Can You See The Climate Scare Slowly Fading Away?

From THE MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

I have often noted that the climate scam and the associated forced energy transition would of necessity go away at some point because the proposals being advocated to “save the planet” could never possibly work. But the open question has always been, when that happens, what will it look like? Would all the big enviro groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club all go on national TV one night and admit that the whole thing was a fake scare from the beginning? In the real world, that’s not how these things happen. People who have staked out absurd positions somehow need to save face. So there would have to be some sort of gradual process of backing down.

And thus we come to the key role of the New York Times for the Left, which is to mold and convey the official talking points to the team’s candidates and influencers. How about sharing some instruction on how to quietly back away from the Green New Deal?

Today on page A-12 of the print edition there is a piece with the headline “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They’re Not So Sure.” The subheadline is “As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change.” The online version indicates that the piece first appeared there five days ago, June 11. They held it for the print edition until today, and then buried it deeply on page A-12. The casual reader may not get that far, but the person who will see it is the party apparatchik who needs direction from central headquarters. Excerpt:

With voters worried about spiking gas prices and inflation, some [Democratic Party] leaders argue that they should stop trying to throttle oil and gas, which heat the planet when burned. It’s a rejection of the approach taken during the Biden administration, which treated climate change as an existential threat and tried to stop new drilling and pipelines. . . . The result could be a less ambitious climate agenda if the party returns to power in Washington. . . . Now many Democrats argue that the path back to power means abandoning some of their most aggressive stances on climate change.

The piece is filled with useful pointers in how to tone down the catastrophism. Most of that seems to involve an end to vilifying oil and gas, while continuing to promote wind and solar as the “cheapest” ways to produce electricity. (They still haven’t figured out that by the time you include costs of integrating wind and solar into the grid, those things are a far more expensive way to produce electricity than fossil fuels.). Here are some of the pointers:

• “Rather than pushing green solutions only, many Democrats say they have a better way to bridge the gap: Be the party of yes to all forms of energy. After all, they argue, wind and solar power are often the cheapest forms of electricity and the fastest to deploy. On an even playing field, they say, renewables would beat fossil fuels.”
• “We shouldn’t be against the domestic oil and gas industry, but we have to be for the energy transition,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist. “Democrats should be running toward that instead of away from it.”
• Rahm Emanuel, the former congressman, chief of staff to President Barack Obama and mayor of Chicago who is exploring a 2028 White House run, said Democrats need to focus on household budgets, specifically electric and gas bills.“I’m not against talking about climate policy, but you’ve got to talk about it as energy and energy prices,” Mr. Emanuel said, “and you talk about it as it relates to protecting ratepayers.”

And if you stop vilifying the oil and gas industries, you can even start taking their money!:

[Recently] in California, . . . Tom Steyer, a champion of fighting global warming, was edged out of this month’s gubernatorial primary by Xavier Becerra. Mr. Becerra, a moderate Democrat, questioned the state’s most stringent climate goals, like ending sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, and received donations from oil and gas companies.

If the Democratic candidates are getting this message, it could be that the climate scare suddenly mostly disappears from the upcoming midterm elections. Wouldn’t that be an incredible change!

On the other hand, so far this is just about messaging. Even if the messaging changes, that does not mean that the goals of the Democrats on taking power will have changed. Certainly, over in the Endangerment Finding litigation, dozens of enviro groups and all the blue states continue to argue that atmospheric CO2 (the product of use of fossil fuels) is a “danger” to human health and welfare. Where Democrats rule, the destructive policies will continue until either there is some sort of catastrophic grid failure or the costs become too wildly excessive to credibly blame on some bogeyman.