The New Republic: Why Won’t Democrats Act Like They Believe In Climate Doom?

I’ve been asking this question for over 20 years

Democrats May Believe Climate Change Is Real. They Don’t Act Like It.

This week, scientists reported that the collapse of a critical Atlantic current system is more likely than many of them feared. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC, sends warm water from the Southern Ocean near Antarctica up to the Arctic Sea and then returns the cooled water back again. It’s responsible for shaping the weather patterns that much of society has been structured around, like the tropical rainfall belt and Northern Europe’s relatively mild winters. AMOC was already believed to be weakening as a result of warming oceans, increasing rainfall, and melting sea ice. Yet while projections of a more significant slowdown have ranged wildly, new research, incorporating real-world observations, suggests that it will slow by an estimated 42 to 58 percent by 2100. By the middle of this century, the AMOC slowdown could pass a point of no return, whereby its collapse becomes virtually inevitable.

This crap again? The scaremongering on this must be played out, because it wasn’t showing up on my climate change searches. A couple more doomy paragraphs follow, then

The new study comes as climate change has largely fallen out of political debates across much of the West. In response to closure of the Strait of Hormuz for more than a month, liberal and right-wing governments alike doubled down on coal, oil, and gas in the name of energy security. The mood in the U.S. might best be described as climate nihilism: Climate-denying Republicans are gutting climate rules and doing everything in their power to punish renewables and expand fossil fuel production; Democrats who championed their climate bona fides just a few years ago are quietly rolling back both laws and rhetoric about reducing emissions.

People can only listen to doom and gloom for so long before they mostly check out, especially when the doom doesn’t ever seem to materialize. And, also, when they see the people pushing it the hardest are complete hypocrites.

It is easier, psychologically, to imagine that all those people who were yelling about climate change a few years ago were shrill blue-haired radicals, loony NGOs, and politicians who were so eager to capture those groups’ votes and endorsements that they foolishly took up catastrophically unpopular positions on the issue. It is also easier to debate the right way to talk about the climate crisis politically than it is to reckon with the actual problem at hand. Arguably a major reason why climate change has dropped out of the national conversation is because it is such an incredibly upsetting thing to think about.

Or, people are tired of it. And, then you have the notion that they are all so Trump Deranged that they can’t think of anything else.

Liberal-coded rhetoric about “solving” climate change—almost always connected to a handful of exciting green technologies—can seem like its own, more well-intentioned form of denial. There is no solving climate change. It is already happening, and it will continue to get much, much worse even if the world were to magically end all fossil fuel combustion tomorrow. A world-historic proliferation of solar, geothermal, wind, and nuclear power will not on its own eliminate fossil fuel combustion, much less create viable fossil-free alternatives for cornerstones of modernity like concrete, steel, and nitrogen-based fertilizers. A thriving green tech sector also won’t figure out how to peaceably relocate the many millions of people living in places that are becoming uninhabitable.

Well, those ideas are meant to take taxpayer money and shift if to their pockets. Just ask Stacy Abrams.

To adequately plan for an inevitably climate-changed future—for mitigation, adaptation, and loss—the world’s governments would need to unite behind a war-like mobilization that would make even the most audacious of Soviet planners blush. In a war, however, at least by conventional metrics, one side can usually be said to have won once it’s over. Victory in a war on climate change, by contrast, would involve something like permanent battle, where the primary goal is to limit the numbers of losers to (optimistically) tens of millions rather than billions. The result would be a world that looks fundamentally different from our own. Given the quantity of greenhouse gasses that have already been deposited into the atmosphere, an enormous transformation in the ways people live now will happen—is happening—either way. The question isn’t whether we can preserve the world as it is and stop climate change, but whether we can plan for those changes to be as minimally destructive as possible.

Might not be the best allegory to use, Warmists.