Folks, let’s stop pretending. For more than fifty years, the climate doomsdayers have been wrong. Not mostly wrong. Not partially wrong. Completely, spectacularly, zero-for-everything wrong.
According to the people keeping track, the scoreboard now stands at 0–54. Fifty-four predictions of catastrophe, famine, ice ages, flooded cities, vanished islands and the end of snow itself—and not one of them landed. Not one.
Yet these same people still demand that we surrender our economy, our energy, our cars, our steaks and our freedom for prediction number 55.
Think about that for a second. If your financial adviser had steered you into fifty-four consecutive disasters, you wouldn’t give him a fifty-fifth chance. You would fire him on the spot—and maybe call the cops.
But when the climate industrial complex misses for half a century, the media and political class treat the next scare like gospel.
That’s not science. That’s a protection racket.
Look at the greatest hits. In the late 1960s, they promised mass famine by 1975. It didn’t happen. In 1970, they warned that America would face water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. Neither ever arrived.
The 1970s and early 1980s were wall-to-wall ice-age panic. A new ice age was supposedly coming by 2000, 2020 or 2030. Satellites allegedly showed it approaching fast. Then the script flipped almost overnight, and suddenly the threat was runaway warming.
In 1988, Americans were told the Maldives would be underwater by 2018. They’re still there.
New York’s West Side Highway was supposed to be a canal by 2019. You can drive it today. In 2000, we were told children would grow up not knowing what snow looked like. Ask anyone in Buffalo how that prediction worked out.
Ice-free Arctic summers were predicted for 2013, then 2015, then 2018. We’re still waiting.
Peak oil was always five or ten years away—until it wasn’t. Super-hurricanes, fifty million climate refugees by 2020, Manhattan underwater by 2015—none of it happened.
Fifty-four swings. Fifty-four misses.
And yet the volume only gets louder. Why? Because the point was never accurate forecasting. The point was power.
That is where the real story begins.
The people pushing the most extreme timelines do not even live as though they believe them. Take one of the loudest voices of the past decade, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This is what she had to say on the subject seven years ago—listen.
That is the kind of language used to justify any amount of government control. So, what is she doing now? Planning for a life measured in decades—not years.
She is freezing her eggs.
That is not the behavior of someone who truly believes the planet will become uninhabitable within a few years. It is the behavior of someone who understands that the calendar will keep turning and wants options when it does.
The same pattern is everywhere. The people who lecture you about rising seas buy oceanfront property. The people who demand that you give up your pickup truck still fly private.
They don’t believe in the apocalypse. They believe in the politics of the apocalypse.
And the politics are the real product.
Climate change became the perfect Trojan horse for an agenda that could never win on its own merits. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, socialism needed a new costume. Environmentalism provided it.
Paint the free market as the destroyer of the planet, and suddenly every expansion of government looks like self-defense. Every new regulation, industrial policy and wealth transfer can be sold as necessary for planetary survival.
Doomsday is the lubricant.
Listen to how the newest socialist stars talk about it. They do not separate climate change from the rest of the left’s wish list. They stack it alongside everything else and label the entire package an existential emergency.
Here is Democratic Socialist nominee Melat Kiros.
When a rising Democratic Socialist frames climate change, artificial intelligence and opposition to her own political movement as part of the same “end times” crisis, the mask slips.
The science is secondary. The crisis is the excuse.
The goal is the same centralized control Rush Limbaugh diagnosed more than thirty years ago. In 1992, he warned that the environmental movement was becoming the new home of socialism. He was right then, and the evidence has only piled higher since.
The constant cry of catastrophe allows the left to demand more government, more planning and more power over the choices of ordinary Americans. Without the doomsday soundtrack, the entire sales pitch collapses.
Listen to Rush say it as only he could during an on-air debate with Al Gore.
Exactly. The doomsday predictions are the battering ram. Once people accept that the end is near unless government takes the wheel, every argument about freedom, markets or personal responsibility can be shouted down as “denial.”
That’s the game.
And the hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Last year at the United Nations, President Donald Trump called it out in front of the entire world. He took aim at the same elites who jet around the globe lecturing everyone else about carbon footprints while living large themselves.
He described the pattern perfectly. The people who tell you to freeze in the dark still want their own comfort. The people who insist that your children must inherit a poorer, colder and more restricted life continue planning for their own prosperous futures.
The carbon-footprint lecture is for thee, not for me.
Even some green-energy true believers are beginning to admit the practical limits. One of Britain’s most prominent renewable-energy entrepreneurs recently acknowledged that fossil fuels will remain part of the energy system for decades—and that pure ideology cannot wish that reality away.
When the people who built their fortunes on green energy start acknowledging the necessity of the conventional energy sector, the doomsday narrative takes another hit.
Reality has a way of intruding.
So, where does that leave us?
With a movement that is 0–54 on its predictions, led by people who do not live as though their predictions are true—and whose solutions always require more power in the hands of the same political class that has been catastrophically wrong for half a century.
Now they want you to trade your freedom for prediction number 55.
They want you to accept higher prices, lower reliability, slower growth and tighter control because—trust them—this time the models are different. This time, the experts have finally gotten it right.
History says otherwise.
The American way says otherwise.
We do not organize our economy around the latest scare. We organize it around human ingenuity, abundant energy and the freedom to build. We innovate our way out of problems instead of surrendering to them.
We drill. We refine. We invent. We adapt.
That is how a free people confront risk. That is how America raised living standards while making its air and water cleaner. And that is how we will continue moving forward.
The doomsdayers have had their turn. Fifty-four predictions later, the world is still here, still growing and still full of people who refuse to live on their knees.
Don’t hand them prediction number 55.
Don’t hand them your freedom.
Tell them the streak is over. Tell them America is not for sale—and neither is the future.