Something was conspicuously missing from California’s primary this month. In the state that built its political identity around fighting climate change, the issue barely registered.
Voters fixated on affordability and housing. About 44% named the cost of living, jobs and inflation as the state’s most important problem, with just 1% citing climate change.
Even Tom Steyer, the billionaire who made his name funding climate activism, ran a campaign centered on lowering household costs.
In America’s greenest state, climate has become a footnote.
That is no isolated signal. Just days before voters went to the polls, California’s own Air Resources Board voted to hand as much as $4 billion in free allowances to oil refiners and other industrial polluters to ease compliance with the state’s carbon market.
New York, meanwhile, is rewriting its landmark climate law, pushing back deadlines and softening its binding 2030 emissions target. When the bluest of blue states quietly retreat, it tells you that politicians have concluded voters care more about their wallets than distant climate targets.
Who, in fact, are still panicking about the climate “catastrophe”? Fewer and fewer.
Gallup’s latest survey of the world’s most important problems found that the median share of people naming the environment or climate as their country’s top concern was just 3%.
Economic and governance worries dwarfed it.
Even the money has moved on: A new Times of London survey of 200 institutional-fund managers found climate change had tumbled from their No. 1 environmental, social and governance concern to fifth place, behind human health, AI ethics, corruption and corporate conduct.
How did so many people who were terrified by climate change a few years ago come to care so much less about it? Four reasons.
First, we remembered the world has many problems.
After the Cold War, it became fashionable to call climate the last great challenge. It never was.
COVID, wars, budget deficits, immigration pressures, faltering schools, the uncertainties of artificial intelligence and aging populations straining health and pension systems are all legitimate, competing priorities.
Climate is one item on a long list, not the only line.
Second, you can cry wolf only so many times. For 50 years we have been fed apocalyptic deadlines.
One peer-reviewed study catalogued at least 79 specific doomsday predictions.
In 2019, King Charles warned that we had 18 months to save the planet.
Al Gore told us in 2008 that we had 10 years left.
Those deadlines came and went. Nearly every dramatic prophecy that has reached its expiration date has simply turned out to be wrong, and voters have noticed.
Third, climate policy is staggeringly expensive and accomplishes remarkably little.
The world has already spent more than $16 trillion on climate measures, with promises of hundreds of trillions more.
Yet a landmark study in Science examined 1,500 climate policies across 41 countries over two decades and found that only 4% meaningfully cut emissions.
Together, the entire apparatus reduced global emissions by less than a quarter of 1%.
In any other field, governments delivering so little for so much would have been thrown out long ago.
Fourth, the scariest claims are often deeply misleading.
We are warned that rising seas could displace 187 million people, a figure that assumes humanity does nothing for an entire century.
Once you account for the seawalls and adaptation that people obviously undertake, that estimate of displacement turns out to be overstated 600-fold or more.
We are told heat waves will kill more and more, but rarely told that cold kills far more than heat, so that moderate warming currently saves lives on balance.
As America warmed across the 20th century, heat deaths fell, precisely because people could afford air conditioning. Cheap, reliable power saves lives.
None of this means climate change isn’t real. It is.
But the best climate economists consistently estimate that unchecked warming will cost 2% to 3% of global GDP by the end of the century.
That is a real problem, but not Armageddon.
The United Nations expects the average person to be about 450% richer in 2100. Climate change might trim that to 435%.
That is a worse outcome than we could have, but still a dramatically richer, healthier world than today’s.
So we should still try to fix climate change, but intelligently and cheaply.
That means investing heavily in green-energy research and development to make clean power so affordable that everyone, not just wealthy elites, chooses it freely.
Panic is a terrible adviser, so the end of the climate panic is welcome news.
It is better for smart climate policy. It is better for our mental health, especially for the young people told for a decade they had no future.
And it frees us to confront the many other problems we have neglected.
After years of being needlessly frightened, the fever is finally breaking.
Better late than never.
Bjorn Lomborg is author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”