The Great Climate Reset

What comes next?

Things change fast

The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning — in speed, scale and scope. — Axios 13 January 2026

The recent change in the climate conversation has been stunning, as noted above by Axios. Catastrophism is out, pragmatism is in.

It was just three months ago when Bill Gates shocked climate advocates by writing a memo extolling climate pragmatism in advance of COP30 in Brazil:

Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.

We now know that Gates’ memo was not simply a high-profile defection from a popular cause, but an early indicator of the wholesale rejection of the climate movement. Since then, we’ve seen a broad embrace of energy realism and distancing from apocalyptic visions.

Major media are already doing post-mortems. For instance, over the weekend the New York Times lamented the collapse of efforts to transform global finance into a force for climate advocacy:

Six years after the financial industry pledged to use trillions to fight climate change and reshape finance, its efforts have largely collapsed.

Last October, I argued at The Dispatch that the ongoing changes in the climate conversation were broad based and not simply a result of Donald Trump’s campaign against all things climate.

In the United States, the changing tenor of the climate discussion has been readily accepted and amplified by Democrats, who of course offer little support for Trump administration priorities.

For instance, E&E News reported after last November’s elections:

Increasingly, Democratic lawmakers and consultants are urging either a retreat from climate politics or a recasting of its message — even if that means risking a rift with the party faithful.

E&E News cited two reports from centrist Democratic groups which warned that the party’s hyper-focus on climate of recent years — think Joe Biden’s “existential crisis” — had damaged the party’s electoral outcomes:

The reports argue that Democrats have lost elections in recent years because of the party’s hyperfocus on climate change. A voter who is struggling to pay bills, they say, doesn’t have the luxury to care about climate change.

The party’s focus on climate change has helped create a wedge between rich Democrats and working class voters who have drifted away from the party in recent elections, argues one report released last month by the centrist Democratic group WelcomePAC.

“Highly educated Democratic voters and affluent Democratic voters care more than the average American about issues like climate change, democracy, abortion, and identity and cultural issues—and less than the average American about issues like the cost of living, gas prices, border security, and crime,” the group concludes.

That echoes the claims of another centrist group, Searchlight Institute, which released a report in September that showed that even though almost 9 in 10 Democrats view climate change as a very serious problem, the vast majority of voters rank it way below affordability as their primary concern.

Climate messaging contributed to the notion that the party was disconnected from many voters, the report said.

“If the Democratic Party is going to shake the perception that they are focused on issues perceived as out-of-touch to most Americans,” the group concluded, “they’ll need a significant reset beyond just adding talk about lowering costs to climate messaging.”

What becomes of the climate issue in public and political settings is currently uncertain. However, there are a few things about which we can be certain and which will shape how THB covers the issue going forward.

First, single-issue climate advocates will make a lot of noise.

There are very few people who view climate change as being among the most important issues facing their country or the world. There are however single-issue climate advocates who are disproportionatey represented in elite institutions — including the media, academia, and NGOs. They are certainly ever present on social media.

We should expect that these committed advocates — many whose careers and identities depend upon the issue — are not going to accept quietly the changing tenor of the climate discussion.

This community has worked hard for many years to create a bubble within which heterodox voices are excluded. That echo chamber will make it difficult for climate advocates to now reach those outside the bubble — should they even want to — who are now leading the climate discussion.

It would be easy for those of us whose views have stood the test of time to focus unproductively on the loudest climate advocates or to engage in told-ya-so. Here at THB, I plan on continuing to focus on challenges to scientific integrity and the evaluation of energy and climate policies, both good and bad, and to spend as little time as possible on single-issue climate advocates.

Second, those whose views are now ascendant may wish to declare victory — That should be resisted.

Just because climate change is not apocalyptic does not mean that the issue goes away. Humans influence the climate system, posing unknowable risks about the future that merit our attention. Energy policies and adaptation policies will remain crucially important.

Noah Kaufman, researcher at Columbia University, strikes the right note in my view in a recent essay in the Atlantic. Here he discusses economics specifically, but his message is more broadly applicable to claims across disciplines about the climate future:

High-profile economic studies claim to quantify the global damages that will be caused by climate change centuries into the future and have produced estimates that range from modest to catastrophic. They have lent a veneer of scientific authority to arguments for both complacency and alarm, even though these studies are far too limited to support either position. . .

[Q]uantitative estimates of aggregated global damages over centuries lie far beyond our analytical capabilities. Small changes in assumptions—for example, how damages scale with rising temperatures or how humans mitigate and adapt to those risks—can yield results that appear to justify virtually any policy response. In other words, these models can display a pessimistic worldview in which climate damages accelerate to catastrophic levels, or a more optimistic one in which human progress keeps damages relatively modest. They offer little help in determining which of these futures is coming. . .

Experts being clearer about what economics can and cannot tell us would not resolve disagreements about climate policy. But this would make it harder to treat speculative damage estimates as decisive evidence for unsupportable claims. The full effects of climate change are unknowable, and a more constructive public discussion about climate policy will require getting more comfortable with that.

A retreat from catastrophism is welcome, but we must remember that climate change is still with us.

The climate conversation is changing. That can be for the better — let’s make it so.

Comments, questions, discussion, and debate are welcomed!

Before you go . . . Please click that “❤️ Like” button — More likes mean that THB gets in front of more readers. More readers mean that THB reaches more people in more places, broadening understandings and discussions of complex issues where science meets politics. Thanks!

THB exists because of its paid supporters . . . Thank you! Click the button above to join them at whatever level makes sense for you.