From Science Matters

 By Ron Clutz

Kevin D. Williamson explains at NY Post Why climate change activists have failed to score public support.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

We are hearing even more than usual about climate change this summer and that is not surprising — not with dog-days news cycles driven by record-setting heat waves, torrential rains and widespread Canadian wildfires.

Some climate activists think we are not hearing enough about the issue: Writing in The Guardian, columnist Jonathan Freedland insists that the problem is one of marketing. “The climate movement has devoted relatively few resources to reaching or persuading the public,” he writes, preposterously.

He quotes progressive p.r. man David Fenton — “We’re in a propaganda war, but only one side is on the battlefield” — and cites former United Nations climate grandee Christiana Figueres, who claims “the climate community has recoiled from marketing.” Why? Because, Figueres says, it is “sort of tainted. It’s icky. You know, ‘We’re too good for marketing. We’re too righteous’. . . Hopefully we’re getting over it.”

Of all the dumb and dishonest things that have been written and said in the climate debate, the notion that climate-change activists just can’t get their message out — that they won’t stoop to marketing — may be the very dumbest and most dishonest.

Billions of dollars have been spent on climate-change advocacy,
to say nothing of money devoted to actual climate policies.

The government leaders of practically every democratic country speak about the issue constantly.

In the intergovernmental sector, you have everybody from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund ringing the climate alarm bells, while in the private sector you can count on the likes of BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and other corporate titans to do the same.

ESG rules have pushed the climate issue onto the corporate agenda in a big way—companies are spending billions in total (as much as $1.4 million per company) on climate-reporting costs alone.

Even the supposed villains in the story — big energy companies such as ExxonMobil — spend billions of dollars a year advertising the green agenda. “In the past ten years we have reduced greenhouse gas emissions in our operations by more than 7 million metric tons,” ExxonMobil boasts, “which is the equivalent of taking about 1.4 million cars off the road.” You may not think they are sincere, but they are far from silent about the issue.

Climate activists have the commanding heights. What do the so-called deniers have?
A few of my cranky libertarian friends.  .  . And voters.

The real issue with climate policy isn’t that voters don’t know about the issue — it is that they disagree. Climate policy touches everything from big tech to farming to economic growth, everything from the homes we live in to the cars we drive, and, as such, an ambitious climate program will necessarily impose big costs.

The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world can pretend that green policies will pay for themselves, but no serious person believes that.

Sure, Guardian headline writers can straight-up declare “The beauty of a Green New Deal is that it would pay for itself” — this is nothing more than that “marketing” to which our green friends supposedly are so averse.

American voters do care about climate issues, but not as intensely as activists would like. Climate routinely polls in the single digits when it comes to voters’ top concerns, far behind (surprise!) the economy and health care.  Independents rate immigration a more pressing issue than climate change.

Maybe you think the US government is under the heel of the oil barons, but no democratic country has undertaken the kind of economic transformation climate activists advocate.

The signatories of the Paris Agreement are far from meeting their climate obligations; the $100 billion a year in climate-finance commitments promised at the UN climate summit in Glasgow have not been fully funded; even in the European Union, the leaders of which take a much stronger climate line than their US counterparts, there has been no radical change.

A coal excavator in Germany, which boosted coal mining in the wake of gas shortages caused by the Ukraine crisis. AP

Germany responded to Russia’s recent energy blackmail by reopening coal plants.

European voters rank climate a higher priority than Americans do, but it typically polls behind economic growth and immediate issues such as the invasion of Ukraine.

That is not oil-drenched propaganda at work— that is, for better and for worse,
democratic politics at work.

While there has been piecemeal progress, countries across the globe are moving at a glacial pace when it comes to the one policy that can reliably reduce greenhouse-gas emissions at a reasonable cost: rapidly expanding nuclear power, which has an operational carbon footprint of approximately zero.

The state government in Pennsylvania got that collapsed interstate overpass reopened in record time by waiving all sorts of planning and permitting rules, but no such urgency exists in the case of nuclear power or other needful energy infrastructure.

That, unfortunately, is democracy, too.  What is needed is not more marketing — more propaganda, more hysteria.   What is needed is a more attractive set of trade-offs.

But finding better trade-offs means admitting that there are trade-offs, which climate activists — hostage to their marketing departments — have too often refused to do.

It isn’t that climate activists aren’t selling their agenda — it is that
voters in democratic countries around the world are not buying it.