The Rise And Fall of Climate Alarmism

Is the climate crisis over? Are we done defacing priceless art and gluing ourselves to airport runways? Is the four years left panic finally losing its hold? On the eve of the 30th annual United Nations Climate Summit, Bill Gates, arguably the most establishment and certainly one of the most powerful climate doomsayers of my lifetime, publicly walked back the apocalypse. We have to frame it in terms of overall human welfare, not just everything should be solely for climate. That's not a small rhetorical adjustment.

It signals a broader, deeper shift on the part of global elites, and diehard climate activists know it. Vanessa Carey, the CEO of Seed Global Health and the World Health Organization's Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health, warned that Gates' diminished urgency was, quote, Very dangerous, and sent a false notion of just how far gone Mother Earth is. Gates hit back hard, telling Axios, in front of a thousand students, what world do they live in? This is a numeric game, he continued, in a world with very finite resources, more finite than they should be.

It's time, he said, to redirect those billions of green energy dollars back to human flourishing, including amping up. Literally, energy production. So, does this mean we're going to get an apology for the sky-high electric bills? For the thousands of true believers who drove themselves crazy, decided to forego children, or literally set themselves on fire on the steps of the Supreme Court because they were told the world was about to end? I'm not holding my breath. Bill Gates, the technocrats, and energy experts may have lost interest in climate alarmism.

He's even joking now about his own carbon footprint. Yeah, I probably have one of the highest greenhouse gas footprints of anyone on the planet. You know, my personal flying alone is gigantic. And it might seem like a lighthearted joke to them, but words like that were punishable by social death just a decade ago. Now, no big deal. After 40 years of using catastrophic language and misanthropic policy to browbeat the West into almost catatonic despair, it turns out today more Americans than ever report being frightened, sad, and anxious when they think about the environment.

Was it worth it, Bill? Did any good come from environmentalism? We're witnessing what appears to be, in America at least, The last gasp of an elite green energy movement that spent itself after hollowing out its own true believers and bringing countless third world nations to their knees. And I have to say, I won't be mourning the soggy paper straws. We're going back to plastic straws. These things don't work. They break, they explode, they don't last very long. We're going back to plastic straws.

But I've also found something surprising in examining the rise and fall of climate alarmism. It turns out that, long before climate politics hardened into ideology, one man offered a sane, coherent approach to the very real question of how we should care for creation. Spoiler, it was not Al Gore. Turns out, the greatest environmentalist of the modern era was a Catholic priest. There is no doubt the industrial age could still drive the world to even greater catastrophe than it already has. And I think Bill Gates might have just realized that if we don't correct course, climate alarmism will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is the story of two solutions. Alarmism gave us war on humanity. John Paul II saw it was actually a war for humanity. But first, a word from our sponsor. Did you know that the Catholic Church recommends a powerful way to protect your home and everyone in it from evil? Holy Heroes has your complete kit with everything you need for the traditional home blessing, plus this recommended protection. Here's what's unique about this home blessing and protection kit. It includes a stand-up Saint Benedict medal to display in your home.

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And now, back to climate change. In the 1970s, the dominant environmental fear was not yet global warming. It was DDT, acid rain, water pollution, and oil spills. The first Earth Day in 1970 was the Watershed National Moment that followed major milestones like the publication of Rachel Carson's book. Silent Spring in 1962, the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, and reports that the Great Lakes were dying. Led by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the first Earth Day represented an overwhelmingly grassroots movement in the United States and Canada, and led to federal cleanup legislation, such as the Clean Water Act.

In the Great Lakes community, to drill down on just one specific region. A century of industrial pollution from steel plants, oil refineries, paper mills, and city sewage plants was destroying the area's natural beauty and also its ability to continue to sustain its economy. A massive local effort to clean up the lakes yielded incredible results. Both the United States and Canada passed legislation granting funds to assess and to act locally. By 1980, Senator Nelson was celebrating Earth Day. as a success. Phosphorus levels had plummeted, DDT had left the food chain faster than expected, and rainfall had become cleaner.

Tourism, shipping, and industry were returning as a result. But local success never became the dominant narrative. Instead of encouraging similar local efforts to other environmental cleanup needs around the world, globalists saw an opportunity for a power grab if they could take the dying Great Lakes narrative and apply it to the whole world. Regional crisis, regional solutions. Global crisis, global solutions. Of course, the Great Lakes are only one small chapter in the story of climate alarmism's triumph. There were equally powerful cultural and spiritual forces priming the population for full-on green energy hysteria.

In the post-war first world, a decidedly Malthusian anxiety gripped the educated classes. Too many people, too much industrial growth, too much consumption. Paul Ehrlich's population bomb predicted worldwide famine and mass death. His solutions were draconian, forced sterilization, Population control and economic contraction. But they seemed like common sense measures to many environmentalists. In the absence of a robust Christian belief in the Imago Dei, and amid rising concerns about capitalism's excesses, many churchmen also adopted less extreme but equally anti-human ideas, contraception, population control, and degrowth.

A spiritual vacuum made possible The rise of a new religion, climate alarmism. After the Cold War ended and the threat of nuclear annihilation abated, climate change became the new unifying framework for global elites. As environmentalist Michael Schellenberger has written, the radicalism of the left's 100% renewables and net zero agenda took the form of a dogma that used Christian language to invert climate change. Foundational Christian and civilization's values. Instead of human beings having dominion over the earth, earth should have dominion over humans.

The narrative, reinforced by legions of scientists who deliberately misled the public on the extent of the threat, seduced thousands, if not millions. The lost souls, the failed artists, anxious college-educated elites who latched onto the end of the world is nigh thinking. Alarmism offers a comprehensive religious narrative, the loss of paradise, industrialization, a demon horde, capitalists, a priestly class, a prophecy, the coming apocalypse, and a promise of salvation for the elect few, degrowth, and population reduction.

The structure was moral, not scientific, and that distinction explains both its rise and its fall. With Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, climate politics reached mass culture, and we entered the peak end times. Schools, corporations, and governments adopted increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric. We have 12 years left, and countdown.

That era persisted well into the 2020s. In his second State of the Union address, President Biden told Congress, Let's face reality. The climate crisis doesn't care if you're in a red or blue state. It's an existential threat. The threat gave Americans a moral mandate to embrace extreme net zero policies, aggressive regulatory mandates, and an intense hostility to nuclear energy and natural gas. The United States, disregarding all warnings from Europe's advanced energy crisis, went from an energy renaissance to sporadic energy poverty.

The EU and the Biden administration's oil companies for charging too much, but it's a simple matter of supply and demand. Forcing the grid to go sustainable rapidly deprived vast regions of abundant energy at the very moment the demand for more energy hit historic highs. High demand, low supply, skyrocketing costs. And here's why we may have passed peak alarmism. In order to convince ordinary people to self-destruct, Governments, NGOs, and scientists found that they had to untether from the empirical record. Climate alarmism, it turns out, was a house built on sand, and I'll give you a quick tour of just a few of the toppled myths that previously upheld the green energy temple of doom.

First, sea levels. The myth. Melting ice caps have driven rising sea levels and produced a threat multiplier scenario globally. Reality? Sea levels are rising, but not accelerating in the catastrophic way models once projected. Tide gauge records do not support the alarmist predictions. That hockey stick curve often cited in media, well, that was produced by models, not actual measurements. Number two, polar bears. The myth, melting Arctic ice due to man-made climate change, is decimating polar bear communities in the Arctic. Polar bears are held up as the furry poster children of climate collapse.

Reality? All but one of the 19 major polar bear populations are stable, or increasing. The species continues to adapt effectively to changing conditions, and today there are more polar bears on Earth than there were in 1970. Number three. Coral reefs. The myth? Coral reefs are on the brink of disappearing. Reality? Observational data show record-high global coral cover in multiple monitored zones, including Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Coral ecosystems have demonstrated far greater resilience than alarmist narratives predicted. Number four, extreme weather. The myth?

Human-driven climate change means more hurricanes, more floods, and more fires. The reality? Long-term data show no sustained increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, floods, or droughts. The greatest heat waves on record actually happened in the 1930s, and California's devastating fires have been closely linked to forest mismanagement rather than unprecedented climate-induced ignition. But perhaps the most consequential myth that has been debunked is the worst-case scenario models that place human extinction caused by our own industry decades or centuries in the future instead of millennia.

In fact, the worst-case scenario model that shaped global policy, RCP 8.5, is no longer scientifically defensible. It requires emissions trajectories that are already impossible. Researcher Roger Pilkey puts it plainly. RCP 8.5 is not simply highly unlikely, it is falsified. Yet, this disproven scenario has been and is being used to justify sweeping economic and political interventions, from the EU's energy agenda to the former Biden administration's regulatory push. The problem is not that climate change isn't real. It's the apocalyptic framing of what is happening.

That was based on assumptions we know now to be inaccurate. The elites know this, and that is precisely why Bill Gates and energy tycoons feel perfectly comfortable shifting their attention elsewhere to powering massive AI centers. The collapse of alarmism isn't strictly scientific. It's also economic and technological. AI, industrial reshoring, and digital infrastructure have created unprecedented demand for electricity. The idea that the world can power this through intermittent renewables alone is not credible. This is where capitalism takes the reins.

Net zero is incompatible with the technological demands of the modern world. It restricts growth rather than enabling it. In an almost complete reversal of the population bomb, Amazon overlord Jeff Bezos recently called for a future of, quote, A trillion humans, which he promised would produce for us a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. I would love to see, you know, a trillion.

Humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins, and we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system. That's a philosophy of abundance, not austerity, and it requires vastly more energy. The new industrial revolution, the rise of AI, cannot coexist with degrowth. ideology. Like a good capitalist billionaire, Gates's recent memo reads like a repudiation of the entire alarmist framework.

Quote, this is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change, improving lives. He emphasizes the pursuit of energy access, health, prosperity, resilience, and reducing the green premium. Bottom line, humanity just cannot afford climate austerity if there's just no pressing need to be alarmed. So, are we just headed back to rampant capitalist pragmatism? I certainly hope not. There are some very important and very serious questions that our half-a-century flirtation with climate alarmism raised.

It's just that we don't need to be doomers to answer them. One man saw from afar that the green energy agenda was a raw deal and a wrong-headed response to phenomena like the death of the Great Lakes, water pollution, and acid rain. As early as 1985, Pope John Paul II was offering another answer. He didn't dismiss the very real threats human industry had posed to the earth. Both capitalist and communist regimes have been pursuing economic dominance through a machine that poses yes.

An existential threat to humans. Through his Catholic personalist anthropology, John Paul II offered the one approach to environmental concern that is at once intellectually coherent, morally sound, and practically successful. In Nairobi, 1985, he spoke to leaders of the developing third world, saying, It is a requirement of our human dignity to exercise dominion over creation and the creation of the world. In such a way that it truly serves the human family, exploitation of the riches of nature must take place according to criteria that take into account not only the immediate needs of people, but also the needs of future generations.

He acknowledged real environmental problems, but he refused to adopt the anti-human posture that dominates climate discourse. Far from being the problem, The human person is the key to the solution to the real environmental threats posed by advances in technology.

Environmental problems should be seen in relation to the needs of actual men and women, their families, their values, their unique social and cultural heritage. The ultimate purpose of environment programs is to enhance the quality of human life, to place creation in the fullest way possible at the service of the human family. As with the success of the Great Lakes cleanup, all environmental efforts should begin locally. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity applies as much to care for our common home as any other moral issue.

Unlike later papal documents such as Laudato Si', John Paul II urged extreme caution regarding globalist, one-size-fits-all environmental mandates. Instead, he advocated for the training of local personnel. Which makes it possible to adapt technology in a way that fully respects the cultural and social fabric of local communities. This is the opposite of today's technocratic environmentalism. It prioritizes cultural integrity, economic development, and the lived experience of the poor themselves. And it maintains a very healthy skepticism of global bodies like the UN. This framework is not only morally superior, it's far more accurate scientifically, historically, and economically.

In fact, the Catholic framework for understanding care for the environment has already produced robust results. Small green shoots poking up through the ashes of a failed secular religion, like movements towards walkable neighborhoods, targeted intentional regulation of corporations that contribute to regional pollution, popular demand for better science when it comes to vaccines and medications, a rejection of artificial birth control, and a rejection of the right to care for the environment. As antithetical to the health of our bodies and the planet, a renewed focus on sustainable farming methods, critical thinking about technology, and innovations in making energy use more efficient.

Stripped of apocalyptic ideology, these can form the basis of a reasonable environmental ethic. So, we seem to be at another crossroads. If climate alarmism is really dead, As Bill Gates seems to be signaling, we are facing an apocalypse vacuum. As climate activism fractures, John Paul II's vision will endure, an environmentalism rooted in human dignity, stewardship, local solutions over global mandates, and a hopeful, realistic understanding of human creativity and dignity. This is not alarmism. It's not denialism. It is what he called an authentic human ecology.

And in a world exhausted by fear, it may be the only framework capable of building lasting environmental responsibility. So, is climate alarmism dead? Well, the science no longer supports it, the economy can't sustain it, and even the most influential voices in global policy are quiet quitting the movement. But environmental concerns remain, and should remain. But let's ground them not in fear, but in the truth about the human person.

Decades before climate politics hardened into ideology, a Catholic pope articulated a vision that avoided both extremes, denial on one side and despair on the other. I mean, has Bill Gates been reading John Paul II? Probably not. But he has perhaps inadvertently stumbled upon the truth. Have we learned anything from the rise and fall of climate alarmism? Are we finally more aware of similar apocalyptic prophecies when it comes to other problems facing humanity? Hopefully, the next time a movement posts a countdown clock in Union Square or takes to TikTok warning of imminent doom, We can all look back at climate alarmism and say, fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice. If you fooled me, we can't get fooled again. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to The Deep. New episodes drop every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.