Climate Law Heats Up

By John R. Puri

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

When Americans are expected to conform to the law, it’s essential for them to know where different kinds of law reside. Laws governing murder and burglary are left to the states; authority over immigration law rests with the federal government. But where exactly lies climate law, if such a thing even exists?

 

That is the question before the Supreme Court this term in Suncor Energy v. Boulder County. The case began when the Colorado county filed suit in state court against two oil and gas companies, Suncor and ExxonMobil, for financial damages. It alleges that these multinational corporations, by selling and promoting fossil fuels across the country and beyond, knowingly contributed to global climate change. As a result of these actions, Boulder contends, the county faces higher costs from extreme weather.

 

Before a Colorado court considered the suit on its merits, Suncor and Exxon argued that it lacked the authority to do so. Colorado’s highest court disagreed, so the defendants appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices will hear the case in October and decide on it next year. At stake is nothing less than the nature of federalism.

 

To the energy companies and their allies, Boulder’s lawsuit is an attempted end run around the legislative process. After failing to enact climate legislation in Congress, activists are trying to force their desired policies on the country through the courts. This is not the first time a subnational government has sued over greenhouse gases. In 2011, after several states sued electric utilities in federal court to limit their emissions, the Supreme Court ruled in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut that the Clean Air Act displaced any federal common-law claims. Now, the defendants argue, climate activists are evading American Electric Power (AEP) by shifting to state courts. They fear that a win for Boulder would devastate energy production by opening the door to lawsuits in 50 different jurisdictions.

 

Boulder County maintains that it is simply seeking compensation for local damages, not a nationwide injunction on emissions. While most originalists engaged on the issue are with Suncor, conservative law professor Jonathan Adler has taken the other side. He believes the companies are the ones trying to evade the law by asking the Supreme Court to terminate all state litigation before it can be heard. Though he doesn’t endorse Boulder’s injury claims, Adler told me that he thinks the energy sector has resorted to inventing a constitutional principle to stop the suits from going forward.

 

Both parties assert that victory for the other side would imperil self-government. The energy companies’ supporters argue that allowing Boulder’s suit to proceed would allow plaintiffs in one state to regulate conduct in other states. A municipality in Colorado could effectively tax an oil company in Texas without the people of the latter state having any say. Under the Constitution, such interstate regulation is delegated exclusively to the federal government. State governments — including their judiciaries — may govern activity only within their own borders.

 

In an amicus brief for the case, Adler responds that a radical federal preemption of local torts is what would truly erode federalism, and he argues that environmental protection was historically the domain of the states. It remains so today, as nothing in the Constitution or federal law purports to remove this power, even when environmental injuries cross a border. Relief for Suncor would leave battered municipalities “without recourse under any State’s law, while leaving source States free to authorize the conduct that generates the harm — converting a principle of equal sovereignty into a one-way immunity for source States.”

 

Boulder’s argument has a favorable precedent in the 2023 case National Pork Producers Council v. Ross. There, the Supreme Court ruled that the interstate commerce clause did not prohibit California from banning pork imports from suppliers that did not match the state’s strict animal-cruelty standards. Pig farmers in other states predicated their challenge on the dormant commerce clause — an implied prohibition on state laws that excessively burden interstate commerce — of which many originalists are skeptical. They failed to persuade a majority.

 

From that defeat, however, some conservatives see opportunity in Suncor. In their eyes, the Court in Pork Producers invited petitioners to present deeper arguments against extraterritorial regulation, rooted in the Constitution’s very structure of state sovereignty. The justices may finally endorse jurist Michael McConnell’s old amicus brief against California’s law, breaking ground on a new legal arena: “States generally may not punish people for deeds done in other states,” and no state can “block interstate commerce for the purpose of coercing or influencing the way people behave in other states.”

 

That is the decision the energy companies hope for. Carbon emissions, they attest, are inherently a national issue — international, actually — subject solely to federal law. Colorado can no more govern emissions from another state than it can regulate those from another country.

 

On Suncor’s side is a pair of rulings that share a name, Milwaukee v. Illinois. If carbon emissions are comparable to pollution in their harms, as Boulder County claims, these precedents should apply. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that interstate water pollution fell under federal common law and that relevant suits should therefore be filed in federal court. Nine years later, adjudicating the same controversy, the justices found that the Clean Water Act’s regulatory scheme had since displaced common-law nuisance claims.

 

Likewise, the energy companies argue that the Clean Air Act further preempts any climate torts, mirroring what the Court found in AEP. But therein lies an unsettling wrinkle: What if federal law does not regulate carbon emissions after all?

 

AEP turned on a 2007 precedent infamous among conservatives: Massachusetts v. EPA. There, in a 5–4 decision, the Court ruled that the Clean Air Act authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions only because they qualified as “air pollutants” under the statute. Therefore, states could sue the EPA if it failed to properly regulate carbon emissions. Echoing their previous dissent, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas concurred pointedly in AEP, “for the sake of argument because no party contends otherwise,” that Massachusetts was decided correctly.

 

Legal analyst Steve Milloy has noticed that, while the Trump administration claims in an amicus brief that the Clean Air Act grants the EPA exclusive authority to regulate carbon emissions, the administration explicitly rejects that position by rescinding the agency’s so-called endangerment finding. This 2009 determination provided the legal basis for the EPA to regulate emissions as a harmful pollutant. In rescinding it, Trump’s EPA concluded that the Clean Air Act “does not authorize the Agency to prescribe emission standards in response to global climate change concerns.”

 

Democratic states have already sued to reinstitute the endangerment finding under the Massachusetts precedent, and their case will probably reach the Supreme Court. Many conservatives are excited at this prospect, believing that the current Court would overturn Massachusetts if given the chance. None of the Court’s majority from 2007 remains, whereas three of the four dissenters are still on the bench.

 

But consider what happens if this foundational precedent falls away. If the EPA may not regulate carbon emissions, then federal statute does not preempt state-level climate suits, as the energy companies in Suncor argue. And if the Clean Air Act does not displace federal common law over carbon emissions, as AEP held, then federal nuisance torts are presumably reopened for business. Boulder County could refile its claim in federal court and even seek an injunction against energy producers rather than mere damages. Technically, conservatives would have gotten what they had wished for.

 

Even the best scientific models can’t perfectly predict the weather, but we can forecast with certainty that there are more storms ahead for climate law.

The Energy Sector Is Threatened by a Climate Litigation Free-for-All

By Donald J. Kochan

Sunday, September 20, 2026

 

Climate litigation gets an oral argument at the Supreme Court on October 5. Several fundamental questions loom: What is the proper reach of state law? May one state impose obligations that apply to activities in other states or other nations? And may one state do so in ways that interfere with the prerogatives of the federal government?

 

The case, Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc., et al., Petitioners v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, et al., is one of dozens across the United States in which local governments are seeking to hold energy companies liable through state tort law for alleged climate-change effects. In these cases, neither the activities nor the effects alleged as wrongs are contained within the borders of the states where the cases are filed. Consequently, any remedy or liability would leak beyond their borders. Any court action other than dismissal, therefore, would necessarily and inevitably entail one state’s exerting extraterritorial jurisdiction. The U.S. Constitution does not allow this.

 

While states have a significant degree of autonomy to regulate intrastate activity free of intervention from the federal government, they do not have the authority to set national policy for transboundary or national matters. They also do not have the authority to regulate activities occurring in and within the authority of other states. This is the distinction between a coordinated union in a federal system versus a system of all against all.

 

Indeed, as the U.S. Supreme Court majority wrote in its Michelin Tire Corp. v. Wages (1976 ) opinion, a major defect “of the Articles of Confederation, and a compelling reason for the calling of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, was the fact that the Articles essentially left the individual States free to burden commerce both among themselves and with foreign countries very much as they pleased.” The U.S. Constitution replaced the articles in an attempt to restrain that power. Alexander Hamilton expressed in Federalist No. 11 that the new U.S. Constitution carved out some things that were of national concern and with which states could not interfere, explaining that “there are rights of great moment to the trade of America, which are rights of the Union.” Hamilton also stressed that the Constitution was adopted to create “an unrestrained intercourse between the states,” lest interstate and foreign trade be “fettered, interrupted and narrowed by a multiplicity of causes.”

 

Recently, however, certain ambitious states (or their subunits) — with their own policy agendas and particular approaches to social problems — have, either through their legislators or through their courts, seen fit to try to expand their power in ways that would necessarily have extraterritorial effects. Climate-change tort lawsuits and their legislative cousins, climate Superfund statutes, are perfect examples of this growing tendency.

 

As Saikrishna B. Prakash of the University of Virginia Law School writes in his amicus brief filed in Suncor, Boulder’s theory of liability would eradicate the territorial limits of a state’s legislative authority — “plunging the Nation into the interstate and international discord the Framers sought to avoid.” Prakash further explains that “Boulder’s attempt to deploy state tort law to regulate the entire United States and the world would have left the Founders thunderstruck.” Indeed, “With the Constitution’s creation of the Union, any power to regulate across state lines rests with Congress.”

 

Federal law has always governed interstate and international greenhouse gas emissions, in no small part because of the need for a uniform set of federal rules. Carefully balancing the costs and benefits of regulation for producers and consumers — including environmental protection, energy reliability, energy security, economic stability, and geopolitical stability — Congress exercised its constitutional authority and built a comprehensive regulatory scheme in the Clean Air Act. And the U.S. Supreme Court has already made clear, in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut (2011), that the Clean Air Act displaces common-law efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. In our system of federalism, states do not have a role in this matter.

 

These are the principles that the U.S. Supreme Court will guard if it reverses the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision in Suncor, which has allowed state tort suits with extraterritorial reach. If the Court does not do so, it will endorse a tort system in which every domestic and foreign company can be sued in or by every state as well as every one of the thousands of subunits within states, like the County of Boulder. Such a multiplicity of lawsuits would cripple commerce, paralyzing energy producers by subjecting them to dozens of conflicting, jury-driven liability standards for the same global conduct. That would not only be grossly unfair and lead to inconsistent and arbitrary judgments. Such a litigation free-for-all would harm energy consumers, too.

The Climate Underground

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

 

Matthew Huber’s May op-ed in the New York Times went off like a bomb inside the increasingly jilted community of climate activists. The Democratic Party’s candidates — many of whom were once committed to a wholesale renovation of the entire American economy, its modes of transportation and housing, and even its very social contract to combat climate change — don’t even talk about the issue anymore. Nor should they, Huber wrote. Democratic office-seekers’ “first task must be to regain credibility with working people by tackling their more immediate, material concerns.”

 

Huber was describing an organic phenomenon that he merely observed. But it wasn’t long before the activist left swiftly determined that the diminution of climate change as a source of political currency for the Democratic left was something that had been done to them — the flowering of some malign conspiracy cooked up by the reviled establishmentarians.

 

As PBS News put it last month, the “national shift in the conversation” around climate change (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) “is sharp enough for some researchers to coin the term ‘climate hushing’ to describe it.” The number of disparate and disconnected left-of-center interest groups that seemed to move away from climate change simultaneously belies rather than betrays the existence of some overarching plot. There are too many moving parts, and a complex coordination narrative has less explanatory power than the fact that climate change is not a priority for most voters. “It has felt less like people care less about climate and more like people are increasingly freaked out about other issues,” the executive director of the climate activism outfit the Sunrise Movement told PBS.

 

And yet, the talk of “climate hushing” persisted, and the left’s hostility to it grew.

 

“Whatever their motives,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse argued, “the climate hushers are wrong about pretty much everything.” The Democratic National Committee’s Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis chair, Michelle Deatrick, disputed the notion (endorsed by the DNC’s own autopsy of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign) that climate activism is electoral poison. “Walking away from climate demobilizes our base,” she insisted. Throw that unfalsifiable claim atop many more that Inside Climate News compiled. Among academics, the consensus seems to be that “there’s not a political cost” associated with climate activism, the 2024 election “was not a referendum on climate change,” and most Americans remain “worried about climate change.”

 

Incensed by the notion that they had become an embarrassment to the Democratic Party’s institutionalists, the environmental activist class resolved to put on an even more humiliating spectacle. This summer, this scorned constituency staged protests, circulated petitions, and hounded Democratic lawmakers in their attempt to push their agenda back to the front burner. So far, the impassive Democratic political class remains unmoved.

 

The party’s attempt to relegate climate activism to the fringes, even temporarily, is a compromise with political reality more than a sincere change of heart. Not that the duplicity will assuage climate activists, bitter and forsaken as they are. What is the activist left to do but prepare for what The Guardian’s Damien Gayle forecast would be the “new phase” of climate activism: violent direct action from the underground.

 

The left’s climate Cassandras are talking themselves into carrying out “clandestine acts of sabotage against the corporations they see as responsible for the destruction of the climate,” Gayle reported. But it’s not all talk. Gayle cited several recent “ecotage” attacks in Europe — wrecking construction equipment, puncturing tires at Land Rover dealerships, disabling underground communications infrastructure, and even filling the golf courses’ 18 holes with cement — as evidence of what the future of climate activism may soon look like. As How to Blow Up a Pipeline author Andreas Malm contends, Gayle concluded, “militant action” is the “only sustainable route for climate activists increasingly facing a severe pushback against non-violent disruptive protest.”

 

As a declaration of intent to engage in violent acts, it doesn’t get clearer than that.

 

Yet, the most militant of those who remain intent on “militant action” have already been forced into the “underground,” the BBC reported. Groups like Just Stop Oil, which popularized antisocial protest tactics like defacing priceless works of art and blocking traffic, have been “policed” into incognito mode. That invites the risk that underground activism could “spawn a new, even more disruptive or chaotic climate action.”

 

“In this context, some climate activists have concluded that it is time to drop the movement’s long-standing commitment to accountability,” the report added. “They will undertake disruptive actions but won’t stick around to be arrested anymore.”

 

Just Stop Oil and its offshoots long ago lost the support of the mainstream British left. For America’s environmental activists, their shunning is a relatively new experience. Their activism may follow a trajectory similar to the one the U.K.’s activist left followed, and we should be wary if it does. The last time the environmentalist left went “underground” in America, it produced a campaign of costly economic sabotage and property destruction.

 

Some of the outcast activists will bide their time, meet the voting public where they live, and incorporate the lessons that should accompany their marginalization into their work. But some won’t. And those who won’t will not abandon their convictions. Instead, they are likely to lash out at a system that seems wholly arrayed against what they regard as a moral imperative, using the tools and tactics associated with the “underground.”

 

We have been warned.

Apocalypse Not: The World Is Not Going to End, Again

By Wilfred Reilly

Saturday, September 05, 2026

 

The world is not coming to an end — again.

 

In October 2025, Microsoft’s Bill Gates — long the worst sort of climate doomsayer — published a lengthy memo explaining that, while global climate change is real, “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” According to Gates, the “doomsday view of climate change” that says it “will decimate civilization . . . is wrong. . . . People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

 

The desktop baron argues for reevaluating temperature targets, writing that strict focus on near-term temperature and emissions goals is an imperfect measure of progress. Most important, he now advocates a policy shift toward maximizing “human welfare” and human flourishing — shifting much of the absurdly inflated climate budget toward projects fighting disease, famine, and poverty itself. In summary, the climate problem exists, but the cutting-edge view today is that it is fairly minor in comparison with other issues and can best be combated by human initiative.

 

Gates’s memo had a familiar ring to it. As I note in my upcoming Broadside/HarperCollins book Confidently Wrong, one of the defining features of upper-middle-class life during the past 50–60 years has been scientists, activists, and public intellectuals making the most horrifying kind of doomsday predictions — which invariably fail to come true. Remember the Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth report?

 

Back in 1972, a group of top academics used then-advanced regression analysis to argue that the planet at some point must run out of key resources. Quite specific dates were provided for this global near-apocalypse. And then not one of the predictions came true. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry noted 40 years later, in his teasingly titled “Time Has Not Been Kind to the Limits to Growth,” the report “got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness.”

 

Because of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture and horticulture, humanity’s food supplies have not collapsed. In fact, Perry reports, “malnourishment has dropped by more than half,” from well over 30 percent of the world population to about 15 percent. “Nor are we choking on pollution,” as electric, hybrid, and even hydrogen vehicles have replaced many of the high-dollar gas hogs of the past. In fact, the annual risk of pollution-caused death has shrunk from one in 500 to one in many thousands since 1900. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their think tank’s focus, the AEI boys argue that the real solution to environmental problems is innovation, driven by “economic growth.”

 

This same lesson — that resources are obviously not infinite but new supplies of them can be found or even grown if we turn to human ingenuity — applies in the case of “peak oil,” perhaps the ultimate recurring boondoggle prediction. As every commodities investor knows, Very Serious People have predicted, on a dozen separate occasions, that the earth is going to run dry of key fossil fuels in the near future. As Forbes notes, peak oil is at some level “grounded in reality.” Oil is “a finite natural resource, produced over a geological timespan, whereas demand continues to climb.” However, given different computer models and continuing exploration by the oil companies, “nobody can quite agree on when we will reach the point of Peak Oil or even what will cause it.”

 

At present, as noted in Forbes, glacier-tapping Norwegian energy giant Equinor predicts a deadline year of 2028. American consulting giant McKinsey, running what strikes me as a better model, guesses 2035 or so. Not until “approximately 2040,” says OPEC. Per British Petroleum (BP), “peak oil [will] not hit until 2050 based on known oil resources with the application of today’s technology. For good measure, the contrarian Saudis — who perhaps look down on new North American resource fields — argue that peak oil has already occurred, as far back as 2006. Meanwhile, new drilling projects, now assisted by AI and vastly better machine technology, launch annually.

 

A piece of this kind could go on almost forever, documenting similar blooper projections huge and small. In the first category, we can recall Paul Ehrlich, whose best-selling The Population Bomb argued, among other things, that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” during the 1970s and 1980s. Entire nations, such as England and India, “would not exist . . . in the year 2000.” Even the United States would experience “water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980,” with perhaps 65 million Yanks starving to death. Of course, none of this happened: Among other things, Ehrlich — a professional quantitative analyst — failed to predict the Green Revolution, feminism and female birth control, anti-natalism, and global mass migration. Oops.

 

Among smaller-scale hysterias, we might place global cooling, “killer bees” and the Great Northerly Migration of invasive species, acid rain, the ozone hole(s), and the “Hammer and the Dance”-era Covid-19 numbers. And, let us never forget one that absolutely terrified me and my girlfriend in high school — the idea that tens of millions of American heterosexuals were in very serious danger of contracting AIDS, from R-rated hook-ups or even peripatetic mosquitoes. Michael Fumento, author of The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, truly did God’s work by helping dispel this last largely false panic.

 

Quite a list. So: How, explicitly and exactly, did all of these proposed past apocalypses come to not end the world?

 

Well, in many cases, the initial numbers involved were simply wrong. Scientists (for example) rashly included a worst-case-scenario doomsday prediction in a serious paper, reporters focused on that one model when drawing up the headlines for major stories (“If it bleeds, it leads!”), and society wound up down-road with someone like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying that old Mum Earth has just “twelve years left.” This was likely the Club of Rome’s problem: Bad inputs or regressions inevitably produce bad outputs. GIGO, as they say in IT.

 

The other possibility is equally common and in fact more hopeful: human beings came together to fairly easily solve a real-enough problem. This is what happened with the ozone hole — R.I.P. to effective “CFC” hairspray and the big-haired ladies of the 1980s and 1990s — and what archetypally happened to resolve the “Y2K” problem. In 1999, “some Americans stocked up on food, water, and guns in anticipation of a computer-induced apocalypse.” But “years of behind-the-scenes work” by computer programmers and other wonks had already changed 99 percent of all potentially dangerous code, and nothing of note occurred . . . again.

 

Something very close to this latter scenario will almost certainly happen with climate change. More than a dozen U.S. companies manufacture excellent seawalls, some of them miles long. If global saltwater levels really do begin to rise, the leaders of beach-front cities are not just going to stare dully at the incoming waves until they drown.

 

You are not going to die (from some epic disaster). Start living like it.

The Apocalyptic Style in Woke Thinking

By Jonathan Chait

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

Greta Thunberg was detained last month in Germany, during a sit-in at a munitions factory that sells weapons to Israel. She was wearing a Yalla Intifada T-shirt. Perhaps you thought Thunberg was a climate activist. She used to be. Thunberg gained fame by warning that greenhouse-gas emissions posed a threat to human life so urgent and existential that the world must put aside trifling concerns to solve it immediately. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is,” she told the World Economic Forum in 2019. But someone else will have to put out the fire, because these days, Thunberg is possibly the planet’s most famous anti-Israel protester.

 

Much of the climate movement—particularly its most radical elements—has pivoted to Palestine. The Climate Justice Alliance, Extinction Rebellion, and Climate Defiance, among other green organizations, participate regularly in Free Palestine demonstrations. Most of the campus groups that were previously organized around demanding that their universities divest from fossil-fuel companies now demand that they divest from companies that do business with Israel. The same holds true across swaths of the left. Activists who previously treated racial justice, public health, or trans rights as the cause of a lifetime have determined that Gaza is now the cause of their lifetime.

 

Some of the pre-Gaza activism yielded tangible successes. Climate activists, for example, built a movement that persuaded Democrats to make their cause the party’s highest legislative priority, which is why the Biden administration expended so much effort passing green-energy subsidies. These gains were temporary: Donald Trump proceeded to repeal most of those policies. But instead of continuing to try to put out the blaze, many activists have simply moved on.

 

The draining of energy away from issues that once seemed so urgent has been slightly disorienting, even humorous. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently repeated a catchphrase that has circulated on the left, “Woke 1 was crazy,” which simultaneously laughs off the excesses of the social-justice left while implicitly assuming that a Woke 2 is just around the corner. The reality, however, is that Woke 2 is already here, and Gaza is its current preoccupation.

 

Woke 2 exhibits nearly all of the same behaviors as its predecessor—the fervent demands that society concentrate all of its attention on an apocalyptic crisis, the importation of academic jargon, and the reshaping of the social relationships and everyday decisions of its adherents.

 

To see these characteristics reappear in a completely different context from their original incarnation casts the woke phenomenon in sharp relief. Wokeness is not concern about a particular issue or issues, or even an ideology. It is, instead, a political style, a form of apocalyptic obsession that is serially fixated on different issues, waxing and waning in intensity. It offers the comfort of Manichaean morality—telling adherents that they alone can see the world in its true horror. But what it doesn’t offer, by design, is any practical resolution.

 

***

 

Unlike what the historian Richard Hofstadter once called “the paranoid style in American politics,” which dwelled on imaginary plots, the woke apocalyptic style concerns itself with actual social crises. Greenhouse-gas emissions really do pose a threat to posterity. Israel really has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians. Racism and police brutality, and the coronavirus pandemic—two other causes that inspired apocalyptic forms of activism—were likewise anything but a figment of the left’s imagination.

 

So what distinguishes the woke apocalyptic style from the understandable urgency one would expect activists to feel about any important social problem? The mindset has three defining traits.

 

First, its adherents gravitate toward the purest version of whatever position they select. They are facing down not just climate change, police bias, or a pandemic, but human extinction, racism, eugenics, and other existential perils. Only questions that can be reduced to a pure conflict between good and evil interest them. They generally reject any nuanced view of these issues as an effort to distract from the question at hand and drain the necessary moral fervor (though they prefer to call it “moral clarity.”) Beliefs they themselves held until very recently can become not just wrong but so abhorrent that anybody still endorsing them must be shunned.

 

A 2024 New York profile of the former Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, a seminal figure in both Woke 1 and Woke 2, explained his newfound focus on Palestine as a product of the revelation that the issue was actually quite simple. The profile frames this aspect of his thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in vivid terms: “That it was complicated, he now understood, was ‘horseshit.’ ‘Complicated’ was how people had described slavery and then segregation. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said, ‘when you want to take something from somebody.’”

 

Second, as a way of counterbalancing its tendency toward serial fixations, woke apocalypticism frequently asserts that every worthy cause is linked. During the 2014 protests against police abuse, Free Palestine activists persuaded racial-justice activists that their causes were the same. When COVID-19 seized the attention of the protest community, these same activists emphasized the racial-injustice aspect of the pandemic. “Palestinian Liberation is a disability justice issue,” the “People’s CDC,” a left-wing public-health group, has proclaimed. In the green activist community, the slogan “There is no climate justice without Palestinian liberation” has become almost a ritual incantation.

 

In June, trans-rights activists chased California State Senator Scott Wiener from a trans-rights rally, screaming, “You do not belong here,” because they deemed his position on Israel unacceptably Zionist. (Wiener has accused Israel of “genocide” and called for cutting off U.S. aid for offensive weapons, but continues to support Israel’s right to exist.) All political coalitions try to emphasize links among single-issue activists, but it is nearly impossible to imagine, say, a Republican legislator being ejected from an anti-abortion rally because he supported a gun-control law.

 

The substantive basis for linking every cause together ranges from tenuous (the pandemic did harm minorities somewhat disproportionately) to nonexistent (Palestinian liberation has no bearing on climate change whatsoever). Yet insisting on a relationship upholds the bonds of solidarity among single-issue organizations, giving them permission to operate outside their domain and pursue whatever cause is presently animating their supporters. And it reinforces a sense of omnicrisis, that their project is not a series of discrete policy changes but the healing of a broken world.

 

The third characteristic of this activism is that its demands are irresolvable. The crisis is perceived as literally existential, a form of damnation that a response as small as legislation cannot dispel. Many racial-justice activists have directed their energy into tarring the United States as the sinful product of colonialism and slavery—a diagnosis that, while containing elements of truth, offers little practical redress. Unlike Marxism’s postrevolutionary paradise, woke politics has no end point beyond despair.

 

The Biden administration tried to address racial justice and climate change, two causes that preoccupied left-wing activists at the time of the 2020 election. Yet the impressive array of legislative and executive steps designed to advance both causes did nothing to placate activists, who by 2024 had decided that Gaza was all that mattered. They were not wrong to care deeply about the suffering in Gaza, but the amnesiac way in which they dropped causes that they had very recently proclaimed to be matters of literal life and death suggests that their stated motives cannot be taken purely at face value.

 

What seems to propel these activists is not the specific issue that at any given moment is causing them to feel—as Thunberg once demanded in response to the climate crisis—panic and fear, but instead the need to experience these sensations constantly.

 

***

 

Woke 1 was a tidal wave that crashed over blue America. Nearly anybody who resided in a deep-blue space—academia, publishing, Hollywood, the arts, news media, nonprofits—experienced an onslaught of new terminology and rituals. Some of this (land acknowledgments, for example) has survived as a sort of residue. Other elements (Robin DiAngelo) have receded into embarrassing memory.

 

Woke 2, so far, is more of a ripple. Opposition to Israel has long held a place in the firmament of left-wing causes, but it reached preeminence only after October 7, 2023. A network of pro-Palestinian student activist groups sprang into action immediately after the attack, which they characterized as an act of liberatory defiance. The key dynamic that enabled their cause to expand beyond committed anti-Zionists was the intensity and duration of Israel’s response to October 7, which played directly into the attackers’ goal of creating a humanitarian crisis that would turn Israel into a pariah, elevating opposition to its very existence into a social cause.

 

The cultural manifestation of this movement is most evident in progressive capitals such as San Francisco and New York City. In June, a Brooklyn coffee shop announced on social media that Dan Goldman, a Democratic member of Congress, was a “genocide enabler” and no longer welcome there. The most recent cover story of New York putatively celebrates the coolness of the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) community, but defines it in ideological, not ethnic, terms. “To be in SWANA community,” it states, “meant embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns.”

 

A companion article describes how this dynamic has seeped into the dining scene. “In the three years since October 7, awareness of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the wars that keep proliferating have turned eating out into just one more way people are expressing their views on Israel, on Gaza, on Lebanon, on Iran.” It reports that one Middle Eastern restaurateur’s “decision not to speak or post about the war publicly has left many fans of his restaurants Miss Ada and Theodora confused about where he stands,” as if café owners, like presidential candidates, should be expected to articulate a foreign policy.

 

In political terms, Woke 1 had a profound effect on the Democratic Party. Demands by activists and staffers pushed candidates to adopt left-wing positions on crime, immigration, trans rights, and climate change that placed them out of step with the majority of the electorate. Woke 2 has had a similar effect, providing left-wing activists with a tool to discredit mainstream Democrats.

 

The movement’s insistence on calling Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians a “genocide” is its most important demand. Scholars do not agree on what this term means or whether it applies to Israel’s conduct, and resolving the question is unnecessary to establish a consensus that Israel’s response to October 7 was excessively punitive, or even that its military has violated the laws of warfare. But the tactic of demanding that Democrats label the conflict a genocide, and treating anybody who refuses as complicit in the murder of children, is not aimed at exposing supporters of Israel’s policy. It instead targets liberals who have traditionally viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a cycle of violence for which both sides bear responsibility. Describing the conflict as a genocide frames the problem not as a matter of shared guilt and shared responsibility to compromise, but as the straightforward oppression of an innocent people by a guilty one.

 

The term brings together the perspective of Palestinian nationalists, who see Israel as a source of unique evil in the world, with the apocalyptic left’s orientation toward generalized despair. The left-wing writer Noah Berlatsky recently argued  not only that the case that Israel had committed genocide was “open and shut,” but also that genocide is a routine occurrence. Other examples include British treatment of trans people (“The UK is moving towards, or already in process of committing, a genocide against trans and intersex people”) and Elon Musk’s cuts to USAID.

 

Leftists have discovered that requiring the term is a useful way to discredit Democrats who oppose them on other issues. “This is a moral Rorschach test,” the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said during his primary campaign in Michigan. “If you can’t identify the systematic murder of tens of thousands of kids as a genocide, and then you want to say that you’re a fighter for human rights and dignity, that’s just hypocrisy.”

 

Democrats who refuse to embrace the movement’s preferred term are, by and large, those who hold more nuanced positions on other issues. The demand to use the term genocide has broad application as an ideological sorting device. David Purucker, a sociology graduate student at the University of Oregon and a Democratic Socialists of America activist, recently illuminated the dynamic on a podcast from the centrist Niskanen Center. “And then just on the Palestine question, even though it’s not super salient to the broad Democratic electorate, it is, I think, is a really powerful signal of who is willing to take on the most sort of powerful parts of the establishment and really fight for the economic issues that are your priority,” he said. “I guess the sort of mental process would be like, Okay, if this person isn’t willing to call it a genocide in Gaza, how can I trust them really to stand up to the health-insurance lobby, for example?”

 

The Nation’s president, Bhaskar Sunkara, also a DSA member, likewise told Ross Douthat on a New York Times podcast that Gaza is “being used to separate Democrats who are committed to an old political establishment, including the foreign-policy establishment, and Democrats who are better.”

 

The Palestinian-nationalist movement has long sought to place Israel in a special category of evil. The woke apocalyptic left has assimilated many concepts and terms from that struggle, but its interest in the subject is slightly different. It uses the issue to affirm the pervasive horror of the modern world. Berlatsky’s Substack is titled, fittingly, Everything Is Horrible.

 

***

 

Despite the effort by some leftists to shrug off the craziness of the Woke 1 era, several left-wing candidates who have benefited from the energy of Woke 2 have found themselves haunted by their Woke 1 messaging. El-Sayed, the former candidate for Wisconsin governor Francesca Hong, and Democratic House candidates Darializa Chevalier of New York and William Lawrence of Michigan have all had to explain away or apologize for social-media posts using the left-wing academic jargon that was in vogue half a decade ago, some of them endorsing abolition of the police, Thanksgiving, or other well-liked institutions.

 

Any movement built on anti-Zionism as an organizing principle will tend to attract anti-Semites.When the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn elevated a left-wing faction that was similarly motivated by intense anti-Zionism, it resulted in “a culture within the Party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it,” a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission found. The Democratic Party might be facing an equally grim future, in which what happened to Weiner and Goldman—experiences that Jewish liberals have had with increasing frequency since October 7—grows routine.

 

But there is also reason to expect, or at least hope for, a more constructive outcome. Woke 2 has generated fewer cancellations, firings, and acts of terrified self-censorship. There is no 2026 Harper’s letter defending the right of intellectuals to openly debate Israel, because such a letter is not necessary.

 

Perhaps this is because progressives have learned from their past censoriousness. Perhaps even they find it too implausible to claim that exposure to contrary beliefs about a conflict on the other side of the globe is a form of harm from which they require protection. Or maybe progressive institutions are simply too split over the morality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for woke activists to easily impose a new consensus and ostracize all dissenters. Whatever the explanation, Woke 2, with a handful of exceptions, has taken the form not of a silencing campaign but of a debate—angry and frequently stupid, but engaged in energetically.

 

In an atmosphere that permits deliberation, rage may give way to reason. Liberal supporters of Israel may concede to the Free Palestine movement that Israel’s current government has no strategy other than endless use of force, that it has willingly enabled settlers to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank, and that American policy has done too little to alter these choices. The Palestine activists might be made to acknowledge that the carnage in Gaza would not have occurred but for Hamas’s desire to murder as many Israeli Jews as possible, and that the group deliberately maximizes deaths among Palestinian civilians by embedding their fighters in schools and hospitals.

 

In other words, the Middle East is complicated. Bringing the moralistic fervor of Western progressives entirely onto one side of a generations-long conflict between warring religious sects claiming mutually exclusive historical and divinely granted rights to control a sliver of land is unlikely to result in peaceful coexistence.

 

Pro-Palestinian activists are correct to argue that American support has enabled Israel to pursue a one-state solution and to rely on military force in place of diplomacy. What they have yet to grasp is that the Western left’s inability to repudiate Hamas has had a pernicious effect on the conflict: reinforcing a co-belligerent in a cycle of violence. The American civil-rights movement is not, in fact, the proper moral lens with which to understand a terrorist group that murders not only Jewish civilians but also dissident Palestinians, and whose objective is not the right to vote and sit at lunch counters but to impose sectarian theocracy. An effective and humane Western form of activism would recognize that disregard for Palestinian well-being is a trait shared by Hamas and Israel, and would challenge both accordingly.

 

The American influence on this intractable conflict can be exercised more constructively. What Middle East policy cannot accomplish—what no reforms in any policy domain can accomplish—is resolving the existential angst caused by a political style that cannot tolerate moral ambiguity.

 

 

How Bad Policy Fuels Wildfires

By Jason Hayes

Saturday, July 25, 2026

 

People throughout the Midwest and many Eastern states were recently reacquainted with the consequences of poor forest management as smoke from Canadian wildfires filled the skies. Green activists leaped into action, claiming that climate change is driving North American wildfires to dangerous new levels and that we must forgo essential energy sources such as fossil fuels to stop the smoke. But the inevitable results of their policies — higher taxes and a crippled economy — won’t stop wildfires, and they certainly won’t change the climate.

 

That’s because a changing climate isn’t the source of these wildfires. For the most part, people and lightning are.

 

Whatever its source, fire plays a natural and important role in forest ecosystems. It reduces “fuel loading” by removing dead and diseased trees and plants, clearing out densely treed areas, creating new openings, and renewing plant communities that provide vital habitat and browse for wildlife.

 

But fire can also be destructive and dangerous, especially when it threatens human lives and infrastructure. We saw this recently when wildfire smoke caused Detroit to experience the “worst air quality in the world.”

 

Over the past several decades, forest management practices have created the perfect conditions for large fires and greater risks to human health and well-being. Regulations governing the use of public lands have created a one-two punch: preservationist policies that lock people out of the natural environment and Smokey Bear-style efforts to extinguish every fire immediately.

 

The move to keep people out of natural areas was based on the mistaken notion that humans are inherently destructive. It led to vast areas of public lands being closed off and designated “untrammeled” wilderness. Human activities, such as cutting trees or mining for critical minerals, were made taboo by moneyed and powerful environmental groups. Though public lands were originally set aside for multiple uses, these groups would only approve low-impact activities, such as hiking.

 

At the same time, we compounded the problem by adopting the strategy of immediately extinguishing every wildfire and building more homes and businesses in the “wildland urban interface.” By banning the wise use of public lands and forests while continuing to live in and around them, we have enabled the fuels that feed wildfires — dead and dying trees, shrubs, and grasses — to accumulate. Consequently, when a fire hits, the damage can be expensive. (For example, see California earlier this year.)

 

This year, as in 2023, warm, dry conditions mixed with tens of thousands of lightning strikes in Canadian forests to ignite the wildfires that choked our skies with smoke and ash. Natural Resources Canada (NRC) and the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System reported that, as of July 22, roughly 900 active fires were burning, while more than 3,900 fires had burned approximately 8.2 million acres so far this year. Firefighters have responded heroically and the situation remains serious. The NRC’s weekly report for July 15 predicted “continued fire growth” as “hot and dry weather and lightning” continue to pressure many provinces.

 

In comparison, the United States is experiencing a busy but not record-breaking season. As of mid-July, the National Interagency Coordination Center reported 72 large active fires, with more than 21,000 firefighters assigned to fight the over 41,000 wildfires that have burned more than 3.9 million acres so far this year.

 

The reports coming out of Canada are undeniably concerning. However, while media figures and activists argue that the wildfires prove the existence of an existential climate threat, it’s important to remember that fire seasons like this are not unprecedented. We have seen similar reports before. North America experienced much larger fires and more intense temperatures long before we became concerned about potential human influence on the climate.

 

The 1825 Miramichi Fire, for example, burned 3 million acres across New England. In October 1871,  the Peshtigo Fire, described as “the most devastating forest fire in American history” by the National Weather Service, burned 1.5 million acres across northeastern Wisconsin and killed over 1,200 people. On the “Dark Day” — May 19, 1780 — thick smoke from massive fires in the Canadian province of Ontario turned day into night across New England. Frightened Connecticut legislators at the time believed that the smoke “signified the Day of Judgment.”

 

Green activists will argue that solving the wildfire challenge requires abandoning essential energy sources such as gasoline and natural gas. But decades of on-the-ground experience tell a different story. The most effective methods of mitigating wildfire damage involve basic management techniques.

 

First, scale up fuel-reduction activities, especially near human communities and infrastructure, and focus on proactive management rather than reactive fire suppression.

 

Second, streamline permit approvals to encourage active forest management and allow activities such as harvesting, spacing, thinning, and the reintroduction of prescribed fire into forest ecosystems. This will allow these essential management activities to take place under controlled conditions, creating jobs and encouraging the use of renewable forest products.

 

Finally, ground forest management in silviculture, related forest sciences, and long-term fire regimes rather than green feelings and anti-human sentiment. Sticking to the green plans that discourage the use of forest products, lock people out of the natural environment, and prioritize the reduction of CO₂ — which, as we all learned in grade school science, is plant food — will address only the symptoms, not the underlying causes.

Red State Freedom Is Better for the Environment Than European Green Socialism

By Drew Bond

Sunday, July 19, 2026

 

Here is a fact that should embarrass every climate activist: States with the most liberated energy markets in America are producing better environmental outcomes than the green mandators of Europe — and doing it without impoverishing their people in the process.

 

Freedom, it turns out, is a remarkably effective environmental policy.

 

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. For decades, Europe has proclaimed itself the vanguard of the environmental movement. Germany’s Energiewende — its sweeping top-down energy transition initiated in 2010 — was announced as the model every serious nation should follow. Germany shut down its nuclear plants, poured money into mandated renewables, and staked its future on wind generation in the North Sea and solar pulled from its perennially cloudy skies.

 

Germany does not stand alone. The U.K.’s Renewables Obligation scheme mandated aggressive renewable targets and layered green levies directly onto consumer bills. The Netherlands passed a legally binding Climate Act in 2019, committing to mandatory emissions reduction targets. Denmark required 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030. With few exceptions, European nations liberally used the heavy hand of the state to force an energy transition and “de-carbonize” their economies.

 

The results were staggering — and painful.

 

Denmark’s mandates drove household electricity prices to among the highest in Europe. The Netherlands backed down from its emission targets after a revolt from the nation’s farmers. And Germany, formerly the beating industrial heart of the continent, is becoming a manufacturing backwater. German households already pay among the highest electricity prices in the developed world. Now, industrial giants like BASF are relocating production out of Germany, citing uncompetitive energy costs, and energy-intensive production in Germany dropped over 15 percent from February 2022 to March 2026. Across the continent, the EU lost over 850,000 manufacturing jobs in four years.

 

The net impact is not environmental progress, but environmental arbitrage. When European factories close, production does not disappear. It moves — overwhelmingly to China, which generates more than 60 percent of its electricity from coal and has emitted more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world combined. Factory closures in Germany or Poland may cheer anti-industrial environmentalists, but only because they don’t see those factories reopen in Shenzhen or Guangzhou.

 

Thus, in return for economically immiserating their own people, Europe has not solved climate change. It has only outsourced it.

 

Americans are rightly perplexed by fatalistic Europeans who would rather endure unemployment, skyrocketing cost of living, and summers without air conditioning than accept marginally higher national emissions numbers. And Europeans can’t understand Americans who don’t take the “climate crisis” seriously.

 

In reality, Americans have always cared about the environment. We simply understand that enduring pain is not the same as being effective.

 

In America, we made incredible environmental gains with a growing economy thanks to the power of the market. As of last September, American carbon emissions dropped 20 percent since 2005. At the same time, from the mid-2000s U.S. energy consumption remained steady for nearly two decades until it surged to record highs in 2024 and 2025 largely due to AI data center investments.

 

American emissions didn’t decline because California and Massachusetts out-Europed Europe, using mandates to make up for the rest of the country’s pollution. Rather, America is improving the environment thanks to a red-state energy revolution led by natural gas — which is replacing higher-emitting coal — with a little help from wind, solar, and batteries. Natural gas is the clear driving force behind this progress, but since many climate activists don’t view natural gas as green, let’s focus on wind and solar, where red states are still beating the greens at their own game.

 

Four of the top five states for total wind, solar, and battery energy generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are Republican states. Texas alone produced almost twice as much solar and wind energy as California. More than two-thirds of America’s added solar capacity in 2025 was built in states that voted for President Donald Trump, and 85 percent of clean-energy investments under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act headed to Republican districts despite every congressional Republican opposing the legislation. Green energy is flourishing in red-state America.

 

It’s no paradox. Ask any developer, and they will tell you why: Republican jurisdictions have lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a much more welcoming business environment. Republican states have renewable energy not because regulators demanded it, but because people had the freedom to build it.

 

Call it Econ 101. In a free market, producers naturally deliver the most energy at the lowest price to win the most dollars from consumers. Where that energy comes from doesn’t matter nearly as much as how much it costs. And red states would do even more if the federal government didn’t hold them back — the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) ironically stifles renewable energy more than it does oil and gas.

 

Europe spent two decades proving that mandates impoverish people without saving the planet. At the same time, red states built wind farms, pipelines, solar arrays, and refineries by embracing the free market. The result is the most dynamic energy market on earth — and one that is getting cleaner every year.

 

This prompts a question for climate activists: Is it progress you want, or propaganda?

 

If the answer is progress, there’s never been a better time in history to embrace the power of freedom. It’s a win-win for people and the planet.

Why Europe’s Green Entrepreneurial State Went Bust

By Johan Norberg & Christian Sandström

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

 

France, Estonia, the Netherlands, and Finland are concerned about the European Union’s intention to exclude green investments from its spending rules, according to recent reports. Concern is understandable: Taking the leash off more green “investments” is a recipe for sky-high spending, and six years into the EU’s Green Deal, it has become clearer than ever that this combination of environmental legislation and green subsidies has been detrimental for the continent’s already struggling economy.

 

“This is Europe’s man-on-the-moon moment,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared at the launch of the EU’s Green Deal in 2020. Today, that moonshot looks less like Apollo 11 and more like the Soviet N1 rocket: grand ambitions and vast resources, but no successful launch.

 

Europe’s economic decline is becoming difficult to ignore. Only four of the world’s 50 largest technology companies are European. Productivity growth has lagged far behind the United States over the past decade. In Germany, nuclear plants have been shuttered while policymakers doubled down on weather-dependent energy sources such as wind and solar. European electricity prices are roughly twice those in the United States, while German industry buckles under soaring energy costs.

 

Few intellectuals have been more influential in shaping the EU’s green agenda than Mariana Mazzucato of University College London. Her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State argued that the state has a critical role in innovation and that policymakers should actively intervene in the economy to spur development.

 

Mazzucato has become one of Europe’s most prominent advocates for an activist industrial policy. Through advisory roles, reports to the European Commission, and her various responsibilities in EU policymaking, she helped shape the thinking behind the Green Deal. Mazzucato has argued that Germany’s energy transition was a good model for how to promote “technical change and growth across different sectors.”

 

But the results of Mazzucato’s theories have been meager. The Green Deal promised technological leadership, strategic autonomy, and industrial revival. Increasingly, however, it has delivered deindustrialization, fiscal burdens, and failed prestige projects.

 

Electrification — the central promise of Europe’s green transition — is barely advancing. European electricity production has declined over the past decade. In Germany, electricity generation has fallen sharply since 2014 as industrial activity weakens and energy-intensive sectors contract.

 

Last year Spain suffered one of the worst blackouts in modern European history after years of rapid expansion in intermittent power generation. Meanwhile, the hydrogen boom championed by European policymakers has largely collapsed. Former EU climate commissioner Frans Timmermans once called hydrogen the “rock star” of the green transition. But last year, almost 60 major hydrogen projects worldwide were canceled or delayed despite massive subsidies and  political support from Brussels.

 

Europe’s battery ambitions have fared little better. Northvolt, the Swedish battery champion that secured billions in subsidies and green loans, was intended to be Europe’s answer to Chinese dominance. Instead, its collapse became one of the largest bankruptcies in modern Swedish history.

 

The fundamental problem behind the EU’s green-energy experimentation is an intellectual one. Policymakers embraced the idea that governments should behave like venture capitalists — taking bold risks, directing capital, and actively shaping markets. In theory, this sounds dynamic and visionary; that’s one reason why industrial policy ideas are resurgent in the United States, on both the progressive left and the MAGA right. But if Europe’s experience tells us anything, it’s that such policies carry a long and disappointing track record.

 

Industrial policy advocates spend much time discussing market failures, yet they are curiously blind to government failures. Markets have a built-in correction mechanism called bankruptcy; industrial policy has a built-in survival mechanism called lobbying. Politicians naturally gravitate toward projects that generate headlines, ribbon-cuttings, and grand rhetoric. In practice, the long-term technical and economic viability of those projects often becomes secondary.

 

Easy access to subsidies, public guarantees, and cheap loans encourage firms to become subsidy entrepreneurs rather than competitive businesses. When taxpayers absorb much of the downside risk, excessive risk-taking becomes rational — and moral hazard flourishes.

 

There is also a broader political danger. Large industrial-policy programs create fertile ground for rent-seeking and the gradual fusion of political and corporate interests. The result is less a dynamic market economy and more a subsidy-driven system shaped by political access.

 

Mazzucato is now promoting a new book, The Common Good Economy, which advances many of the same themes that influenced the Green Deal. Once again, expansive political ambitions are wrapped in morally elevated language while fundamental questions go unanswered.

 

The common good sounds desirable, but who gets to decide what it consists of? How do we measure whether we are achieving it? And how do we ensure that capital can quickly be redirected to other ventures if green-energy efforts don’t show signs of success?

 

The EU’s green vision constitutes a top-down vision of the state that replaces the decentralized wisdom of millions of entrepreneurs and consumers with the ideological preferences of a few people at the top — people who do not risk losing their money if their decisions result in failure. And, as Thomas Sowell noted, there is no more dangerous way to make decisions than to put them in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

 

By bypassing difficult trade-offs and subsidizing the politically connected, the EU’s invocation of the “common good” in green-energy conversations is often little more than cronyism with better branding.

 

Europe urgently needs a more sober conversation about energy, industrial policy, and economic growth. Americans, meanwhile, should take this fiasco as a reminder that flawed policy does not become sound simply because Americans run it.

Europe’s Deadly Aversion to Air-Conditioning

National Review Online

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

Europe’s perennial climate panic has led to countless acts of economic and geopolitical self-harm, but for outright stupidity and life-threatening recklessness, the efforts by its governments to discourage air-conditioning are hard to beat.

 

AC, a product of American ingenuity, has been spreading across this country since the middle years of the past century. The boost that it has given, especially in hotter, more humid states, to livability, safety, and productivity has been a triumph. About 90 percent of U.S. households now have some form of AC, a level roughly comparable to Japan’s, although we lag South Korea. It’s a sign of the times that China is now home to more AC equipment than anywhere else and that demand for these marvelous devices is surging in India, too, albeit from a low base.

 

In Europe, however, AC is harder to find, with a penetration rate of somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, a number that masks higher rates in some of its more southerly countries. This lower take-up owes a great deal to the temperate climate that had prevailed in much of it, and quite a bit to the buildings that survive from that era. Old, grand architecture and AC are not always an easy fit. A certain snobbish/jealous disdain for the comforts of American life has also played its part. And so have electricity prices that are significantly higher than on this side of the Atlantic.

 

This expensive electricity is, in no small part, a consequence of the devotion of the European ruling class (and, regrettably, of quite a few of their subjects) to the “race” to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a race as reckless as it is futile. Participating in it has meant that European governments have made it unnecessarily difficult to install AC. Their explanation is that generating additional electricity for extra AC will mean more greenhouse gas emissions.

 

That said, a glance at France casts some doubt on that excuse. French authorities have been among the noisiest in their opposition to easier access to air-conditioning, yet roughly 70 percent of France’s electricity comes from “clean” nuclear power. There are also genuine fears that succumbing to the extra demand for AC would strain Europe’s struggling electricity grids, although such worries have not stood in the way of the campaign to bully or bribe Europeans into electric vehicles. Needless to say, a key cause of the pressure on European grids has been the billions devoted to “renewables” at the expense of the continent’s electric grid and more efficient power generation. Malinvestment is what it is.

 

That the aversion to AC should be so strong on a continent that prides itself (not always accurately) on its sense of history ought to embarrass Europeans more than it does. Humanity’s advance — there are now more than 8 billion of us spread across the globe, flourishing as never before — is a living monument to our ingenuity and to our adaptability. It is reasonable to expect that those same qualities will enable us to cope with a warming planet without abandoning the economic growth that has taken our species so far.

 

But climate panic is hostile to such thinking. Mitigating man-made climate change was always going to take time and, in all probability, technologies that either do not yet exist or are not yet ready for prime time. In the interim, we will, as in the past, have to adapt — in this case to higher temperatures, among other changes. The good news is that air-conditioning is available to play a critical role in the adaptation. If Europe’s people want to use more of it (many seem to), their governments should get out of the way. To argue otherwise makes almost as much sense as telling people who are waiting for a bus in the rain not to unfurl their umbrellas because a bus shelter will be built in due course.

 

Except this is a life-and-death issue, especially given Europe’s aging population.

 

Numbers are, as in so many areas where climate is concerned, disputed, but roughly 2,000 Americans a year die of heat-related causes, compared with an estimated 24,400 deaths in Europe’s urbanized areas in 2025 (there are other, significantly higher estimates of the toll in Europe). Much of that discrepancy can be attributed to inadequate AC. It is a striking reminder that climate policies can be more deadly than climate change.

The Lasting Consequences of Bad Climate Science

By Roger Pielke Jr.

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

 

Major energy and climate decisions of the past 15 years—what infrastructure to build, what risks financial regulators require banks to stress test against, how the projected costs associated with the emissions of a ton of carbon dioxide inform regulations—rested on a foundation that is now officially obsolete. Scenarios shape nearly everything in climate policy. But very few people outside a small technical community understand why they matter or who controls them.

 

A reference scenario—also known as a baseline or business as usual—is used to project where the world is headed unless we choose to change course. Other scenarios build off the baseline to illustrate how the world might look if decision-makers implement policies that alter that expected trajectory. The differences between the baseline and the policy scenarios are typically used to assess the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action.

 

In April, the only three officially recognized baseline scenarios in international climate research—RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0—were judged by the international scientific committee that selects and prioritizes scenarios to be “implausible” due to their overprojection of future emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. While the fact that our expectations for future emissions have come down is welcome news, the consequences of the scenarios’ retirement will be profound, and that is the focus of today’s column.

 

A climate scenario does not forecast the future. It is a structured “what if” exercise: explicit, internally consistent assumptions about variables like population growth, economic development, how we produce and use energy, and the extent to which greenhouse gas emissions and other outcomes result from human and natural factors. The results of that exercise are inputs into earth system models, which project how temperatures, sea levels, and extreme weather might change in the future. Policymakers, regulators, and courts then act on those projections and the policy and economics work that builds from them.

 

A small network of researchers, operating under the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)—an initiative of the World Climate Research Programme—decides which scenarios the modeling groups use and how they are prioritized in research. Once a scenario is developed and prioritized, it is then used in almost all projection-based research that is analyzed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). National climate assessments, central bank stress tests, lawsuits, and infrastructure design standards can depend to a significant degree on this research and the IPCC findings.

 

But everything changed in April, when the CMIP published a new scenario framework, known as CMIP7, for the next IPCC assessment report. RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0—the three scenarios that served as the body’s official reference scenarios across two IPCC assessment cycles spanning almost two decades—are gone, having been judged to be no longer consistent with the real world, especially in their energy technology assumptions. Here are five of the most significant implications.

 

Climate projections need recalibration.

 

National climate assessments in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all used either RCP8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathways) or SSP5-8.5 (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) as their reference scenario. So did the World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which supplies climate projections to more than 100 client countries. The reference scenarios were the basis for more than a decade of climate impact projections; those projections informed planning assumptions embedded in national energy and infrastructure policy.

 

The primary driver of the overprojection was a coal assumption. RCP8.5 assumed a five-fold expansion of global coal use—more coal than the planet’s proven reserves contain—and assumed commercial deployment of coal-to-liquid technology to replace oil at a scale never achieved anywhere on Earth. The now-retired reference scenarios projected about 5 degrees Celsius global temperature increase by 2100.

 

Initial projections of the new medium scenario suggest about 2.5 to 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming by the late century. That gap between 2.5 and what we previously expected—about 5 degrees Celsius of warming—is huge. Recalibrating national assessments to reflect actual trajectories will be both important and difficult.

 

Scenarios used in policy need explicit plausibility evaluations.

 

The retirement of the implausible reference scenarios exposes a structural problem in climate research intended to inform policy: For 15 years, the scientific community ran climate projections against scenarios whose energy assumptions failed a basic plausibility test, with no systematic process to catch or correct what we have known is a major flaw in scenario design.

 

The committee attributes the retirement to “trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends,” framing implausibility as something that developed over time. That framing reverses the actual history, which was well documented by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi almost a decade ago.

 

Reasonable people can disagree about where to set a high-end stress test scenario to explore the robustness of policies and infrastructure in the event of low-probability, high-impact outcomes. Different scenario users will have different risk tolerances and other perspectives on how to create a “worst-case” scenario. However, the CMIP7 high scenario—an exploratory scenario at the top of their scenario set—still assumes a massive increase in coal consumption, which may once again be implausible. Whether anyone checks the scenarios for plausibility remains as opaque as ever.

 

The economics of climate impacts need to be reconsidered.

 

The longtime reference scenarios’ retirement forces a reconsideration of the projected impacts of climate change. Damage projections rely on warming projections, which are built upon reference scenarios.

 

Projected damages will necessarily be substantially lower under realistic scenarios, all else equal—a world warming by 2.7 degrees Celsius will produce a different outcome than one rising by 5 degrees Celsius. The quantity of emissions that require mitigation is also much lower than the old baselines assumed, with corresponding implications for the projected costs of deep decarbonization from the projected baselines. Similarly, social cost of carbon estimates embedded in federal regulation and damage functions in financial risk frameworks need revision.

 

The Paris Agreement targets should be revisited.

 

Another consequence of the new set of CMIP7 scenarios is the elimination of the scenario consistent with the Paris Agreement’s stretch goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial values by 2100. The World Climate Research Programme confirmed last month that its new, low-emissions scenario no longer keeps warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

 

More actionable targets exist. For instance, I’ve long argued that a global coal phase-out agreement—including specific dates, verification mechanisms, and real enforcement—holds greater promise for climate policy progress than an aspirational temperature target. Coal accounts for more than 40 percent of all energy sector carbon dioxide emissions. As of 2023, 84 countries had plans to move away from coal, but together they accounted for only about 30 percent of current coal-fired generation. A framework built around coal elimination would be verifiable, negotiable across countries with very different coal dependencies, and directly tied to the emissions reductions that actually move the temperature numbers.

 

Regardless of what new targets are ultimately agreed upon, it is now clear that the world needs new goals in international climate policy.

 

Expect legal challenges.

 

The reference scenarios may have been initially created with scientific research in mind, but they quickly took on important roles in many policy settings. The Network for Greening the Financial System, an international coalition that coordinates climate stress-testing for more than 140 central banks, originally built its “Hot House World” physical risk scenario to be consistent with RCP8.5. That scenario has been used in stress testing at the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of France, and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

 

Any regulation, court judgment, or law grounded in the now-retired scenarios is vulnerable to a court challenge, and that challenge has a basis in mainstream, consensus science.

 

The larger lesson.

 

Policies that hold up across a range of futures make more sense than policies optimized or even based upon a single scenario. Robust decision-making does not require alarming or extreme projections. Prediction is a hard business, but durable energy policy can account for what we do not know. And holding tight to implausible scenarios risks compromising not just scientific integrity but also the trust in scientific institutions that durable climate policy requires if it is to survive over the many decades needed to achieve deep decarbonization.

 

The CMIP made the right call in helping the world to move past implausible scenarios. The difficult work of adjusting projections, renegotiating targets, and working through legal and regulatory consequences now falls to everyone else.