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In the Babusar Valley, where I belong, a devastating flood struck recently. Despite being a native of this area, I have never witnessed such destruction in my lifetime. Even the elders in my village—those who are still alive—say they haven't seen a flood of this magnitude since 1978. This...

55,970 görüntüleme • 11 ay önce •via X (Twitter)

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Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the United Nations Paris agreement on climate change, unleashed fossil fuel production, cut climate subsidies that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and chosen as his Secretary of Energy an oilman who helped create the fracking revolution. Given that Democrats have spent the last 20 years describing climate change as an “existential threat” and making climate policy their highest priority under Biden, one would expect there to be significant protests and other actions by progressives. And yet we’ve seen no significant climate change protests since Trump took office two months ago. No Greta Thunberg marches — she’s moved on to Palestine. No drumbeat from the news media. No Extinction Rebellion activists blocking traffic in DC. “Climate emergency” was not among the words chosen by Democrats in Congress to put on the little placards they held up during Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month. In fact, to the extent there have been protests by Democrats, they have been against the world’s most pioneering electric car manufacturer, Tesla, and have nothing to do with climate change. It’s true that many Democrats still care deeply about climate change and the issue may come back in the future. Where just 23% of Republicans view climate change as a serious threat to the country, 78% of Democrats do. “Executive orders are for show,” says political scientist and climate policy expert, The Honest Broker , on a new podcast for Public, “legislation is for real. And there doesn't seem to be any legislative strategy accompanying anything Trump is doing. As far as pulling out of Paris, we've done this dance before. Trump pulled out to Paris, and then Biden went back in.” And the media and Democrats routinely tie every natural disaster, such as the recent fires in LA, to climate change, even though there’s no good science supporting such connections, in most instances. “Every day there's some extreme weather somewhere,” said Pielke, who is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “and so it is a perfectly made issue for sustaining some degree of attention.” But the partisan polarization over climate change, and the ease with which Trump and Biden can put the US in and out of the Paris agreement, all underscore the overall low level of concern with climate change in comparison to more pressing issues like inflation, migration, and even seemingly fringe issues like transgenderism. “The climate movement is a product of North America and Northern Europe,” said Pielke. “The ‘climate first’ voter is a tiny slice of the political landscape, even though they occupy a lot of attention and time on social media, in universities, and until recently, in the global financial sector. They made a lot of noise, but there weren't a lot of them around to begin with. The climate is just not that important to very many people around the world. People will say it's important. But give them a list of topics and it routinely comes in 17th, 18th, 19th, out of 20.” And now Pielke predicts that climate change could go the way of past environmental scares. “One story for the future of the climate discourse and climate change is that it's not going to go away, but it's going to fade from the center of public view like overpopulation did.” Why did climate change emerge as an issue of concern and then fade? “There's a pretty well-known economist named Anthony Downs who wrote a famous paper called the Issue Attention Cycle,” said Pielke. “It’s like a bell curve. You discover there's a potential problem, there's a lot of excitement, and ‘We’ve got to do something about it!’ Everybody gets on the bandwagon. Then you realize, ‘Oh my gosh, this is difficult! This is challenging!’ And then your attention goes to somewhere else and it's back down. And really climate change is following the Downs’ Issue Attention Cycle perfectly.” Pielke notes that the rate at which economies decarbonize, or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide per unit of GDP, is unchanged. “For the foreseeable future, we will continue to decarbonize the economy no matter what countries say about their climate commitments or whether there's a Viktor Orban or a Donald Trump in office. Decarbonization is much more powerful, it seems, than the politics of the climate. The Paris agreement hasn't really done anything to alter the trajectory of global decarbonization….Climate policy does a lot of things, but reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not one of those things...” Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, read the rest of the article, and listen to the full podcast!

Michael Shellenberger

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