Climate Change Apocalypticism Was a Fashion, Not a Cause

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

 

What killed the climate alarmism that was once common currency on the Democratic left? Instrumental political utility, and the diminishing returns that Democratic politicians were generating by preaching apocalypticism to the converted.

 

At least, that is the lament of Syracuse University professor Matthew Huber in his widely read, mid-May New York Times op-ed.

 

“For the past several months, Democratic elites have been debating how much to talk about climate change, if at all,” he wrote, “in part because these new candidates have narrowed their focus to energy affordability to win back the working class.”

 

The tacit admission in that acknowledgment is that the activists’ go-to remedies for the ills of climate change are policies that limit the public’s access to goods and services by making them costlier. At a time when “affordability” is the problem, climate alarmism is just one of many expendable luxuries.

 

The shift in Democratic messaging, Huber added, feels like “the end of an era.” For nearly 20 years, progressive activists and their representatives advocated a “New Deal–like investment program” designed to eliminate America’s contributions to atmospheric heat-trapping emissions. Only recently, though, have those activists and politicians noticed the extent of the voters’ apathy toward the allegedly existential imperative to cool the planet. “Instead of building a broad coalition necessary to enact something like a Green New Deal, climate change has become yet another issue fueling polarization,” he concluded.

 

Ah, the Green New Deal. Remember that? It’s easy to forget how central that suite of policy proposals was to the progressive project. Indeed, its one-time promoters probably hope you have forgotten.

 

As Semafor’s David Weigel reported in March, climate-focused activist networks such as the Sunrise Movement have abandoned the cause that was once their raison d’être. But because the progressive soul craves a salvific mission, that organization has evolved. It now caters to the progressive fringes who have replaced anxiety over climate with anxiety over Israel and the pernicious influence of Americans who support the Jewish state and its defensive military priorities.

 

The movement’s rapid adaptation says as much about the progressive left’s paranoia over the Jews in Israel as well as the Diaspora (the “toxic” lobbying outfit AIPAC, which the left seeks to anathematize as a foreign influence operation, is managed and funded by Americans) as it does their bygone climate hysteria.

 

But even though the Green New Deal’s loudest champions have quietly shelved their impossible dreams, it’s worth reminding them that they once insisted that their agenda was of such importance that our very lives depended on advancing it.

 

That legislative package’s chief proponent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, deserves the most credit for fleshing out what her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, admitted was about far more than just climate change. Indeed, “it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” he conceded. Rather, “we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” He wasn’t kidding.

 

The Green New Deal’s ambitious ten-year plan called for the shuttering of each and every fossil-fuel power plant in the country. It sought to overhaul the nation’s electricity grid, eliminate all greenhouse-gas emissions produced by transportation, upgrade “every residential and industrial building,” reduce America’s industrial agricultural capacity to “local scale,” and fund a vast global mission aimed at encouraging the rest of the world to do the same.

 

That herculean endeavor was just the beginning. The millions of Americans displaced by this effort to reengineer the American economy would need job-placement programs, job training, and a universal basic income to support them in their fallow years. That was in the legislation, too. So were “free” college programs designed to make earning a degree a “debt-free” proposition. So was the nationalization of the American health insurance industry, which would take the form of forcing every American onto Medicare’s already unsustainable rolls.

 

Independent analyses of the Green New Deal pegged its ten-year cost at somewhere between $32 and $93 trillion in 2019 dollars. That astronomical price tag was supposed to be funded by wildly confiscatory marginal tax rates “as high as 60 or 70 percent,” AOC mused, “on your 10 millionth dollar.”  The only problem with her math was that, at the time, only about 16,000 Americans reported that much taxable income. If enacted, her tax scheme would generate just $720 billion over a decade, well shy of her target, and heedless of the taxable economic activity that $720 billion would no longer fund.

 

Fiduciary prudence like that was scoffed at — a mark of, if not counterrevolutionary thinking, certainly a lack of imagination. “The question isn’t how will we pay for it,” read a supremely embarrassing pro–Green New Deal FAQ that AOC’s office released (and, subsequently, disowned), “but what will we do with our new shared prosperity.”

 

Just as easy to forget is how warmly the Green New Deal was received not just by progressive activists but by the Democratic Party’s establishment. For the party’s presidential aspirants in 2019, climate apocalypticism was little more than table stakes.

 

Out of the blue, Democratic senators who “hadn’t made climate change central to their political careers,” as Axios observed, raced to co-sponsor a version of AOC’s proposal. “I support a Green New Deal,” said Kamala Harris. Elizabeth Warren backed “the idea of a Green New Deal to ambitiously tackle our climate crisis.” Amy Klobuchar, also a co-sponsor, endorsed the “aspirational” elements of the legislation, if not the specifics. Climate change “threatens the way of life for our kids and grandkids,” Cory Booker said, and it must be met with a commitment akin to “the original New Deal.” Other candidates, including Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard, supported the concept of a whole-of-society approach to combating climate change’s effects.

 

And that made sense to the left at a time when the United Nations warned that the planet had just twelve years left to avert a global ecological cataclysm. But the speed with which the Democratic activist class has discarded what they themselves once regarded as nigh religious truth is enough to make you wonder: Did they ever really mean it?

 

Were they merely misguided but sincere advocates for revolutionary reforms that they believed were equal to the scale of the problem they saw? Or was it always just a cynical voter-mobilization strategy that has lost its utility and has since been supplanted by another, more fashionable paranoia?

 

I think we have our answer.