Is the Climate Grift Collapsing?

AP Photo/Pat Sullivan

No, no it's not. We will spend years and decades beating back the insane climate policies and squeezing out the corruption in the climate alarmism NGO complex. We need to completely rewrite curricula, deregulate, fire a bunch of teachers, reclaim our science journals from insane people who disdain truth, and nuke the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. 

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Still, peak climate is behind us. The peak was high, the damage done, and the cleanup will be as difficult as rooting out the Japanese soldiers hiding in the Pacific island caves, but the tide has turned. As with the trans hysteria, beating back the baddies will be a long and painful process, but we are winning. 

Bill Gates has been a key enabler of the climate grift, although hardly the most powerful proponent of it. Despite his reputation as an innovator, he is and always has been more inclined to ride a wave than create one. If he is calling off the climate catastrophe talk, you can be sure that he is merely voicing what many people in his orbit are thinking

There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.

Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.

It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change. Next month’s global climate summit in Brazil, known as COP30, is an excellent place to begin, especially because the summit’s Brazilian leadership is putting climate adaptation and human development high on the agenda.

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As I have written many times before, I am more in the Bjorn Lomberg camp than the full-blown "it can't be happening" crowd. I fully admit I don't know whether or to what extent human beings are impacting the climate, but I don't think that the hypothesis that we are is insane. 

What I do think is insane are the claims that The Science™ says we are doomed, or even particularly threatened. The data sucks and is manipulated, the models are ridiculous, and the science is following the money. 

And the money is HUGE. As in trillions of dollars a year, climate alarmism has been a gold rush for many and a power grab for everybody in the transnational elite. 

Whatever the exact truth is, nobody who is shouting about climate change either knows it or remotely cares about what it might be. There is too much money and power to grab, and the more horrifying the stories they can concoct the more money and power they can grab. 

Lomberg has rightly pointed out many reasons not to be terribly concerned about climate change, at least not now. There are far more pressing problems in the world, including hunger, disease, poverty, and the enduring lack of resilience to natural disasters. 

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Spending trillions on reducing CO2 emissions a year will solve none of these and make no discernible impact on human well-being either now or in the future. A few hundred million wiping out mosquitoes in tropical climes will do more to improve human lifespans and well-being than a few trillion spent on reducing CO2 by a marginal percentage. 

But that is not my point. Obviously, rational arguments have made no impact on the climate "debate" over the past few decades, and they surely won't now with the people who lie awake at night wondering what Greta Thunberg would do. These are not rational people. 

Nor are many in governments around the world, but the decisions may soon be taken out of their hands. Many of the people who have ridden this wave but not relied upon it for their bread and butter are losing interest in it, and the stasis in European economies is giving members in the transnational elite—at least on this side of the Atlantic—pause. 

What was good for business—the climate grift—is now bad for business. Energy crises in Europe will soon enough lead to the fall of governments and the rise of populism, as has happened in the United States with Trump. 

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The idiocy of climate alarmists has been obvious to anybody who paid attention for years, and it is infuriating that people like us have to fight against disastrous policies for years or decades before we are proven right. We don't even get thanks or credit for being right, and the idiots don't get punished for being perpetually wrong. As with COVID, it's forgive and forget for the elites. 

Imagine if we had built a hundred more nuclear power plants, or two hundred, since the 1980s. But no, the fearmongers stopped us, and the result is that we have spent decades trying to restart an industry that we killed for no reason other than alarmism. 

It's not until the damage is done, is obvious, and the bill is outrageously high that people move on. Germany, soon enough, will do an about-face on energy or simply wither away, but if and when they do, they will have to rebuild the nuclear plants they destroyed and work mightily to lure back any industries that might take the risk. 

The damage was completely avoidable. We told them so. We jumped up and down. Showed the evidence. Took apart the models. Put things in context. Held conferences. Endured ridicule and censorship. 

But it won't be until people like Bill Gates shrug and say, "Gee, maybe there is a better way," that anybody with power will listen. The climate grifters will have made bank, our economies will have been hobbled, and the people who are supposedly the beneficiaries of all the "nice" policies will have paid an enormous price for no gain. 

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So yes, we are winning this battle. But we will have to fight the dead-enders for years and rebuild what they have destroyed. 


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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | October 28, 2025
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Beege Welborn 8:40 PM | October 28, 2025
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