“The world is changing.
The planet’s heating up.
What the fuck is going on?”
So sang legendary musical comedian Robert “Bo” Burnham in the opening to his latest Netflix special, Inside. Released in 2021, Inside represents a uniquely distilled snapshot of the grievances that animated young people worldwide—and particularly those who’d spent the better part of their waking lives online—during the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic: racial injustice, economic polarization, the effects of the Internet on mental health, and—of course—global warming. Interestingly, this wasn’t the final time Burnham evoked the imagery of climate change to underscore the special’s thesis. During the third verse of Inside’s third-to-last song, “All Eyes on Me,” he sings thus:
“You say the ocean’s rising
Like I give a shit.
You say the whole world’s ending.
Honey, it already did.”
The inclusion of such motifs as the above was no error. As many who were around at the time can recall, the late 2010s/early 2020s constituted a kind of heyday for mainstream climate politics. According to one 2019 poll conducted by Amnesty International, for example, of all people aged 18-25 across 22 countries, roughly 41% considered climate change to be the most important issue facing the world. This concern in turn fed mobilization, most famously in the shape of the global “Fridays for Future” movement, when young people the world over—taking a cue from noted climate wunderkind Greta Thunberg—organized to skip their Friday classes as a means of protest against the fossil fuel industry. Said mobilization in turn fed change, as politicians began to assimilate the language (if not always the substance) of climate activism into their platforms. In the United States, this dynamic’s most iconic byproduct was the progressive left’s Green New Deal, a piece of legislation that, while never passed, did heavily influence the Biden administration’s own attempts to wean the American economy off hydrocarbons.
One might expect that, given the stratospheric heights attained by the global climate movement during this period, it must surely be one of the few political heavyweights active in the world today; surprisingly, however, one would be wrong. Indeed, as a growing chorus of observers has noted, the allure of “climate change” as a generational cause has fallen substantially compared to where it once stood. One particularly insightful postmortem in the conservative National Review contains the following puzzling numbers: whereas 51% of young women and 34% of young men in Sweden considered climate a top issue in 2019, now only 15% and 13% do, respectively. As for Europe as a whole, interest in global warming as a “top issue” has cratered from 35% in 2019 to just 10% today. In the United States, meanwhile, the situation appears little different, with those aged 18-34 having registered a 17-point decline in concern for climate change and a 20-point decline in support for “government action on climate activities” since 2018.
As before, moreover, this change in preferences has redounded to the realm of policy. Across the Western world, a rising tide of right-wing parties has pledged to undo the green reforms of their predecessors. They claim that the latter have done vanishingly little for the planet while imposing unwanted fiscal and strategic burdens on their recipient nations. In the American context, this impulse received its highest expression during the 2024 presidential race, when “climate change” ranked dead second-to-last in the suite of issues voters were asked to consider by pollsters. And on this score at least, the Trump administration has delivered, not only by blunting former president Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act, but also via claims of “reviving” the nation’s coal industry (a fuel that even oil and gas professionals agree is well past its prime). They are also threatening to invade Venezuela to put that country’s own petroleum reserves up for sale.
At this point, one could be forgiven for raising the same question Burnham did all those years ago: what the fuck is going on? Not only has the world’s trajectory on climate veered to become almost exactly opposite to what it was just a few years prior, but the very fact that it has seems not to have dawned on the vast majority of people. What gives? One possibility is that they simply moved on to bigger fish. Given that all political activity is zero-sum by nature, the moment an individual or organization begins to latch onto the latest “thing” du jour, it must necessarily sacrifice its commitment to whatever issue it had been focused on before. Thus, despite being founded as an entity notionally devoted to battling climate change, the Sunrise Movement has recently switched gears to protesting the Trump administration, declaring, “To win on climate, we must crush fascism.” Likewise, two years ago the aforementioned Thunberg ditched her climate activist bona fides to become an advocate for the Palestinians of Gaza, having claimed similarly, “For me, there is no way of distinguishing the two [climate change and Israel’s abuses against the Palestinians]. We cannot have climate justice without social justice.”
Another explanation is that the machinery of climate politics—its sprawling network of NGOs, private investors, and government agencies—often failed to make good on its central promise, i.e., keep as many unburned hydrocarbons in the ground as possible. One notable example of this phenomenon has been the habit of some wings of the climate movement to oppose renewables projects on (supposedly) environmental grounds. In Massachusetts, for example, the nonprofit Mass Audubon has come out against solar development in rural areas, citing the fact that solar projects have swallowed 5,000 acres of the state’s natural and working lands (as against 1.395 million protected acres overall) since 2010. Another nonprofit, the DC-based Citizens for Responsible Solar, has scaled Mass Audubon’s opposition to the rest of the country, with the result that rural communities nationwide have become significantly more resistant to embracing solar than they otherwise would be.
More troublingly, of the vast sums of capital that the climate movement was able to secure at its zenith, far from all were used to benefit the climate. According to a recent Free Press investigation, for example, before its current neutralization by the Trump administration, the EPA disbursed billions of dollars to various “climate”-oriented NGOs with little oversight regarding where those dollars actually went. Thus noted one review of the salaries due to be paid to members of the nonprofit coalition Power Forward Communities: “[T]he salary structure for top officers seems high for a nonprofit…wondering if this could be a problem with public perception.” Regarding peer Power Forward Communities’ estimated costs, another reviewer wrote, “I would have preferred they omitted the travel discussion and explained why they need to pay the CEO $800,000, growing to $948,000 in year 7…”
Worse still, when reporters dug into the criteria used to evaluate applicants to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), it seemed that fiscal discipline—arguably the premier concern any entity should have when spending taxpayer dollars—ranked startlingly low:
Indeed, tabulations for the nonprofits showed that they received more points for their commitment to equity and environmental justice than for their ability to oversee the funds. One of the Greenhouse Gas programs gave equity and environmental justice the same weighting as the financial analysis category, and were weighted higher than governance, legal compliance and risk management, and consumer protection.
Another beneficiary of the GGRF, Climate United Fund, put it in its 49-page cover letter: rather than focusing on how to maximize its return on investment, the fund would prioritize such things as “center[ing] equity in access in our community engagement” and “closing the equity gap in access to solar energy” (Climate United Fund would ultimately be awarded $7 billion by the Biden administration).
Given the above, then, it’s little wonder that Americans have grown fed up with mainstream climate politics. Not only has it suffered from severe mission creep in the years since its mid-2019 apex—often it was little more than an outright scam. Whether this might also be because we’ve gravely discounted the damage climate change is due to cause our species, the outcome remains clear: global warming is out, and business as usual is in.
https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-08/ncif-workplan-cuf.pdf
https://www.thefp.com/p/exclusive-internal-documents-reveal
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1154867064/solar-power-misinformation-activists-rural-america
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/2023-massachusetts-climate-report-card-natural-working-lands
https://www.massaudubon.org/our-work/publications-resources/growing-solar-protecting-nature
https://worldcrunch.com/focus/israel-palestine-war/greta-gaza-climate-justice-is-social-justice
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/movement-updates/to-win-on-climate-we-must-crush-fascism/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-european-green-deal-has-failed
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/11/the-global-warming-panic-is-subsiding