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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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And my experience with right wingers is that they often don't view climate change as a serious problem demanding urgent and resource-intensive action.

This is a Motte and Bailey, though. There's a big difference between 'dramatic climate change is/would be a serious problem and we should make efforts to ameliorate it' and 'Standard Leftist approaches to Climate Change make any sense whatsoever and we should all Greta Thunberg together as one'. I do know some people on the Right who think that Climate Change is totally not happening, and I know a lot more who think that it's an incredibly complicated topic that the incentives of Alarmists around means that sloppy science tends to happen a lot and that the vast majority of proposals/other interests of the Leftblob means they're frequently wildly counterproductive. Strong campaigns targeted at dictating the behaviors of affluent countries with tiny population whilst the developing world just kinda gets left to do whatever they feel like and supported to breed unchecked make no sense

And yet I cannot think of a single policy designed by the right to explicitly fight against climate change. Sure, the right wants more nuclear power plants, but the stated reasons are sovereign energy production and supporting datacenters. When it comes to policies with the stated purpose of fighting climate change, all I have seen happen for decades is the left proposing and the right rejecting. Right wing politicians will need to actually propose serious policies for me to believe they care.

Trumps actual policies on climate change:

  • make permitting easier, for nuclear, solar, natgas, etc
  • legalize smaller cars/pickup trucks
  • stop using the power of government to hinder the one guy who is electrifying transportation (to protect left wing cronies in the UAW)

Obama/Biden policies:

  • small trucks are quietly banned
  • subsidies for green-sojnding projects, which get blocked at permitting
  • hinder natural gas, which mostly replaces much worse forms of fossil fuel
  • block nuclear
  • impose silly constraints on industrial projects, including green energy (to get the subsidies you must hire x% women or similar)
  • funnel money to purportedly green boondoggles like CA high speed rail (0 miles of track built)

Are you looking for actual policy? Or do you just want trump to say "climate change is bad and somehow related to freeing Palestine"?

Trump exiting the Paris agreement is in my view the single most damaging thing he could have done. It was the one deal that guaranteed some degree of international cooperation, which is absolutely essential to reduce global emissions. He has also halted renewable energy projects (specifically he cancelled a contract with Vestas) and has worked to increase production of oil and natural gas.

Are you looking for actual policy?

I am looking for actual policies with the explicit purpose of fighting climate change. Something right wingers don't do. They may propose policies which incidentally help, such as making it easier to build nuclear reactors, but the actual purpose is always something else. In combination with stuff like what I wrote above, I can only conclude that climate change is not a priority for the right.

It was the one deal that guaranteed some degree of international cooperation, which is absolutely essential to reduce global emissions.

You're laughing mate. The Paris Accords had no enforcement mechanism and did not include the largest polluters. It was pure virtue signaling.

Leftist climate policy actually gives credence to Trump's claim that climate change was a hoax invented by China, since it seems China is the one benefiting from Western nations crippling their own energy infrastructures.

They may propose policies which incidentally help, such as making it easier to build nuclear reactors, but the actual purpose is always something else. In combination with stuff like what I wrote above, I can only conclude that climate change is not a priority for the right.

While this is true, I think it's barely less true of the left. The left is a lot more willing to say their policies have the explicit purpose of fighting climate change... But that's because that's an applause light on the left, not because it's true. The only realistic solution is stratospheric aerosol injection. It costs basically nothing, demands no seismic shifts in anyone's way of life, and can even trivially undo the warming that's already occurred -- the 'serious' proposals for CO2 sequestration are, generously, in the trillion-dollars-a-year-for-a-century range. For half a degree of cooling. And that's after we zero out emissions with trillions more spent and likely severe reductions in quality of life for half the globe and stunting the development of the other half too.

The biggest downside -- that we'd be in a lot of trouble if industrial society totally collapsed -- is, uh, kind of redundant. I can't imagine a situation where industrial society could totally collapse without us already being in a great deal of trouble. Billions of deaths are guaranteed regardless, so maybe we should focus on not letting that happen? The other downsides are just as uncompelling: It might affect weather, but we don't know how (and if it proved disastrous, we could just stop). It would... make the sky more cloudy? There are other, more specific objections to specifically sulfates, they're 1. not the only option, just the example of the phenomenon nature has provided us and 2. also not that bad.

Seriously, if we'd just started doing this in the 80s, global warming would be a footnote, a factoid about a minor problem we used to have like ozone layer depletion. The idea it'd be a live issue in the culture war is laughable; if you brought it up, 95% of people wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about. (Environmentalism surely still would be, but it would all be about habitat destruction and peak oil.) The cost is a rounding error in the budget of any developed nation, the required international cooperation, while not none, isn't particularly onerous, and the effect can be easily tuned to our requirements.

And what has the drive to reduce emissions accomplished? Well, it hasn't actually reduced emissions -- slowed their rate of rise, sure, but just holding steady (which we're still not near) isn't good enough; the only way to achieve a stable climate with this approach is to zero out (net) emissions altogether, which is a fantasy. Even the UN gap report on the effects of the US leaving the Paris Agreement, which assumes it would have met its targets (it wouldn't have) predicts a 0.1 degree impact over the next 75 years. That's what you're complaining about?

The moment we decide we actually want to solve the problem, SAI will reduce global temperatures by 1.0 degrees within a year or two. Until then, I can only conclude that no one really does want to solve it.

You are skipping over that he did stop the federal subsidy for EVs, which, I know, subsidies don't actually make EVs cheaper, it just spreads the cost around. But if you believe, as many people do, that the externalities of gas vehicules are not being captured by the cost their users pay (and it's not just the environmental externalities, but the geopolitical ones too) and that those externalities are being paid by society at large anyway, then EV subsidies feel more like evening the playing field than robbing non-EV drivers to pay for EVs.