By Robert Bradley Jr.
“Democrats and environmentalists are shifting their approach to climate change…. 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.”
– Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer, New York Times (below)
It was “all of the above” on the way up, and it is “all of the above” on the way down. Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer’s “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They’re Not So Sure” (New York Times, June 11, 2026) is worth revisiting to document the sea change that has occurred in the Democrat party away from climate alarmism and forced energy transformation.
“As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change,” the article begins.
Democrats and environmentalists are shifting their approach to climate change, as the economic fallout from war in the Middle East has reshuffled the politics of energy. With voters worried about spiking gas prices and inflation, some of the party’s 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.
Continuing:
The most recent example came in California, where 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.
Across the Northeast, Democratic governors have started to consider gas pipeline expansions, once unthinkable in the most climate-conscious states in the country. Even climate hawks in Congress have shifted their tactics, lawmakers said in recent interviews. And though the co-sponsors of the Green New Deal in 2019, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, still rail against the fossil fuel industry, they rarely emphasize their once-influential plan to mobilize the U.S. economy to fight climate change.
“The result could be a less ambitious climate agenda if the party returns to power in Washington,” Friedman and Plumer state.
Now many Democrats argue that the path back to power means abandoning some of their most aggressive stances on climate change. When they do promote renewable energy, they frame it as a way to lower electric bills and avoid the gas pump, not because of the effects on the planet.
Some environmental activists are muting their demands to keep fossil fuels “in the ground,” a rallying cry that had defined the climate movement for more than a decade. “It’s something we are struggling with,” acknowledged Cassidy DiPaola, a spokeswoman for Fossil Free Media, a nonprofit group that wants to rapidly end the use of coal, oil and gas. “We are still committed as a movement to the ideas of keeping it in the ground, but as a campaign message, it’s more effective to talk about building clean energy.”
What an about-face, “a far cry from 2020, when activists pressured Democratic presidential candidates to forswear oil and gas donations, blackball anyone with a fossil fuel past from cabinet positions, and commit to eliminating the nation’s planet-warming emissions in just a few decades.”
Democrats are trying to figure out how to talk about a problem that many voters still say they want to see the government tackle, but without opening candidates to attacks from Republicans calling them out of touch. Mr. Markey said he isn’t abandoning the Green New Deal and legislation he has sponsored to prohibit new federal oil and gas leasing. But these days, he said, “I talk about the positive vision for what clean energy represents as a solution to the affordability crisis.”
The public is on the side of the climate skeptics, whose arguments against climate exaggeration have broken through the constituencies of the Climate Industrial Complex.
A recent Economist/YouGov Poll showed that just 5 percent of Americans say climate change is their top voting issue. By contrast, 29 percent say their top priority is inflation and prices, and 13 percent cite jobs and the economy. A number of strategists have urged Democrats to stop talking about the issues that excite already-committed voters and broaden their appeal….
Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer continue:
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.”
Call that bluff. If renewables are really cheaper and naturally better than fossil fuels, it is time for “an even playing field.” Repeal the Investment Tax Credit and the Production Tax Credit, and ditch what is left of the (misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act.
The new political reality was evident in the last election, Friedman and Plumer note.
Almost immediately after the 2024 election, some strategists argued that Democrats should stop talking about the threat of global warming altogether. A growing number of Democratic politicians agree. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona said recently he and many others aren’t discussing climate change during the midterm election season because “we want to win.” Rahm Emanuel … 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.” He argued that Democrats “were talking to the faculty lounge and to another Aspen conference on climate change,” and added, “That’s not how you win political arguments.”
There are holdouts.
… many Democrats said they are still firmly committed to raising alarm about a planet that has already warmed by about 1.3 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, has criticized “climate hushing” — downplaying the changing climate to avoid perceived political backlash, a tactic he says leads to a self-reinforcing cycle. “When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters,” Mr. Whitehouse warned on social media recently.
Anger has set in.
Saad Amer, a climate activist and founder of the consultancy Justice Environment, said he believes voters still want to know how politicians will tackle the crisis. “The folks who are saying we shouldn’t talk about climate change are unimaginative hypocrites who don’t have any vision of what a future should look like,” Mr. Amer said.
Reality bats last, it has been said. Energy affordability, reliability, and plenty trump unsustainable politically correct, economically incorrect wind, solar, and batteries. It is time for a real free market with politics demoted.
This timidity on climate will disappear overnight if the Democrats regain power; it will be back to the Biden policies the first day. Ergo don’t let them regain power!
Hope that information may be the answer to politics.
This is the recent paper on CO2 absorption: Saturation of the infrared absorption by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere | International Journal of Modern Physics B.
It’s been 19 years since the now-famous arXiv publication of Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics, which underscored the research done in 1972 by Professor Alfred Schack in his 1972 paper The influence of the carbon dioxide content of the air on the world’s climate.
To wit, any data set with ascending values can be mistaken for its climate prediction capability. The data sets don’t matter because the atmosphere is already saturated with those very same greenhouse gases. In other words, more gas won’t make a difference. Except for methane, which oxidizes to CO2 under sunlight, methane can’t have a long-term effect either. Sites that still hold up CO2 as a villain also include methane.
The additional warming caused by a saturated gas is too small to be anything but theoretical.
Using CO2 filters with visible light up-conversion, the sky is bright with haze. Only the occasional cloud provides relief from the brightness. The sun is not to be found, which should have been proof enough! Converting infrared photons to visible light, without a Red-Green-Blue pump, is a surprisingly new technology, only a decade old: New material converts invisible, infrared energy into visible light
Only land use and deforestation remain for anthropogenic climate change (I’d stonewall attempts to deflect with other gases until an acceptable land-use survey is conducted).
Re. the second reference, i.e., Gerlich and Tscheuschner, does anyone recall what the alarmists specifically objected to in this paper?
My criticsm was that the authors chose not to focus on saturation, but instead, to “Slay the Dragon!”
Last paragraph. Those are LOCAL environmental conditions and it is a great mistake to allow them to have the slightest connection to GLOBAL climate change topics. As is the heat-island effect.
Nonetheless, without accounting for land-use changes, the effect of other changes, such as HCFCs and NO levels, is incalculable.
Before Happer and Wijngaarden, the focus was instead on the “hotspot” claim.
Since the IPCC AR5 report dropped the claim in 2014, the IPCC had asked us to believe that CO2 alone drives climate change, without any provable criteria.
The IPCC stated in the AR4 report that a hotspot would be a measurable result of additional greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.
It is the lack of this greenhouse gas “signature” that suggested that climate change is a strictly surface phenomenon, not an atmospheric one, a result confirmed by the recent CO2 saturation paper.
As for the hotspot, “We have found that while the models generally agree with each other, they disagree with the observations. In particular, the three state-of-the-art greenhouse models (Hadley, DOE PCM, and GISS SI2000) examined here show positive temperature trends that increase with altitude, reaching values greater than the near-surface trends by as much as 50 to 100 percent. However, the existing observational data sets show decreasing as well as mostly negative trends since 1979.” – from “Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation,” by David H. Douglass et al, at https://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/2004GL020103_altitude.pdf
My view, too.
The irony in this whole business is of course the elephant in the room, or is it the bus, that the ‘planet-warming emissions’ don’t warm the planet very well.
There’s a strong argument that it was pollution, rather than Cosmic Rays, that caused global cooling, in the mid 70s. My Dad tracked the ever-dropping pan evaporation rate for a while.
Have any of them looked at the Keeling curve?
The Keeling curve, showing increasing CO2 with time, is precisely why skillful scientists have looked at the physics involved and found that CO2 is nearly saturated for its IR “return” effect and more will have no detectable effect on temperature. See Happer and Wijngaarden for the details.
When ideology and dogma bump into the wall of reality, don’t be surprised if they get a painful headache.
The Democrats have been peddling false anxieties and the public have noticed. After thirty years none of the projected issues they advanced have occurred.
The North pole is still icy, the South Pole is even icier than it was three decades ago. The Maldives have expanded their tourism and have not sunk below the sea. The gulf stream continues to flow and the much talked about hurricanes have remained at normal levels, even tending to decrease in numbers making land fall. Polar bears are doing what bears do, becoming an increasing problem due to their increasing numbers. Walrus tumbling off cliffs, remains uppermost only in David Attenborough’s imagination.
Wild fires are always with us and are at normal levels, a return to sensible forest management practices will maintain that normal.
The ongoing greening of the planet due to increased levels of CO2 is real as advised by NASA. Thankfully that is a good thing as seen by the record harvests seen almost yearly for the past two decades.
Maybe the Democrats are finally looking at what is actually going on rather than relying on their headline fear mongers telling them what to see? Al and Bernie along with the sea is boiling UN head of nonsense Guterres are being seen for what they are. Fear mongers.
“Walrus tumbling off cliffs, remains uppermost only in David Attenborough’s imagination.”
And in the minds of hungry bears who drove them off said cliff.
So, from “We need to force Ruinables down your throats to save the planet” to
“We need to force Ruinables down your throats because they are cheaper”.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
‘On a level playing field, renewables will beat conventional power’
Yeah and England would beat Argentina, bacon would fall from the sky and the moon will turn blue…
Yeah and England would beat Argentina,
baconmeatballs would fall from the sky [only if it is cloudy] and the moon will turn blue…bacon would fall from the sky: When pigs fly….
So the NYT has spoken. Yet , I doubt any state with a Net Zero policy is planning on changing those policies. Certainly not Wokeachusetts.
“What’s wrong with you people? We’re all gonna die!!”
Oh wait, it’s something else. We’re still trying to figure it out.
One might argue that for the NYT to write this is a “start”, but it’s hardly a “good start”. A good stare would acknowledge that the modest warming for the last century we have experienced that ended the Little Ice Age has been good for life on earth and is no different from previous natural warming events in the temperature records, that far more people still die from cold weather than from warm weather, that extreme weather events have not increased to any extent, that increased CO2 in the atmosphere has been beneficial for agriculture and the food supply, and that previous catastrophic overheating predictions have all been proven proven to be wrong.
To the tune of that old gahstly song “Love and Marriage go together like Horse and Carriage” –
“WindSun & Reliable,
WindSun & Reliable,
Go together for a Grid to be Viable.
This I tell you, brother
You can’t have one without the other”
Maybe the NYT has noticed the north Atlantic Ocean. Currently, it has a “cold blob” infecting its northern waters, an equatorial La Nina in the tropics and even colder waters across the hurricane belt. As a result, the global temperature has stayed roughly constant despite the El Nino building in the Pacific.
This has kept global temperatures pretty flat. No records are being set in 2026 except under cherry picked heat domes. Maybe the editors have noticed?
The big question now is …. are these cool areas an indication the next 30 year AMO cool phase has started? It is due. If so, the current El Nino will likely end in 6-9 months and with it will come a large amount of global cooling. That is going to be hard to explain so a course change in leftwing propaganda has started.
Weather has its fascinations!
The strategists are telling their clients to hide their true agendas again and save them for the claimed mandate list just after the election. It’s the usual moderate turned ultra liberal ploy again.
At least the readers got a run down on the players in the evil climate empire in Congress and the nonprofit armies.
If we eliminate fossil fuels, we eliminate wind turbines and solar panels as well. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1315198317261137