The currently observable reality is that progressives, who have now captured the Democratic Party at all levels of government, don’t seem able to run anything anymore—not cities, not Covid, not a national border. Why would letting them run climate policy be different?

Whatever one thinks about the “root causes” of the rise in violent urban crime or the more than one million migrants apprehended at the southern border in the current fiscal year, both stand as significant case studies in political mismanagement.

The nonresponse to the overrun border by the Biden administration and to urban violence by progressive mayors in Chicago, New York, Washington and Portland, Ore., suggests this high-probability scenario on climate: They will make mistakes, the world will go to hell, and then they will deny we are in hell—and what’s worse, insist that we keep doing the same manifestly wrong things.

Even more fantastically, the progressives offload responsibility for their policy failures onto us with constant guilt-tripping: The cities are a mess because of systemic racism. The world is burning because “humans” have used fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.