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Civitas Outlook
Topic
Politics
Published on
Mar 13, 2025
Contributors
Joel Kotkin
Photo by Thomas Richter on Unsplash

The Climate Has Changed on Climate Change

Contributors
Joel Kotkin
Joel Kotkin
Senior Research Fellow
Joel Kotkin
Summary

As we face the threat of expanding war, intensified class and ethnic conflict, growing inequality and health crises, it’s time to look dispassionately at climate as one of the many challenges facing humanity.

Summary

As we face the threat of expanding war, intensified class and ethnic conflict, growing inequality and health crises, it’s time to look dispassionately at climate as one of the many challenges facing humanity.

Listen to this article

Like the Marxist dialectic, or the predictions of the Gospels, the green movement has long seen its triumph as preordained. Yet sometimes the inevitable turns out to be not so.

Over the past few years green policies — notably the drive for “net zero” — have been failing. Both markets and politicians have seen the light. What
Joe Biden’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen once called “the greatest business opportunity of the twenty-first century” has revealed itself to be something of a disaster.

The new American President is likely to be blamed for the implosion of the green agenda, but its collapse long pre-dates his re-ascension. Well before November the opportunity of the century was going bust — not least because the policies were having little apparent impact on the actual climate. On Wall Street, ESG-approved (environment, social and government) stocks have been tanking, according to leading studies, shackling firms with massive losses.

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