Decarbonization and climate change hysteria died this winter

Photo above: China runs wild on coal-fired power plants while Europe castrates itself with diminishing power production in the name of global warming

And no one cared.

ALEX BERENSON – MAR 3, 2026

Last month, President Trump ended the left’s efforts to decarbonize the United States.

Notice the massive protests in the streets? Or any protests?

Me neither.

In December 2009, the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency issued its so-called “endangerment finding,” a ruling that carbon dioxide threatened “current and future generations.” The fact that every human being releases carbon dioxide with every breath didn’t come up.

The finding was the definition of an administrative state power grab. The EPA’s job is regulating dangerous chemicals that have definable and known risks, not remaking the American economy by fiat because it says so.

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The “endangerment” finding marked the start of a wave of decarbonization insanity which only accelerated over the next decade, even after Donald Trump took office in 2017. Anti-growth environmentalists took over the mainstream center-left, with the legacy media’s enthusiastic backing.

Europe led the way, though the Obama administration happily joined the parade, as Wall Street and other rent-seekers looked for ways to game massive renewable energy subsidies.

By December 2015, the climatecrats were powerful enough to pass the Paris Agreement, “a legally binding international treaty on climate change.” 

The agreement required nations to work together to reduce carbon emissions, because climate change is BAD, people!

Never mind that disaster-related deaths plunged during the 20th century, falling 90 percent between 1920 and 2020. That decline is even more impressive than it first seems, because the world’s population rose almost four-fold over the same period.

Wealthier societies can better predict severe weather (and other disasters, such as volcano eruptions and earthquakes). They also can evacuate their citizens more easily and construct stronger and more resilient buildings for those who stay in the path of storms. As for famine, it essentially no longer exists. When it does its root causes are inevitably political rather than natural.

As even a (left-leaning) analyst acknowledged:

To be clear, deaths haven’t declined so steeply because disasters are becoming less frequent or intense… The main reason that fewer people are dying is that we’ve gotten better at protecting ourselves and each other.

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(No trees were harmed in the printing of this agreement. Okay, maybe a few.)

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Nonetheless, the politics of climate change were clear, especially in European countries (and blue states) with little domestic oil or coal production. Leftist leaders passed happy-sounding decarbonization laws whose consequences they hoped were safely years or even decades in the future:

All planes will run on pressed apple juice and Tabasco by 2050!

Instead of trucks, freight will be delivered by zipline!

Nitrogen fertilizer is out! Farmers shall think good thoughts to grow corn. Corn loves good thoughts.

I’m barely exaggerating.

European countries promised to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050. Since even the most pie-eyed environmentalist admits airplanes will require oil-based fuel for the foreseeable future, that goal requires negative emissions in the rest of the economy.

China gladly cheered on this economic suicide even as it built thousands of new coal-fired power plants to fuel its growth. Its increased emissions vastly overwhelmed European efforts to slow carbon release.

In 2000, Europe released more carbon dioxide than China. Today China emits more than five times as much as Europe — and one-third of all emissions worldwide.

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(China’s line is blue, so it must be environmentally friendly, right?) 

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For a while, none of this mattered.

Feelings, not facts, were in charge, never more so than in 2019, when a 16-year-old Greta Thunberg told the United Nations:

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

How dare you heat your homes, people? How dare you drive? How dare you fly? Flying is for good people, like Greta!

The beginning of the end of the hysteria came in 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine woke Europe to the fact that it had become deeply dependent on imported natural gas. The years since have not been kind to the decarbonizers. High energy prices have left Europe’s economies hobbled, yet even as it produces less power, its electricity infrastructure is increasingly brittle.

Solar and wind power simply cannot function without backup generating capacity, and we are decades, at best, from having reliable and cheap ways to store the energy they produce for later use.

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Now even Europe is quietly backing away from its climate change goals. In December, the continent dropped its plans to ban gasoline- or diesel-powered cars in 2035, though it still has a 90 percent target for now.

The United States, which has a far stronger domestic energy industry than Europe, never went as far — though the Biden administration tried, using the endangerment finding to undergird a 2021 effort to force half of all new vehicles to be electric by 2030.

Along the way, the Bidenites threw subsidies that dwarfed any before at solar and wind power. The left’s openly stated goal was to give enough taxpayer-funded bribes to red states to convince Republican voters that decarbonization was the future.

In 2024, American voters rejected that offer and returned President Trump to the White House.

And on Feb. 12, Trump’s EPA withdrew the ridiculous “endangerment” finding.

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Environmental groups are already suing over the Trump administration’s move.

But the Supreme Court is very likely to say that the EPA’s initial ruling was the problem, that questions as big as the future shape and carbon output of the American economy belong to Congress, not unelected bureaucrats.

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(Not elected. Also not a bureaucrat. Working for you, for pennies a day.)

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Even more interesting than the brewing legal battle is the political and cultural response to what Trump did.

Or, more accurately, the lack of response. Millions of Americans will protest almost any action this White House takes. But climate change hysteria is so spent that Trump’s decision to undo the cornerstone of decarbonization has barely even been noticed.

Well, maybe noted climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio will hit the barricades now that he’s done vacationing on Jeff Bezos’s 400-foot, half-billion-dollar yacht.

How dare you!