jobs. Have the PhD’s at NASA who published scare stories as public releases off of data that should have been treated as noise lost their positions?
Have the scientists who counseled other scientists to lie in the name of convincing a stupid public of their unearned certitude been shamee and driven from the universities where they have sinecures?
Have the editors of science journals been dumped for their Left wing ideologically driven gate keeping?
Does the public have any better idea today of what or how to read any science?
Did those who knew that the Left was peddling bullshit stand up and shout it from the rooftops or just keep their heads down?
Yes, the lying left blew its euphemistic cover all to hell by so relentlessly lying but in the process they wasted trillions and years and killed people. Or do you think there were no dire consequences to the stupidity in Germany of closing their nuclear plants, to running coal out of town, to attempt to run industry on sunshine and windmills?
The hatred I feel for people like Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Thomas Karl and others who played the game fast an lose and ditched any ethics as outlined by Feynman, is bottomless. These people are absolutely despicable and deserve to be run out of society along with all their fellow travelers who supported them. And I for one will not be happy until I see these quacks, these charlatans, these manipulators of data ans statistical methodology jobless and penniless. Though happier still will I be when another Feynman arrives on the scene to run a pike through the heart of anyone who dares to bring forth another scientific con job.
You left out Al Gore and a few others from his era.
“You can’t guilt people who no longer trust you.”
I think this is the key point. The unelected bureaucrats in all the three letter agencies no longer have any credibility. They all need to be replaced and with far fewer people. If not, government will no longer be able to function.
Yes, the bureaucrats and academics need to know that they have to take responsibility for their advocacy on climate and their lying-for a good cause- is just noble corruption. These people who have systematically conned the public and thereby frightened and impoverished them, deserve to be repudiated and sacked. All power to the Trump reset on climate and energy matters, it was about time the truth became popular again after decades of misplaced research with academics and politicians obscuring or cheating on proper scientific methodology.
Unfortunately they still wield a great deal of authority and power.
The government really has not been functioning as intended since the build up for WWII.
The Ice Age is coming and we’re all doomed-
Brisbane temperatures hit 23-year low as winter chill continues
That’s the sort of line they were pushing daily for decades but the problem is time is their enemy with the dooming.
Nevertheless it was always their lunar energy prescriptions that would fail the test of physics and economics and bring them undone. That’s where they’re at now with fickle energy caught lying just like they have with Joe Biden. There’s no more trust left and all they can do is scream and smash and burn everything in the streets showing their true colours.
It wasn’t only the lies; it was the obvious fast ones and con jobs the climate alarmists were fabricating. They temporarily convinced governments that carbon pricing would help solve what citizens began realizing was a non-problem. It became more apparent that the tax revenue was being used to subsidize green products and initiatives made worse by new laws, restrictions and mandates. These forced consumers to have to pay inflated prices for items that were no more efficient than their older, cheaper counterparts. Then when it became apparent that whatever climate changes that were ostensibly occurring were nothing extraordinary but standard variations of the weather, people rejected the whole climate crisis argument, particularly when they saw developing nations like China and India continue and increase their fossil fuel consumption because they realized renewables were inadequate. So the whole business has been revealed as a big lie that the majority no longer accepts nor supports, and it should remember this when it elects any new governments.
You are correct in your assessment but unfortunately in Australia the public are still unsure of the real climate and energy facts because the official opposition – the Liberal coalition refused to promote them sufficiently, Thus, the public voted for the status quo and the transition away from reliable fossil fuels to inefficient second-class power generation with their endemic higher electricity costs. The science establishment and bureaucrats in Australia have been captured by the lefty environmental elites who care more about nature than human welfare, and who prize ideology over the scientific method. However, they will eventually roll over when the rest of the developed world shows them up for liars and fools, by going back to fossil fuels and nuclear after rejecting Net Zero and the stupid climate alarmism they espoused so passionately but incorrectly.
…“This generation will already live under ManBearPig!” is not any subtler or smarter than “This generation will already live under complete Ism!”, and does not even have any molted appeal for the few willing to indulge in wishful thinking this much.
Very nice Charles.
Meanwhile Commies grapple with the real underlying global problem for the future-
Cuba’s students call for resignations and strikes after brutal internet price hike
The Culture War on Climate Is Over—And the Left Lost It the Day They Started Lying About Everything
Well put. A thousand thumbs up.
I don’t think climate scientists and epidemiologists can be lumped together as “the same people”. If one area of institutional science gets things wrong it doesn’t necessarily reflect on any other area of institutional science.
It’s not clear whether the covid lockdowns had much impact in the end. That’s something we can reasonably debate. The word “talisman” overstates the emphasis placed on cloth masks; authorities never said they were perfect, they merely said that they should be required because the benefits outweighed the risks. (The risks of wearing a mask on your face are very small, after all.) Whether covid vaccines reduce transmission rates is unclear, but it’s clear that covid vaccines reduce the risk of death. (Whether to get additional doses beyond the first two, particularly when you’re young and healthy, is unclear. But the first two doses are worth it, particularly so during the pandemic when covid was everywhere.) And if you’re going to criticize health authorities for the things they got wrong, it’s only fair to also credit them for the things they got right.
But anyway, we were talking about climate change.
I don’t recall Elon Must exposing a vast censorship regime. Does anyone have sources to back this up?
I don’t recall Elon Must exposing a vast censorship regime. Does anyone have sources to back this up?
Areyou unaware of the fact that Twitter actually employed ex-FBI agents to suppress posts the Biden Administration didn’t like? This and the extensive correspondence between the company and the FBI is all in Congessional testimony.
Matt Taibbi and others wrote extensively about what they found about the workings of Twitter and the influence government agencies had on it. Called the Twitter Files IIRC.
“Whether covid vaccines reduce transmission rates is unclear, but it’s clear that covid vaccines reduce the risk of death. (Whether to get additional doses beyond the first two, particularly when you’re young and healthy, is unclear.”
Covid vaccines certainly did not have any effect on infection or transmission, Respiratory viruses infect the mucosal lining of the nose and throat, this mucosal lining has no blood supply to carry any potential antibodies that may have been produced from the shot in the arm, Antony Fauci revealed early on that both vaxed and unvaxed people carried the same viral load in the nasopharynx.
It soon became clear that the more boosters people got the more covid they got, the deaths and severe injuries from the jab far outweighed any benefit.
What sandy beach do you bury your head in? The lockdowns had documented health impacts (think nursing home deaths and, in particular Andrew Cuomo and the nursing home deaths under his watch) and economic impacts among other things. You can only have a debate if you have your fingers in your ears and blinders on.
think nursing home deaths
Suicide, too, due to the extreme isolation.
Unfortunately in the UK the leftist climate crisis is still believed:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-crisis
And the government is still full speed ahead for Net Zero with even more billions being spent on carbon capture schemes
Yes, that’s true. However, there are signs that some of the influential public figures and politicians have seen through the climate scam and related net zero nonsense and are pushing for rational change. Trump’s influence on global climate and energy is even being felt in Europe, so we can expect a dial back in Net Zero intentions in the EU and UK, if only whilst the Ukraine war threatens their energy sources and impacts their defense budgets.
Very good essay, tour de force of logic and clarity and righteous rage.
It’s tempting to think the war is over. But it isn’t. There’s still plenty of true believers out there. If Vance loses in 2028 we’ll be right back where we were in 2023.
These people don’t care about your facts. There’s a planet to save by god, and they aim to do it no matter how much it hurts.
Funny you invoked “by god.” Isn’t it extreme hubris according to multiple religious beliefs that humans can do something that counters what their “supreme being” established?
I think the elites are fully aware that climate alarm has become a hard sell. And those carbon credit markets idea has become a problem.Instead they now focus more on war, tech and financial/ monetary ‘solutions’ to problems they have created themselves. A shift in fear focus. In order to get closer to the Brave New World (order) digital IDs and the coupling to CBDCs in which tech surveillance is the means to reach the target are pushed through.
All to keep us ‘safe’ of course and the immigrant ‘issue’ is the salespitch.sarc:)
One World Order is the plan.
Indeed.
Of course, they will just craft another scam to replace it. Human nature will always succumb to the big con, whatever its latest incarnation. There seems to be an inherent tendency in the majority of people to follow the leader. There is a risk in individuality, such that the flock appears comforting.
Coupled with a basic evolutionary fear of change.
This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. It is perhaps the end of the beginning.
— paraphrased from the Winston Churchill speech.
“Until then, the war is not just lost—it’s unwinnable.”
Unfortunately the war, the global psychological war for control of the minds and hearts of humanity continues on multiple fronts. Propaganda, brainwashing through repetition, disinformation, and censorship/silencing continues.
Control the language, control the ideas.
— commonly attributed to 1984 by G. Orwell.
Becoming a scientist is entertaining the notion that the experts are wrong. (after R Feynman).
Why hasn’t the left called for Chinese and Indian coal plants to be destroyed if they are an existential threat?
In the case of China, they won’t bite the hand that feeds them. Follow the money..