I kind of read the "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???" in another way:

The issue seemed to completely drop from public discourse during the Biden presidency as even people on the far left attacked and complained about high gas prices. Musk himself flip-flopped and said it's not really a pressing issue. The Biden administration ended up admonished oil companies for slowing exploration.

The president can almost be excused for his naivety - he's literally lived in a coastal penthouse his whole life. So in a way he's right - as far as he's aware it's a dead topic so it must have been a hoax.

Yes, and no. I think we actually do this logic a lot in our lives. Do I actually believe whole wheat bread is better for me, or do I just buy it on the chance it is? Do I go with the cheapest toothpaste or spend money on something that might be better? Do I buy an AWD car on the chance I am stuck?

Sacrificing a goat, after all, does sound like a lot of work. But maybe I will wear a lucky hat to a baseball game?

> Empirical evidence is just too hard to ignore.

Except it's the opposite - empirical evidence is very easy to ignore. Between herding, the replication crisis, and the overall insularity of academia, trust in "studies" has never been lower.

But people still respond very well to demonstrative or pragmatic evidence. Empirically there's nothing special about a keto diet. But demonstratively the effects are very convincing.

Reminds me a bit of the Narcissist's Prayer:

That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.

> It's quite amazing watching the "climate change isn't real" folks transition to "climate change is no big deal", then to "climate change is too hard/expensive to deal with".

At the top level (of government and corporate entities) those people always knew it was real, the messaging just changed as it became harder to keep a straight face while parroting the previous message in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence.

Exxon's (internal) research in the 1970s has been very accurate to the observed reality since then.

They just didn't care that it was real because they valued profits/power/etc in the moment over some difficult to quantify (but certainly not good) future calamity.

You would think they would care at least in the cases where they had children and grandchildren who will someday have to really reckon with the outcome, but you'd be wrong, they (still) don't give a shit.

something something tilt of the earth.

Unaudited empirical evidence is easy to ignore. The problem is one of physics. It should be simple to show with napkin math.

Playbook is The Narcissist's Prayer

  That didn't happen.
  And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
  And if it was, that's not a big deal.
  And if it is, that's not my fault.
  And if it was, I didn't mean it.
  And if I did, you deserved it.

Luckily the effect is much larger in the opposite direction: weaning oneself off of foreign oil is a huge advantage both economically and militarily.

Trump is implementing multi decade right wing fantasies in many fronts. The idea that we can't achieve anything is limiting yourself when you're in a political arena. To win, like Trump, when you get power you have to attack on many fronts, cultural, capital, legal, and approach it as a zero sum scorched earth war where norms are another obstacle in your way.

My father in law was a massive climate change denier until some trees started dying on his property.

He called out an arborist, and the arborist clearly explained that there wasn't enough rain anymore to support the number of trees on his land, and that the forest was slowly receding as the older/bigger trees took all the water from the other trees.

It finally dawned on him that a place where trees used to happily live to hundreds of years old could no longer support trees.

Still, he thinks CO2 is a con job cooked up by China and that global warming is divine punishment. But it's a good reminder that a lot of denialists are waiting for a personal, practical reason to care.

"Climate Change" implies that some sort of "constant climate" is even attainable, irrespective of desirable.

Among the large set of people who think we should take steps to reduce anthropogenic global warming there are at least two subsets who seem to oppose nuclear power. One is sort of pseudo-religious and believes that any disruption of the natural environment is a "sin" against Mother Nature. The other claims that nuclear power is too expensive and that we can solve the base load power problem more cheaply with battery storage, despite the lack of evidence that we'll be able to scale it up fast enough in the time available. And I have nothing against building more battery storage where it makes sense, but I don't think that's going to be sufficient by itself.

> Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now

I mean, this is the clear and obvious one. Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it.

It also harrows out people who are legitimately concerned from "moralist concern junkies". You'd think climate change being a global existential crisis would make people open to nuclear energy or more drastic measures like geo-engineering, but the frequency with which people refuse to compromise undercuts the their legitimacy.

Where is this mythical cheap source of batteries? I mean you can go on Alibaba and order cheap 18650 cells in limited quantities but there's an enormous difference between doing that and having enough reliable battery power to keep a nationwide grid supplying a modern industrial economy through several days of bad weather.

banning coal is quite cheap even ignoring the emissions and pollution side effects. England has already shut down their last coal plant and without 6 years of Trump, the US likely would have or would be planning to within the next couple years. Coal is expensive, not flexible, and horribly polluting even compared to natural gas.

Banning coal is a complete no-brainer at this point. Has been for quite a while. Never mind climate change, it's horribly polluting. The only reason it's still remotely economically viable is because the people who burn coal don't bear the costs of their pollution. If they actually had to compensate people for all the cancer, lung disease, poisoned ground water, contaminated seafood, and other such problems they cause, coal would vanish.

It's already to the point where the ridiculous coal fans who infest our government are forcing coal power plants to remain open when their operators want to close them because they're no longer profitable to operate.

You need to understand the political and cultural history. Environmentalism has been associated with leftist, feminist and communist ideology going back to the hippies and the antiwar movement (which makes it easy for many Americans to mistrust by default.) When Trump said he believed global warming was a Chinese hoax (remember that?) he was echoing a belief amongst the right that environmentalism and "global warming" was a plot to undermine American business and sovereignty, and that climate science supporting anthropogenic climate change was manufactured by "cultural Marxist academics" to push that agenda.

This conspiracy thinking has been pushed by Republicans, right-wing think tanks, coal, oil, manufacturing and like industries attempting to undermine public trust in climate science since at least the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial