Bill Gates's that he has changed his mind about climate change and no longer views it as a serious threat to the future of humanity is not just a major blow to the "climate crisis" camp, but likely signals the end of a 50-year cycle of Malthusian catastrophism that has hobbled liberalism for the last several decades.
Gates's statement, attacked by climate die-hards as a capitulation to "climate denial," was unsayable among acceptable elites even as recently as two years ago (when President Joe Biden was repeatedly asserting that "Climate change is an existential threat to humanity"), but reality has been breaking out in ways that can no longer be suppressed or ignored. Not that the climatistas won't try. The recent 30th annual UN Council of the Parties on climate change (COP30) was described once again as the "last chance" to "take action" to save the planet "before it is too late," and the "most important" summit since . . . last year's "most important" summit. It is hard to believe this farce can be kept up much longer, but for the committed, it's "most important" summits all the way down.
This kind of climate obsession won't disappear quickly or easily, but it ignores how radically the ground was shifting even before Bill Gates delivered his hammer blow. None of the American TV news networks, for example, sent reporters to this year's COP, and major print media are rapidly cutting back on climate coverage. A few reporters at the conference filed stories wondering whether this would be the last COP meeting.
The arrival of "abundance liberalism" () gingerly repudiated climate catastrophism and embraced increased production of conventional hydrocarbon energy, but the young advocates of abundance liberalism, like Ezra Klein, probably don't realize that instead of being something new, they are actually a throwback to a nearly forgotten kind of liberalism. And therein lies a long story arc of the last two generations.
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