The Desperate Attempt to Save the Climate Alarm Narrative

Dr Tilak Doshi dismantles the latest alarmist arguments with cold, hard facts

Aaron Regunberg’s essay ‘Why Climate Politics Can’t Wait‘ published last week in Boston Review reads as an anxious sermon aimed at wavering Democratic strategists as the mid-term elections approach. Its target is what the party’s own consultants now call ‘climate hushing’ — the quiet retreat from apocalyptic messaging.

As Matt Huber recently wrote in the New York Times, “The Democratic Party remains deeply unpopular. The way out is to stop elevating a litany of single-issue policies that appeal to the already converted. When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.” Huber, like his compatriots on the Left, argues that Democratic advocacy on climate has pushed working people away from the party and that rebuilding a working-class base requires dropping the fight for climate action. New York’s Kathy Hochul, California’s Gavin Newsom, and a growing list of other Democrats – the party’s hitherto leading climate change ideologues – have concluded that talking incessantly about decarbonisation is an electoral liability rather than an asset for the party.

The Boston Review is not some marginal activist newsletter. Founded in 1975 and published in partnership with MIT, it has spent five decades as one of the American Left’s most serious intellectual addresses — the venue where figures like Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen and Cornel West have published, and where the ‘Boston Review Forum‘ format has shaped how progressive policy elites argue with each other. When something appears there, it is aimed not at swing voters but at the strategists, academics and staffers who set the intellectual agenda for the Democratic Party’s activist wing. That is what makes Aaron Regunberg’s essay worth taking seriously. It is not a fringe complaint. It is the progressive intelligentsia’s own attempt to talk its elected officials out of the very retreat from climate messaging that voters have been rewarding at the ballot box.

Regunberg’s essay leans heavily on the idea that this year’s Strait of Hormuz war has finally handed climate advocates the perfect argument: “Sunlight does not have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and nobody ever went to war over wind.” He catalogues three arguments for “hushing” and sets out to demolish each. He fails at all three rebuttals, and the manner of his failure is instructive: concede a little ground to reality, then argue with great sophistication that nothing should actually change with respect to aggressive decarbonisation policies.