Momentous social movements begin to die the moment adherents figure out their leaders don't believe what they say. Liberal Protestantism's long decline started in the 1950s, when congregants began to wonder if their ministers still believed the old creeds (they didn't). Communism dies wherever it's tried because sooner or later the proletariat realize their self-appointed champions aren't particularly interested in equality. Many sects and cults dwindle the moment their supposedly ascetic leaders are revealed to be libertines.
Something similar is happening to climate ideology.
For three decades you were labeled a crank, a "climate denier," someone who pigheadedly rejects "settled science," if you didn't embrace the belief that life on earth faces imminent extinction from "global warming" and, later, "climate change." The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn't thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.
That climate ideology was alarmist and in no way settled should have been obvious. For many, it was. The conclusions of genuine scientific inquiry rarely reinforce the social and political biases of power brokers and influencers, but climate science, like some of the softer social sciences, did exactly that. It purported to discover foreboding trends in inscrutable data and assured us that the only way to arrest them was to do what America's liberal cultural elite wanted to do anyway-amass political and economic power in the hands of credentialed technocrats, supposedly for the good of all.
This story is from the January 28, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the January 28, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In