{"id":879350,"date":"2026-06-20T00:14:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T00:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/879350\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T00:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T00:14:14","slug":"heres-what-can-come-next-with-climate-change-fever-finally-breaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/879350\/","title":{"rendered":"Here’s what can come next with climate-change fever finally breaking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Something was conspicuously missing from California\u2019s primary this month. In the state that built its political identity around fighting climate change, the issue barely registered.<\/p>\n

Voters fixated on affordability and housing.\u00a0About 44%\u00a0named the cost of living, jobs and inflation as the state\u2019s most important problem, with just 1% citing climate change.<\/p>\n

Even Tom Steyer, the billionaire who made his name funding <\/a>climate activism,\u00a0ran a campaign\u00a0centered on lowering household costs.<\/p>\n

In America\u2019s greenest state, climate has become a footnote.<\/p>\n

That is no isolated signal. Just days before voters went to the polls, California\u2019s own Air Resources Board voted to hand as much as $4 billion in free allowances to oil refiners and other industrial polluters to ease compliance with the state\u2019s carbon market.<\/p>\n

New York, meanwhile,\u00a0is rewriting its landmark<\/a> climate law, pushing back deadlines and softening its binding 2030 emissions target.<\/p>\n

When the bluest of blue states quietly retreat, it tells you that politicians have concluded voters care more about their wallets than distant climate targets.<\/p>\n

Who, in fact, are still panicking about the climate \u201ccatastrophe\u201d? Fewer and fewer.<\/p>\n

Gallup\u2019s latest survey\u00a0of the world\u2019s most important problems found that the median share of people naming the environment or climate as their country\u2019s top concern was just 3%.<\/p>\n

Economic and governance worries dwarfed it. <\/p>\n

Even the money has moved on: A new Times of London survey<\/a>\u00a0of 200 institutional-fund managers found climate change had tumbled from their No. 1 environmental, social and governance concern to fifth place, behind human health, AI ethics, corruption and corporate conduct.<\/p>\n

How did so many people who were terrified by climate change a few years ago come to care so much less about it? Four reasons.<\/p>\n

First, we remembered the world has many problems.<\/p>\n

After the Cold War, it became fashionable to call climate the last great challenge. It never was.<\/p>\n

COVID, wars, budget deficits, immigration pressures, faltering schools, the uncertainties of artificial intelligence and aging populations straining health and pension systems are all\u00a0legitimate, competing priorities.<\/p>\n

Climate is one item on a long list, not the only line.<\/p>\n

Second, you can cry wolf only so many times. For 50 years we have been fed apocalyptic deadlines.<\/p>\n

One\u00a0peer-reviewed study\u00a0catalogued at least 79 specific doomsday predictions.<\/p>\n

In 2019, King Charles warned that\u00a0we had 18 months\u00a0to save the planet.<\/p>\n

Al Gore told us in 2008 that\u00a0we had 10 years left.<\/p>\n

Those deadlines came and went. Nearly every dramatic prophecy that has reached its expiration date has simply turned out to be wrong, and voters have noticed.<\/p>\n

Third, climate policy is staggeringly expensive and accomplishes remarkably little.<\/p>\n

The world has already spent\u00a0more than $16 trillion\u00a0on climate measures, with promises of hundreds of trillions more.<\/p>\n

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Yet\u00a0a landmark study in Science<\/a>\u00a0examined 1,500 climate policies across 41 countries over two decades and found that only 4% meaningfully cut emissions.<\/p>\n

Together, the entire apparatus reduced global emissions by less than a quarter of 1%.<\/p>\n

In any other field, governments delivering so little for so much would have been thrown out long ago.<\/p>\n

Fourth, the scariest claims are often deeply misleading.<\/p>\n

We are warned that\u00a0rising seas could displace 187 million people, a figure that assumes humanity does nothing for an entire century.<\/p>\n

Once you account for the seawalls and adaptation that people obviously undertake, that estimate of displacement turns out to be overstated 600-fold or more.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

We are told heat waves will kill more and more, but rarely told that\u00a0cold kills far more than heat, so that moderate warming currently saves lives on balance.<\/p>\n

As America warmed across the 20th century, heat deaths fell, precisely because people could afford air conditioning. Cheap, reliable power saves lives.<\/p>\n

None of this means climate change isn\u2019t real. It is.<\/p>\n

But the best climate economists consistently estimate that unchecked warming will cost 2% to 3% of global GDP by the end of the century.<\/p>\n

That is a real problem, but not Armageddon.<\/p>\n

The United Nations expects the average person to be about 450% richer in 2100. Climate change might trim that to 435%.<\/p>\n

That is a worse outcome than we could have, but still a dramatically richer, healthier world than today\u2019s.<\/p>\n

So we should still try to fix climate change, but intelligently and cheaply.<\/p>\n

That means investing heavily in green-energy research and development to make clean power so affordable that everyone, not just wealthy elites, chooses it freely.<\/p>\n

Panic is a terrible adviser, so the end of the climate panic is welcome news.<\/p>\n

It is better for smart climate policy. It is better for our mental health, especially for the young people told for a decade they had no future.<\/p>\n

And it frees us to confront the many other problems we have neglected.<\/p>\n

After years of being needlessly frightened, the fever is finally breaking.<\/p>\n

Better late than never.<\/p>\n

Bjorn Lomborg is author of \u201cFalse Alarm\u201d and \u201cBest Things First.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Something was conspicuously missing from California\u2019s primary this month. In the state that built its political identity around…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":879351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[23],"tags":[129225,276,8695,285,5495,746,31647,6243,19300,45981,1269,159,185911,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-879350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-al-gore","tag-california","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-climate-change","tag-energy","tag-environment","tag-gdp","tag-global-economy","tag-green-energy","tag-king-charles-iii","tag-opinion","tag-science","tag-tom-steyer","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116779552897315848","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}