Essay by Eric Worrall
“… US activists are pushing back against this trend of “climate hushing” …”
Democrats’ ‘climate hushing’ prompts activists to turn up the volume
Nationwide actions seek to counter view that talking about climate crisis distracts from affordability messaging
Dharna Noor Sat 1 Aug 2026 22.00 AESTLast modified on Sat 1 Aug 2026 22.02 AEST
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Research makes clear that global warming is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. Yet the climate crisis has largely disappeared from the political agenda, with many Democrats who once described it as an existential threat now shying away from talking about it.
Now US activists are pushing back against this trend of “climate hushing”, arguing it is misguided. During the summer’s federal recess, during which lawmakers leave the nation’s capital to work directly within their home states or districts, demonstrators organized by the environmental advocacy coalition Climate Action Campaign are calling on representatives to put climate back on the political agenda.
“The long history of the climate movement proves that we move fastest when there’s real pressure from the grassroots,” said Bill McKibben, the environmental author and activist who co-founded climate non-profit 350.org, “All the evidence shows those grassroots are as worried about [the] climate crisis as they ever were.”
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Actions began on Thursday and will take a variety of forms. In Michigan, participants will demonstrate against the Republican representative Bill Huizenga who voted for Trump’s so-called big beautiful bill, which boosted planet-heating fossil fuels.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/democrats-climate-policy-hushing
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The problem with McKibben’s claims that climate change is a vote winner is these claims are not supported by the evidence. Republican gains such as the victory of President Trump in 2024 prove climate change is not the vote winner it once was, regardless of clearly flawed surveys which suggest climate change is still a high priority issue.
Senior Democrats have realised climate messaging only works on people who already intended to vote for them, and have tried to shift the conversation to issues their target audience cares about, like fear of AI.
McKibben’s climate awareness campaign has caught Democrat strategists between a rock and a hard place. If Democrats don’t give climate issues airtime, they risk splitting their own voter base, as the dwindling but still substantial cadre of climate fanatics in their own ranks lash out at being ignored. But if Democrats abandon issues independents and moderate Republicans care about, like fear of AI, or spook moderate voters by talking up expensive green energy policies, they’ll lose anyway.
McKibben’s campaign to restore climate activism to the top of the political agenda is going to be an interesting test of how much influence McKibben and his fellow travellers still have. My guess is McKibben and friends will lose – that Democrats will judge the potential gains from focusing on bipartisan issues such cost of living and demands to protect jobs and regulate AI are greater than the risk of alienating climate fanatics in their own ranks. But I’m sure looking forward to seeing how climate activists react when they realise even their alleged political allies no longer care about their cause.
Funny how McKibben uses FF every minute of every day! HYPOCRITE
Good point.
The global plastic lifecycle emits more greenhouse gases than the entire aviation and shipping industries combined, and rivals or exceeds total road transport emissions.
And that’s before you factor in EVs charging from “non-renewable” sources when you do your food shopping.
Methinks it’s time for McKibben to self-flagellate.
Middlebury College Overstates CO2 of Its Tree Burning Plant by 2 times and Sequestering CO2 by its Forests by 10 times
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/middlebury-college-overstates-co2-of-its-tree-burning-plant-and
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Middlebury College in Vermont, has an Environmental Studies Department.
The Department receives federal and state government grants and alumni bequests to perform environment-related studies
The Department held a Senior Student Seminar (ES 401) during the Winter of 2010 regarding:
1) the CO2 emissions of the Campus tree burning plant, and
2) the sequestering of CO2 by the forest owned by the College.
1) According to the Campus wood burning plant website, the best estimate of wood chip delivery is 20,000 tons of green wood chips per year.
Incorrect CO2 Calculation
The seminar report states: “Thus, a more realistic estimate of carbon emissions is: 20,000, US ton of green wood x 0.50, moisture content x 44/12 x 1 = 36,667 tons of carbon”. See URL, pages 38 and 39.
This calculation is incorrect, because it did not account for the carbon content of dry wood
BTW, the word “carbon” should read “CO2”
http://www.middlebury.edu/media/view/255078/original/Winter_2010carbon_sequestration.pdf
Correct CO2 Calculation
The wood chips contain 20,000, US ton of green wood x 0.50, moisture content = 10,000 US ton of dry wood.
The dry wood contains 10,000 US ton of dry wood x 0.487 lb carbon/lb dry wood = 4,870 US ton of carbon.
The CO2 created by combustion is 44/12 x 4,870 = 17,857 US ton of CO2.
The report overstated the CO2 emissions by 36,667/17,856 = 2.05 times
2) Incorrect Calculation of CO2 Sequestered by the Forest
The report states: “Middlebury College-owned forests, 1295 ha (3200 acre), will sequester about 9,905 US ton of carbon/y, or 9905/3200 = 3.095 US ton of carbon/acre, or 44/12 x 3.095 = 11.35 US ton of CO2/acre. See URL, page 39, table 7
For reference: Vermont forestland, 4,511,000 acres, sequestered about 4,390,000 metric. ton of CO2, or 0.973 metric ton of CO2/acre, or 1.073 US ton of CO2/acre, per US Forest Service.
https://fpr.vermont.gov/sites/fpr/files/Forest_and_Forestry/The_Forest_Ecosystem/Library/Forest%20Carbon%20Inventory%20_Mar%202017_final.pdf
The report overstated the sequestered CO2 by 11.35/1.073 = 10.6 times
I sent McKibben a copy of my numbers
He told me he would forward it to the proper persons
Those are the type of enviros who fear-monger us, are taxing us, are mandating us, and are telling us to spend our hard-earned money on super-expensive, impoverishing Net-zero to reduce CO2 by 2050.
CO2 is a life gas, if below 200 ppm most plants barely grow.
At 200 CO2 ppm, there would be no greening of the earth, and no fauna, and no 8 billion people.
We need about 1000 CO2 ppm for optimum plant growth, as proven in laboratories and commercial greenhouses.
These McKibben-perverted/brainwashed enviros are incompetent and should be reduced to nothing
Middlebury state and federal government grants are being wasted and should be cancelled
Alumni donations should not be squandered on BS “studies”.
So now the Democrats, who aren’t really Democrats anymore, are starting to feel the sting from the disparate voters they’ve been accumulating based on their special needs. The internecine fighting will only get worse before it gets better with a fragmented base. AGW is fast becoming a hot potato in politics due to economics, not science.
Dems are fracturing into a purity spiral where the ideologically captured are demanding conformity to their complete disconnects from reality. Hoping they go the way of the Whigs..
That’s the row the Dems sowed. Now its time for them to reap their AnteRewards
The big donors have left the building, that’s why all the hushing. It’s all about priorities and confidence levels.
It’s hard for big donors to support the big tent nonsense when the assault is already underway on your wallet and unrecognized capital gains.
Don’t forget USAID and other NGOs have been exposed for using US taxpayers’ dollars to fund their climate change agenda for probably decades.
You are “looking forward to seeing how climate activists react when they realize even their alleged political allies no longer care about their cause.”
I’m looking forward to an explanation from climate activists for how tens of trillions of dollars have been spent in the last 36 years yet annual global CO2 emissions have doubled.
You may be waiting a while!
All you will ever here is, but but but, wasn’t me.
“Research makes clear that global warming is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe.”
Cite an example?
And then “All the evidence shows those grassroots are as worried about [the] climate crisis as they ever were.”
Cite another example?
Once freed from the constraint of defined meanings, streams of words fly freely from the cage of reality.
The epistemology of “climate change.”
“as worried about [the] climate crisis as they ever were.”
Point being, they were never worried, except as a reaction to a media headline.
To them, any and all weather is PROOF! They can just feel it in their hearts, they need no science.
Anyone wondering why climate alarmism is diminishing in politics should look at alarmist statements like that critically. It should be easy to understand that if alarmists overstated the cause that house of cards would have to collapse eventually.. like the excessive use of an unrealistic RCP8.5 scenario for attribution studies trying to justify claims like that one, which of course is also clearly contradicted by the findings of Alimonti er el.:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17477891.2023.2239807
“”We conclude that the patterns observed are largely attributable to progressively better reporting of natural disaster events,””
https://climate.nasa.gov
I see you found the archived webpages that are no longer linked to the front page.
Those have been administratively disapproved and archived as hysterical records.
Nothing from nasa has been disproved, although the Orange Denier in Chief might not like science. After all he tried unsuccessfully to correct NOAA with a Sharpie🤣
The old Appeal to Authority Fallacy.
The fundamental idea that Science progress builds on Science by prior experts. As opposed to the Denier idea that’s it’s a free for all, and nobody cares what experts discovered. That’s why some Deniers are still flat earthers
“Research makes clear that global warming is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. ”
When a writer starts with a false declarative statement the remainder of the screed is useless.
Only for critical thinkers. When a false declarative statement starts with the word “research“, too many liberal useful idiots believe it like religious dogma.
Give credit where credit due. The phrase, this time, did not start with “Scientists say…”
And don’t forget that Doctor “I am The Science” used to talk about all the time.
As I said below,
“Why are they trying to get the Dems to talk about Global Warming … er… Climate Change?
They should try to get them talk about the REAL existential threat, COVID-19!
(Even Fauci won’t talk about it anymore!)” 😎
It’s funny. In her original article, she links to texas floods, dangerous heat, and Canadian wildfires. But for her above declaration, she links to nothing.
More pixie dust and unicorns from the Pied Piper.
The Dems have at least two big problems, and climate change is not among them.
McKibben and his fellow travelers cannot ‘accept’ that the world is moving on—at least in the US. They were delusional about the dangers of climate change. They remain delusional about what is happening inside the Democrat party. Good. They lose.
The rise of DSA is empirical evidence of how clueless the ideologically captured are. If that doesn’t result in Republican majorities in the midterms it will be a poor reflection on the electorate and a poor result for the nation.
Don’t count out voter fraud. Despite all the evidence pointing to fraud it has never been tried in court. The Dems realize the easiest way to win a court battle is to just not allow it to go to trial.
But TDS will overcome the DSA problem.
WTF is DSA???
Data Structure Algorithms
Dementia Support Australia
Digital Subtraction Angiography
Digital Services Act
Disabled Student Allowance
???
Democrat Socialist A***holes !!
DSA is basically reverting to an old definition of a prior German political party – National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
most commonly known as the Nazis.
“WTF is DSA???”
You must not follow politics. They are the organization getting Democrat socialists elected to public office successfully.
DSA + Democratic Socialists of America
The money for Dems is drying up so one casualty is climate marketing, climate communicators, and various other service contractors of nonsense and hype.
You can ride the tiger, but eventually it will want to be fed.
“There’s a climate hushhhhh, all over the Dems tonight…”
Blinkered Bill
For Jeff, Naomi got a facelift.
Must have cost literally millions to get her to look that good !!
She wanted to look nice for her bridle shower.
chuckle 🙂
Those Blinders are Peaky!
My former political party shuts up quickly whenever their policies are exposed as bogus. Unfortunately, they rapidly pull them out of storage and dust them off whenever they regain power and then think that their members wont remember. That’s why democrats are my former political party. I have no patience with hypocrites.
Many years ago I thought I was one of them, you know, I was young and naive and I thought that was the noble thing to be. I hung out with them, and then I realized what hypocrites they are so I turned away from them, and then turned against them. Flaming climate hypocrites they are.
What’s the science behind his 350? Oh of course, there isn’t any. And where does the erratic fraud Mcgibbben stand on wood chips for electricity?
That number — 350 — comes from James Hansen and co-crazies.
Never mind climate shooshing, McClimateface should stop with his Klimate Kvetching.
The climatistas clearly have no faith in the UN’s findings about climate change, and clearly aren’t capable of reading a simple result of a major study.
Here agin is the UN’s 7-million people worldwide survey of things that matter to them.
“Climate change” is the least / last of the 16 topics of issues that concern the global populace.
But it was an unscientific survey, and the participants were self-selecting.
Some McKibben factoids I just looked up.
Bill has moved on to ‘Third Act’ seniors advocacy. I suppose that is realer than the climate change alarm that hasn’t happened.
350.org, which he founded in 2008, is waning. They are down from about 550 local chapters at its peak to only 408 today. In 2024, they tried to organize multiple synchronized climate protests in all 50 states, but only managed 24 in just 17 states. And those were by and large not even locally reported—else 350.org would have bragged in its 2025 report about the climate alarm PR it tried to but mostly failed to generate in 2024.
From the web one can learn that William Ernest McKibben {aka Weepy Bill; see WUWT 2014/08/06} has been active in saving the world since age 20, 46 years ago.
He could have done more good and saved more lives if he had gotten on a road crew building and replacing damaged guardrails.
I was hoping for a video, only got a confession, for crying out loud.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/04/weepy-bill-mckibben-steps-down-as-chairman-of-350-org/
These Democrat climate activists may not realize it, but their tiresome demands for climate action are doing nothing more than triggering a backlash from citizens who’ve recognized that the whole issue is largely a scam that will cost them more money and cause them to face more unjustified restrictions
All you need to know about climate change is that CO2 can’t cause catastrophic runaway global warming.
I wonder how McGibben will react to: https://x.com/cohler/status/2081407310493081791
This demonstrates that the whole IPCC story of anthropogenic climate change is wrong. Cohler and Soon have started with accepting Salby’s work on atmospheric CO2 increase being natural rather than human caused and ran through several other erroneous IPCC assumptions including that global mean surface temperature has a real thing.
Poor Bill McKibben. He has become totally irrelevant. If you follow his sub stack, his screeds are becoming more and more detached and in fact unreadable.
Deep Purple – Hush (Original Film Clip, 1968)
Shell offloads European renewables business in latest pivot away from green energy
Crazies attacking crazies. What’s not to like!