Reclaiming Environmental Policy from the Left

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three-part series on how the Right should think about environmental and climate policy.

Nearly two decades of modern climate politics has produced one durable result: Most Americans stopped listening. Conservatives now have an opportunity to build something better.

The coalition that centered climate change as the crisis worth organizing over no longer commands the electorate. There is little to show for the billions of dollars and a decade of their near-total institutional capture. Even among Democrats, climate change now ranks near the bottom of priorities voters want solved by Washington. The era of the climate hawk is over, leaving behind it a vacuum.

The autopsy of this era of environmentalism is often misdiagnosed by conservatives. Climate change is not an invented problem, and saying so costs us nothing. All the same, the climate alarmists took a real problem, wildly exaggerated it, poorly explained it, and answered it with policies that many Americans didn’t want.

Climate politics became hopelessly abstract. Nobody can visualize a carbon emission, intuitively understands what “parts per million” means, or has any clue why 2050 is the deadline by which we are supposed to have fixed everything. The “facts” given were frequently, substantively, wrong. Consider extreme examples like RCP8.5, a worst-case climate scenario that assumed the world would burn five times its proven coal reserves. Despite its detachment from reality, many environmentalists treated it as the business-as-usual forecast, and the alarmism trickled into large swaths of journalism, litigation, and policy-making.