The Politico lament titled “‘We’ve lost the culture war on climate’” offers a rare moment of clarity from within the echo chamber of environmental orthodoxy.
“There’s no way around it,” admits Jody Freeman, former climate advisor to Barack Obama. “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement”.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/trump-biden-obama-climate-regulations-legacy-00395857
But she—and the authors—never pause to ask why the war was lost. The answer isn’t about political maneuvering or industry lobbying. It’s much simpler: the left sacrificed the last of its credibility during COVID, and no amount of apocalyptic climate branding can bring it back.
COVID: The Bonfire of the Authorities
The same people who now ask Americans to trust sweeping climate rules are the ones who insisted lockdowns would “stop the spread,” that cloth masks were life-saving talismans, and that vaccines prevented transmission. They suppressed dissent, gaslit the public, and rewrote yesterday’s lies into today’s mandates.
During COVID, the American public witnessed a catastrophic failure of expertise—not in science per se, but in institutional honesty. Bureaucrats contradicted themselves weekly, all while pretending infallibility. “The science” was less about the evidence and more about control. And when people began asking why, they were called dangerous.
Now those same voices return with charts, forecasts, and pleas for regulation, insisting that failing to curb CO2 will be a disaster.
“Failing to curb power plants’ pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity.”.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/trump-biden-obama-climate-regulations-legacy-00395857
Sound familiar?
That narrative structure—the breathless projection of catastrophe, the rigid insistence on compliance, the moral castigation of skeptics—is precisely what Americans no longer believe. Because they’ve seen the machinery behind it. And they’re not going back.
Market Reality, Not Mandates, Is Driving Change
Even Politico’s own article unwittingly undermines its narrative. It acknowledges that coal use has plummeted—from 48.5% of electricity in 2007 to just 15% in 2024—while emissions from power plants have dropped by 38%. These outcomes didn’t come from the Clean Power Plan, which never took effect. They came from natural gas abundance, fracking, and market evolution.
This makes Freeman’s despair particularly telling. It’s not that emissions aren’t falling. It’s that people no longer think we need the state to manage every molecule to make it happen.
Even the Supreme Court, hardly a bastion of climate denial, ruled in 2022 that agencies like the EPA can’t regulate major sectors of the economy without direct congressional authorization. That wasn’t climate skepticism. It was constitutional hygiene.
Likewise, the rollback of Biden’s power plant rules by Trump’s EPA isn’t radical. It’s the legal and political reality catching up to a skeptical public—one that now sees through the moral panic.
When Narrative Control Fails, the Spell Breaks
The left didn’t just lose the policy fight. They lost control of the frame. And part of that collapse came from an unexpected source: the decensorship of Twitter.
When Elon Musk took the reins of the world’s most influential digital square, he didn’t just fire a few moderators. He exposed a vast censorship regime—one in which government agencies, NGOs, and media gatekeepers worked to suppress dissent. This included not just COVID heresies but also climate skepticism, criticism of electric vehicle mandates, and questions about energy grid reliability.
Suddenly, voices long deemed “dangerous” were heard again. Questions that were once unspeakable became unignorable.
It wasn’t just about free speech for its own sake. It was about breaking the illusion of consensus. Musk didn’t create a movement; he let the light in on one that already existed, long denied by a rigged system. And once people saw it, they couldn’t unsee it.
Control Versus Trust
The Politico piece is filled with laments over lost tools of control. Court rulings. Congressional gridlock. Executive rollback. But the unspoken truth is this: those tools only worked when they were shielded by trust. And trust died not with a bang, but with a thousand flip-flops—on masks, on mandates, on lockdowns, on model projections.
Now, climate advocates find themselves in the same boat, still peddling apocalyptic certainty while the public shrugs. They’ve been told the end is nigh for decades. They’ve watched the goalposts move. They’ve endured every hot day being labeled a harbinger of doom—only to see emissions fall and prosperity continue.
They’ve also noticed that every “solution” somehow involves more regulation, less choice, and more power for the people who got it wrong last time.
You Can’t Guilt People Who No Longer Trust You
Politico’s article ends by framing the next four years as potentially “lost” on climate. But that assumes something essential: that the public still wants to be led by the same cast of characters. They don’t.
The war is over not because people deny that climate changes, or that humans play a role. It’s over because they deny the credibility of those claiming to solve it. The culture war wasn’t lost in a courtroom. It was lost in the empty supermarket aisles of lockdown-era America, and in the liberated feed of a post-censorship Twitter.
You can’t guilt people who no longer trust you. You can’t control a culture that no longer listens. And you can’t regulate your way out of a credibility crisis.
The only way forward is honesty, humility, and a firm end to the presumption that “the experts” always know best. Until then, the war is not just lost—it’s unwinnable.
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