For the past decade, the Left treated climate change not merely as an environmental concern, but as the looming catastrophe around which all politics, morality, and policy had to revolve. The media described climate change as an existential emergency, a threat not just to polar bears and coastlines but to the very survival of civilization. Democrats and the Left halted pipelines. They banned gas stoves. They mandated electric vehicles. They reshaped global financial markets around emissions. President Joe Biden’s $700 billion Inflation Reduction Act was sold as a historic turning point in the global fight to cut emissions. In 2019, teenagers filled city squares and blocked traffic across continents. Greta Thunberg stood before the United Nations, her voice trembling with fury: “How dare you?” she asked world leaders. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.”
