Hate the headline of the WSJ article- it's misleading. Since climate changes.But, do realize that AGW had to be rebranded into "climate change" in order to continue to sell the chosen concept. "Climate change" was chosen to represent the acceptable obfuscation of our managed reality.Archive link via wattsupwiththat?A few excerpts below:
A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ” Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades. The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out.This outcome was predictable. Political scientist Anthony Downs described the downward trajectory of many political movements in an article for the Public Interest, “Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’ ” published in 1972, long before the climate-change campaign began. Observing the movements that had arisen to address issues like crime, poverty and even the U.S.-Soviet space race, Mr. Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political issues pass regularly. The first stage involves groups of experts and activists calling attention to a public problem, which leads quickly to the second stage, wherein the alarmed media and political class discover the issue. The second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call it the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and salvation. This tendency explains the fanaticism with which divinity-school dropouts Al Gore and Jerry Brown have warned of climate change. Then comes the third stage: the hinge. As Mr. Downs explains, there soon comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” That’s where we’ve been since the United Nations’ traveling climate circus committed itself to the fanatical mission of massive near-term reductions in fossil fuel consumption, codified in unrealistic proposals like the Kyoto Protocol. This third stage, Mr. Downs continues, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.” While opinion surveys find that roughly half of Americans regard climate change as a problem, the issue has never achieved high salience among the public, despite the drumbeat of alarm from the climate campaign. Americans have consistently ranked climate change the 19th or 20th of 20 leading issues on the annual Pew Research Center poll, while Gallup’s yearly survey of environmental issues typically ranks climate change far behind air and water pollution.“In the final stage,” Mr. Downs concludes, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” Mr. Downs predicted correctly that environmental issues would suffer this decline, because solving such issues involves painful trade-offs that committed climate activists would rather not make.Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics. "Causes that live by politics, die by politics"
And AGW was always about power politics. And I don't mean energy- I mean the powerful people pushing their political agendas on the rest of us. From it's inception to this very day. Let's go back to a couple 2009 posts from this very blog!
Big Polluters (OIL) to reap the BENEFITS of climate deal
Big energy and engineering companies will reap most profit from a climate deal due in December, as they use their financial and intellectual clout to grab low carbon subsidies-Utilities and oil companies, among the biggest polluters, are using their market awareness to stay ahead of a climate race, manoeuvring to own the most viable low-carbon technologies.-In addition, they are a natural magnet for government incentives (not a surprise)-CCS(carbon, capture and sequstration) is receiving billions of dollars but may take a decade to develop. It is popular with big corporates as a bolt-on to coal plants which may use depleted oil wells to store carbon dioxide
Carbon, the new energy commodity
Under his plan, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission would have the authority to regulate carbon derivatives as an energy commodity."The carbon derivatives market should be based on a strong regulatory framework," Stupak said. "The finite nature of carbon credits and absence of a physical commodity leave it particularly vulnerable to speculation."