A light just went off for the left: Americans don’t like paying higher bills for a climate war. Duh.
Democrats (well, some of them) are suddenly recognizing the message of November’s victories by Donald Trump and other Republicans.
First, that voters are deeply skeptical of a pricey (and likely futile) war on climate at their expense.
Second, that those victories will make it harder still to achieve the greenies’ fanciful agenda.
Hmm: With luck, the entire climate agenda might just collapse, saving Americans billions and bolstering energy security across the nation.
“The public is exhausted,” admits Assemblyman John McDonald (D-Albany). “They don’t want to see their bills go up. We have to be sensitive to that.”
McDonald also stressed the need “to be realistic that we’re not going to have a federal partner.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul, too, has delayed her plan for a “cap-and-invest” tax on fossil-fuel corporations, knowing the costs would be passed to consumers, conflicting with her 2026 reelection focus on “affordability.”
(She did the same with congestion pricing, delaying it until right after the 2024 election.)
Last year, Hochul also acknowledged the need to “think about the collateral damage” of the state’s climate decisions. And that the state likely won’t meet its benchmarks for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions (though she still pretended it would just be few years late).
Other blue states are also easing back down: Maryland, for instance, is delaying a program similar to the one Hochul put off.
Even California has held off on renewing its first-in-the-nation emissions cap.
The left’s epiphanies follow those in Europe, which got slammed by its green policies, particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, inflation and uncooperative weather sent energy prices soaring.
Dems are right about their agenda’s grim future: Team Trump, for starters, is already rolling back the Green New Deal.
On his first day in office, he ordered an “immediate pause” to climate spending OK’d by Biden-era legislation. He’s also pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord (again).
Instead, he’s vowed to jumpstart every sector of America’s energy industry with his “all of the above” approach. Americans love it.
Look, the climate agenda never made sense. Aside from its enormous costs, it’s always been physically impossible to meet those preposterous zero-emission goals.
No nation can possibly both cut its CO2 output dramatically and produce all the necessary windmills, solar panels and batteries to ensure energy reliability and economic growth — at least, not with the technology available now nor in the next decade or three.
Nor can the world reduce greenhouse gases with nations like India and China adding new gas-emitting plants almost every single day.
The good news: There’s no real need to clobber economies in a bid to control the weather.
Even if the world were to do nothing, UN climate experts themselves basically admit global warming would have little effect on economic growth.
We don’t expect Dems to throw in the towel completely on climate. At least not yet.
But their sudden bows to reality is surely a hopeful sign.
