The Resilience of the Church of Climate

From Tilak’s Substack

In the aftermath of the UN’s COP30 climate summit in Belem, Brazil, several commentators have claimed that the age of climate alarmism may finally be fraying at the edges. The Wall Street Journal concluded that Europe’s green energy policies slashed emissions but at the cost of crippling the economy. PJ Media’s Rick Moran argues that “the religion of climate alarmism is in decline”. He finds that President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda and the high-profile defection from the climate alarmist priesthood by Bill Gates has begun to alter the debate over climate change.

Peter Savodnik of the Free Press wrote last week that those who questioned the calamity of climate change were treated like pariahs for years but now, “their day of vindication has come”. He cites Bjorn Lomborg, who opined that “I believe we are witnessing a broader, more balanced reassessment of climate change”.

The evidence against climate alarmism is no longer relegated to alternative media. It is visible in electricity bills that have exploded precisely in those countries and states – Germany, Great Britain, California – most exposed to wind and solar absolutism. It became apparent in the great Iberian Peninsula blackout in April, which lasted for hours and led to the deaths of 11 people, a systemwide failure due to insufficient fossil fuels-based synchronous generation and an excessive reliance on inverter-based solar power.

It is evident in Europe’s industrial heartlands, hollowed out by irrational energy policies sold as moral imperatives but delivered as economic self-sabotage. Yet another reminder of Western Europe’s on-going deindustrialisation emerged two days ago, as the Financial Times reported that Volkswagen will stop manufacturing vehicles at its site in Dresden, marking the first time in the carmaker’s 88-year history that it will close production at a site in Germany.

Even in the EU, the epicentre of green utopianism, policymakers have come under pressure from powerful business lobbies to weaken proposed ‘sustainability’ rules as part of a drive to reduce burdens on domestic enterprises. AP reported yesterday that European officials moved to ease their ban on sales of cars with internal combustion engines by 2035, responding to pressure from governments and automakers who argued that the industry needed more flexibility to help achieve EU climate goals.

Climate as Theology

Yet, belief in imminent climate catastrophe remains remarkably resilient among Western elites. Optimism in rationality prevailing may be premature. The Church of Climate, with its high priests and devoted flock, has proven remarkably resilient over decades, weathering empirical assaults and expert rebuttals with the tenacity of a faith unmoored from facts. The question worth asking is no longer whether the alarmists are right — they are not — but why the creed survives so unscathed by evidence, falsification and repeated policy failure. This durability is not rational. It is moral, ideological and ultimately theological.

For many years now, serious scientists and scholars with unimpeachable credentials — William Happer, John Clauser, Judith Curry and many others — have demolished the claim that the climate system is threatened with an imminent apocalypse caused by fossil fuel-based emissions. Steve Koonin’s careful exposition of the data made this plain to any reader willing to separate evidence from rhetoric. And yet these arguments yield no value to the priesthood of climate alarm. The reason is simple: the dispute is not about data. It is about virtue and the seductive promise of meaningfulness.

Climate alarmism long ago ceased to be a scientific hypothesis and became instead a moral identity. Its adherents see themselves as uniquely compassionate, enlightened and willing to ‘care for the planet’ in contrast to the supposedly venal, backward or morally defective climate change deniers. These ‘deniers’, as the inquisitors label them, are not fringe figures but guardians of scientific integrity against a modern Lysenkoism where dissent is heresy.

Climate alarmism serves another powerful purpose. It is the modern expression of what Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit“: the belief that a self-appointed elite, armed with models and moral certainty, can out-think the dispersed intelligence of markets, societies and freely choosing individuals. This conceit is reinforced by what might be called the ‘noble lie‘. Many within the climate establishment openly or tacitly believe that exaggeration is justified — indeed necessary — if it nudges the masses toward ‘correct’ behaviour. If climate change must be overstated, so be it. If uncertainty must be suppressed, that too is a price worth paying. The end — planetary salvation — justifies the means.

Layered into the climate alarmist narrative is yet another dimension of political calculus that aids social-democrat governments in power throughout the West with the significant exception of Trump’s America. The ever-imminent climate catastrophe handily provides politicians with the perfect hobgoblin that elicits among their constituents’ clamorous calls for being led to safety, as H. L. Mencken reminded us in his maxim on practical politics.

Given these potent advantages of having a theology of climate, empirical refutation becomes irrelevant. Data that contradicts the narrative are not debated but delegitimised. Critics are not engaged; they are denounced. Expertise is not weighed; it is moralised. Hence the curious phenomenon of genuine Nobel-calibre physicists being dismissed as ‘deniers’, while political activists and failed politicians – the Bill McKibbens, Al Gores and Michael Manns of the world – are elevated to the status of scientific authorities and prophetic sages.

The Package Deal

But climate alarmism does not travel alone. It is part of a broader ideological package deal — an interlocking set of beliefs that reinforce one another psychologically and politically. The same individual who believes that capitalism is a form of exploitation will tend also to believe that Western industrial society is uniquely destructive. That same person is also likely to believe that markets cannot be trusted to allocate resources and that ‘crises’ — climate, Covid, inequality — require emergency powers of an overweening state. Unsurprisingly, this worldview also aligns neatly with support for Net Zero, ESG, DEI, gender ideology, industrial policy, public health lockdowns and the ever-expanding administrative state.

This ideological coherence is not accidental. It reflects the long influence of identity-based cultural Marxism, which taught generations of Western intellectuals to interpret social and economic phenomena primarily through the lens of power, domination and historical white guilt. In this worldview, the legacy of Western development — from the Age of Exploration onward — is not human flourishing but original sin. Climate change thus becomes the ultimate indictment of modernity itself: proof that prosperity, growth and technological progress were mistakes.

Gad Saad’s notion of suicidal empathy yields insights into the intellectual power of the climatistas among Western intelligentsia. Suicidal empathy refers to a pattern where an individual’s deep compassion for others becomes so extreme that it leads to self-harm, burnout or the undermining of the people they are trying to help. In Saad’s words, it refers to “the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic, hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets”. The empathy for ‘people and planet’ that forms the backbone of the climate narrative had led Western policymakers to prioritise abstract moral posturing over concrete human outcomes.

It is this mindset that allows Western elites to congratulate themselves on decarbonisation targets while energy poverty rises, industries flee and living standards stagnate. The victims of these policies — the coal miners, factory workers and rural households — are dismissed as collateral damage or, worse, as morally suspect ‘deplorables’.

The logic of climate alarmism encompasses the familiar phenomenon of Bootleggers and Baptists: the high priests of climate virtue including the juggernaut of lavishly funded environmental NGOs provide the moral cover, while a well-connected cohort of crony capitalists harvest subsidies, mandates and guaranteed returns. Wind and solar developers, ESG financiers and asset-management behemoths such as BlackRock have every incentive to keep the crisis narrative alive. The rhetoric of sacrifice is always for others; the rents are very much for themselves. Climate policy, with its fixation on targets detached from engineering and economics, fits this pattern all too well.

This is why Trump’s challenge to climate orthodoxy was so destabilising. It was not merely a policy shift; it was a moral counter-revolution. By insisting on energy abundance, national interest and economic realism, Trump and his A-team in the energy and environmental patch – Energy Secretary Chris Wright, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum – have punctured the sanctimony of the climate elite. Executive orders can be reversed, but ideas are harder to kill — and that is precisely why the backlash has been so ferocious.

No Time for Complacency

Yet complacency would be a grave mistake. The perceived moral high ground remains firmly occupied by the Church of Climate, and it confers enormous political power. Should Trump’s movement falter — if the midterms deliver a repudiation rather than reinforcement, and if the next Presidential elections are lost by the MAGA movement — the entire edifice of Net Zero dogma could snap back with renewed vengeance. Democrats, buoyed by mainstream media amplification and deep-state entrenchment, would reinstate green mandates, reversing Trump’s gains. The administrative state, the ESG complex and the transnational climate bureaucracy have not gone away. They are waiting in the wings.

The lesson of the past decade is sobering. Empirical truth, by itself, is not enough. Ideas matter, but so do moral narratives, institutional incentives and cultural coherence. Climate alarmism has proven resilient precisely because it is not a theory but a worldview — one that flatters its adherents, rewards its enforcers and immunises itself against doubt.

If there is to be a genuine reckoning, it will require more than cheaper gas or failed wind farms. It will require reclaiming the moral language of human flourishing, exposing the hubris of central planning, and reasserting the primacy of evidence over piety. Until then, the climate apocalypse will remain postponed — but endlessly proclaimed.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2025/12/21/the-resilience-of-the-church-of-climate/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.