Bummer: Climate Cultists Admit Thinking It Will Matter In The 2024 Elections Is “Wishful Thinking”

A whole bunch of climate activist “journalists” gathered with some other Warmists, and it wasn’t pretty

Election 2024: How Will Climate Change Matter

Recently, I was invited to speak at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference on a panel entitled “Election 2024: How Will Climate Change Matter?”

You can watch the full panel discussion here, but the short version of my answer to the question posed by panel’s title was “not as much as you might wish.”

Here’s what I mean:

Given the scope and urgency of the climate crisis, advocates and activists can be forgiven for wishful thinking. But the idea that climate change will be a pivotal issue in the 2024 election is just that: wishful thinking. And to the extent that the issue does influence votes, it could be a wash at best. As we’ve seen in recent years, where people stand on climate change is increasingly determined by partisan affiliation. If you lean left, you probably care about climate and support strong-ish action. If you lean right, you probably think concern about climate is overblown and consider climate activists and their ideas extreme. Given that the country is more or less evenly divided ideologically, the polarization of climate change is a huge problem.

Wendy Wendlandt, president of Environmental America, makes some good points about what they would need to do, but, misses a few things: Doing Something about ‘climate change’ is a lot more popular in the 1st World when things are going well. Not so much when you had a world wide pandemic, regardless of whether it was overblown. And then have inflation that is hitting the average citizen hard in the wallet. When you have two big wars going on, one which could easily get much, much, much worse and spread, being Ukraine against Russia.

She also misses that it’s hard to get people to do stuff when they refuse to do it themselves. If I want people to stop smoking, well, even though I only have about 6-8 a day (I have low power nicotine pouches mostly. It’s my only vice), how can I convince people? If I want to convince you to stop blowing stop signs, well, I don’t, so, I’m practicing what I preach. Same with using signals.

Then there’s this

Winning all of these campaigns still won’t be enough if our society is stuck in the old paradigm. We can’t keep growing our economy in the same old ways, producing and consuming more stuff in the same old ways, without making the planet a hotter, more dangerous and biologically poorer place. Shifting the paradigm is an even heavier lift than building bipartisan support. That’s why our arguments for action need to poke holes in the old paradigm and open the path just a little wider for new ways of organizing our society.

Hmm, so, you want to convince Other People to basically move to a different economic model, limiting people’s choices? And a new way of organizing our society? Who will enforce this on the peasants? She doesn’t say. Most Warmists refuse to actually say.

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