President Donald Trump’s belief that climate change is a gigantic “hoax” — and his willingness to act on that belief by blocking a wide range of constructive actions and withdrawing the U.S. from global efforts to address the problem — has alarmed responsible elected leaders, scientists and environmental organizations across the world.
But the American public? Not as much as many would expect. In polls this year asking Americans to list the nation’s most important problems, the economy, inflation, health care, immigration and crime consistently outranked climate change and related issues.
Part of this is what European media calls the “greenlash”: a chunk of the public realizing that many climate initiatives will make energy and the products it helps produce cost far more after years of being told that the transition would be relatively painless.
But part of this is also another form of “greenlash”: a response to the intellectual incoherence of many activists and their political allies. On the one hand, they warn that the greenhouse gases warming the planet are an existential threat to humanity. But on the other hand, most oppose rapid expansion of nuclear and hydroelectric power — the easiest, most practical and most proven ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Concerns about how to safely dispose of spent nuclear fuel are called overblown by some experts who say addressing the problem is far more a matter of political will than a scientific challenge. Having an electric grid that produces 88% lower greenhouse gas emissions than neighboring nations — which is the case in France, which never joined in the global pullback from nuclear power — would be huge progress. But the waste disposal issue provides a fig leaf to nuclear skeptics.
No such fig leaf exists for those who oppose hydropower. According to a 2022 MIT report, existing hydroelectric power plants in Quebec have so much unused capacity that they could provide the U.S. Northeast with “as much electricity as about 40 large nuclear power plants.” But a proposal to build a 145-mile electricity transmission line from Quebec to the regional electric grid in Maine was rejected after a determined campaign led by environmental organizations and corporations owning huge natural-gas plants.
The corporations were obviously just protecting their bottom lines. But green groups instead offered their historical loathing of hydropower plants for being ugly and “industrial.” You are not hallucinating. The same people who warn that humanity might perish from the Earth because of global warming offer aesthetic objections to an extremely plausible way to head off this peril.
In so doing, they make the catastrophic fallout from climate change that they warn about more likely. As The New Yorker reported in 2024, despite an immense expansion in renewable energy in the first two decades of this century, fossil fuels’ share of global energy supplies during that span only fell a few percentage points — a period in which “global consumption of fossil fuels actually increased by 45%” as the world economy grew.
As the number of terrifying wildfires and extreme storms fueled by warming seas put larger and larger parts of the world at risk, it’s likely that hoax talk fades, increasing the chances for an aggressive, coordinated international response to a daunting threat. But when that time comes, here’s hoping that the dilettante wing of the environmental movement does not remain a core obstacle to rapid progress.