Without question, 2024 is a bad year to be a liberal.
If you want confirmation, cast your thoughts back fifty years to a bad year to be a conservative, 1974. Even though the U.S. had abandoned the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement still dominated the media. The Watergate Scandal eroded Richard Nixon’s presidency. Democrats made massive gains in the mid-term elections. Feminism gathered strength, buttressed by 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision. It was also a banner year for the environmental movement.
Global Cooling
Then, the environmentalists imagined an even bigger problem on the horizon. It would ensure the employment of earth-worshipping bureaucrats and university professors indefinitely. Newsweek’s April 28, 1975 article dubbed it “The Cooling World.”
“There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now.”
From the perspective of 1975, such a prediction sounded dire. Throughout America, high school teachers and college professors sounded the alarm. Newsweek, Time and the three television networks joined the chorus.
Don’t Blame Me!
However, few readers remember the famine of 1985 because it never happened. Nor did it occur in 1990, 1995 or ever. Newsweek’s error was colossal. In 2014, the article’s author, Peter Gwynne, wrote about it in Slate. In “Climate Change Mea Non Culpa,” he whined that “climate deniers” used his work to cast aspersions on the movement. The theme of his “Mea Non Culpa” appears to be, “I was wrong because we didn’t know enough back then, but the real mistake is that we didn’t know how right we really were.”
Mr. Gwynne finishes the article with a self-serving cry of anguish.
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“Over my career, I’ve covered subjects as diverse as cell biology, the world of physics a century after Einstein’s birth, space commerce, and World Cup soccer. I’ve won prizes for my writing, including a lifetime award from the American Chemical Society. But I fear that my obituary will be dominated by that single article in Newsweek.”
Ignoring the Anguished Cries
However, the legions of climate warriors wouldn’t let one miscue derail their movement. When global cooling didn’t occur, the vogueish idiom became global warming. When some inconvenient snow storms prompted people to ridicule that prediction, the academics and bureaucrats shifted to a catch-all slogan—global climate change.
Still, the hoi polloi were unimpressed. They continued to eat meat, drive big trucks and SUVs, heat and air condition their homes and travel for mere recreation. Yes, government agencies occasionally acted, as when the EPA all but eliminated aerosol cans. However, such moves were unpopular, and the politicians who allocated the money seldom allowed the bureaucrats and academics to have everything their way. There were still too many voters who were unwilling to abandon electricity, “fossil” fuels and steaks grilled over charcoal.
The World Stage
The environmentalists’ most reliable arrow became the United Nations. Rooms full of “world diplomats” eagerly blamed the United States for their problems. They organized the first “United Nations Climate Change Conference” in 1995. Except for the COVID year of 2020, there has been at least one such gathering annually. There were two in 2001 and 2019.
The press usually refers to each of these meetings as a “Conference of the Parties.” The conclaves acquired an acronym, COP. A number usually follows, so the recently adjourned 2024 meeting was COP-29.
The presiding officer has the wordy title of “United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary.” The current commissar is Simon Stiell. When he assumed his current duties in August 2022, the U.N. described his previous position as “senior minister in the Government of Grenada holding the portfolios of Minister for Climate Resilience and the Environment.”
Can Anybody Hear Me?
Mr. Stiell laid out his hopes the day before COP-29 convened on November 11 in Baku, Azerbaijan. His language betrays his bureaucratic background and globalist tendencies.
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“There can be no comprehensive approach without the involvement of the entire economy and the whole of our societies. And that means we need Parties and non-Party stakeholders to work together, to join efforts, communicating on best ways forward, systematically.”
Alas, few listened.
Back when climate change was a winning political issue, world leaders fell all over themselves at COP meetings. As The New York Times remarked, “As recently as the Glasgow summit in 2021, the annual climate confab was a who’s who of global power politics. These days, it’s more about who’s missing.”
Distinguished Absentees
Indeed, President Biden elected not to go, nor had he attended COP-28. In 2023, Vice-President Harris stood in, but she decided to lick her voter-inflicted wounds in Hawaii this year. Nor did Secretary of State Anthony Blinken make the trek. According to The Hill, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm led the U.S. delegation. They were, no doubt, ably assisted by “White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory and Biden climate adviser Ali Zaidi.”
Other world leaders opted to pass as well. The Times article listed no-shows Xi Jinping of China, Emmanuel Macron of France, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. The Hill added the name of India’s Narendra Modi to the list. That journal also noted that “China, India and the U.S. comprise the three biggest national sources of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.”
Silencing the Drums
Nonetheless, the globalist environmental drumbeat goes on. The Times lamented that “the signals that once alarmed us have continued to bleat.” It mentioned Hurricane Helene, deadly floods in Valencia and smoke-generating wildfires in Brooklyn “joining clouds of toxic ash carried from flames in New Jersey to blanket New York City in unbreathable air for the second year in a row.”
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“Perhaps,” the Times pontificated, “some futures are scarier to imagine than they are to live through.”
Of course, destructive hurricanes, large wildfires and massive floods are nothing new. All existed long before earth-orbiting satellites allowed humans to “connect the dots” (whether they really go together or not). It could be that the environmentalist’s fears were actually based on ideological agendas rather than reality from the very beginning.
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