Apocalypse Adjourned

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

In 2022, a geography professor named Matthew T. Huber published a book titled Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. In another age, it might have been strange for an actual scientist to write a book about exploiting his field of study to foment a global socialist revolution. But this is the age we live in. 

 

On Saturday, Huber published an essay in the New York Times arguing that campaigning Democrats should drop the whole climate-change issue after all. He recognizes that it’s not at the top of most Americans’ list of concerns and that working-class voters, in particular, really don’t care about it. In other words, climate panic has turned out to be a poor catalyst for socialist mobilization. 

 

And socialism is clearly more important to Huber than is the prospect of a warming planet. “Democrats will surely continue to propose policies calling for jobs and public investment,” he writes, “but it’s not clear why climate should be at the center.” 

 

That’s interesting, isn’t it? After 20 years of telling us that climate change is the most important crisis facing all of humanity, the doom-mongers now say they just don’t get what the big deal is.

 

This is all amusing as a tale of raw political opportunism. But there’s more to the story. 

 

On April 29, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with its latest round of projected climate scenarios. The leading global authority on climate change now says that, owing to changes in climate policy, lower emissions, and the availability of renewable energy sources, the most extreme global-warming scenarios “have become implausible.”  

 

Which is to say that the actual “inconvenient truth” has been revealed at last. The dominant climate models were garbage, and the horror story that we’ve been fed for decades is kaput. So if the conventional wisdom on the left suddenly dictates a pivot away from climate change, the pivoters might know more than they’re letting on. 

 

Not that you’d know this from outlets like the New York Times. The paper hasn’t said a word about our having avoided the climate apocalypse. In fact, today, two days after Huber’s piece on the political liability of climate change, the Times published an opinion article stating: “Ecologists warn that in just 25 years, more than 70 percent of the Southwestern needle leaf evergreen forests, which include ponderosa pines, may be replaced by grass in what might qualify as the first significant post-climate change landscape in America.” Without the shade provided by all these doomed trees, snow will supposedly evaporate instead of feeding rivers and streams. The author calls this “a sign of a catastrophic feedback loop beginning to form.” 

 

So left-liberal candidates should avoid discussing climate change while left-liberal news consumers should continue to be fed climate catastrophe? This makes more sense than one might realize. Democratic candidates are freed up to focus on issues that Americans care about, while the media supply their constituents with the left-wing doom-porn they desperately crave. That’s what you call a good model.