For supporters of the climate agenda and net-zero policies, there’s been a deluge of bad news lately. The United Nations’ annual climate conference, COP29, failed to live up to activists’ ideals. [emphasis, links added]
The United Nations conceded in October that no progress has been made toward net zero. And in the United States, voters elected a president who has brazenly called climate change a hoax.
Gabriella Hoffman, director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), told Just the News that climate change hung as a minor issue in the back of voters’ minds, while the state of the economy and inflation were the issues that influenced their decisions.
“The American public made their voices heard and repudiated all of these net-zero climate policies of the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration,” Hoffman said.
Undeterred
Despite signs that the climate agenda isn’t selling anymore, at least the way anti-fossil fuel advocates want, many climate-aligned politicians and activists are swearing they’ll continue the fight as if the election and public opinion were still in their favor.
“President-elect Trump won the election, but his billionaire oil and gas cronies don’t get to rule,” Natural Resource Defense Council President Manish Bapna declared on Nov. 5, the day Trump won reelection.
Bapna vowed that the NRDC will ramp up litigation efforts to push back against any attempts to roll back the climate agenda of the Biden-Harris administration.
“If he [Trump] tries to roll back urgently needed climate gains, or follow his radical Project 2025 roadmap to environmental ruin, we’ll stand up for the environment and public health – in the court of public opinion and our courts of law,” Bapna said.
The NRDC release didn’t provide any data showing support for the organization’s anti-fossil fuel stance.
Polls consistently show that voters are concerned about climate change, but the issue falls way down the list of their priorities.
Surveys that ask Americans how much they’re willing to spend to address climate change find rapidly dropping support.
A 2021 Competitive Enterprise Institute poll found only 17% would spend $1 to $10 a month on the issue. A New York Times/Siena College poll in September found that two-thirds of likely voters supported increased domestic fossil fuel production.
Despite Trump’s campaign promise to end support for offshore wind, Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey said last week that the state will continue its efforts to build offshore wind farms.
“Mark my words: We will show them. Because we’re moving ahead. We’ll show them,” Healey said Tuesday at an event in Taunton, referring to skeptics generally. “We’ll get this done, and people will be behind it,” Healey said, according to the Cape Cod Times.
Two days after the election, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, Democrats and co-chairs of the U.S. Climate Alliance, said their commitment to the climate agenda was undeterred by Trump’s election victory.
“The New York climate agenda doesn’t pause for elections,” Hochul said in a statement from the alliance. Grisham offered a similar commitment. “No matter the obstacles, our commitment will not waver, and our progress will not be stopped,” she said.
Climate election deniers
Larry Behrens, director of communications for Power The Future, a nonprofit that advocates for energy, called these politicians and activists “climate election deniers.”
“The fact that they are willing to ignore the voice of the American election proves that they are just as out of touch as we always knew they were. Americans went to the polls just three weeks ago, and the case for the environmental left was soundly rejected. They should be looking at ways to listen to the American public, instead of trying to subvert the election results,” Behrens told Just the News.
The media may also continue to push the climate agenda, even as trust in media falls to an all-time low.
Anti-fossil fuel groups directly fund many outlets, such as the Associated Press, and they fund organizations like Covering Climate Now, which provide advocacy resources to reporters covering climate and energy.
The organization partners with more than 600 news organizations and encourages reporters to be biased in reporting on climate change and energy.
In the wake of the election, the organization doubled down on its calls for reporters to continue pushing the climate agenda.
In its weekly newsletter, Covering Climate Now argued that Trump didn’t win the popular vote and therefore no voter mandate exists.
“Climate news may get folded into existing stories more. If so, it will be more important than ever that all journalists, not just dedicated climate reporters, make the climate connection to the news of the day, whether it’s extreme weather or mass deportations, affordable insurance or public health,” the organization advised the reporters at its 600 partner outlets.
Read rest at Just The News
