STEVE HAYWARD: The Nadir of the Climate Change Movement.

At this point, someone might well raise the question of whether Trump’s moves will last or whether they will be promptly reversed by the next Democratic administration, for whom the “climate crisis” will remain a core priority (or whether some of Trump’s proposed changes will encounter a legal roadblock). This is a plausible scenario until we consider the startling proposition that the Trump Administration’s moves are, in fact, a lagging indicator of where the climate change story has been heading for some time now, unrecognized by the media and most politicians.

Climate change has been the premier environmental issue for almost 40 years now and appears to be running through what the eminent political scientist Anthony Downs identified in a classic 1971 article in The Public Interest as “the issue-attention cycle.” Downs outlined a five-stage cycle through which political issues of all kinds typically progress.  Experts and interest groups begin promoting a problem or crisis, which is soon followed by the alarmed discovery of the news media and broader political class.  This second stage, significantly, typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call this the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue regarding global salvation and redemption. (Al Gore is the premier example of this aspect of climate change.)

Then comes the third or “hinge” stage, where there is “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.”  This is where we have been with climate change from almost the beginning. “The previous stage,” Downs continued, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.”  Then, in the fifth or “final [post-problem] stage,” Downs concluded, “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.”

Climate change has arrived at Downs’ fifth stage. Despite billions spent for climate crisis agitprop, the backing of a compliant media, the surrender of much of big business (including many fossil fuel companies), and the endless braying of opportunist politicians, opinion surveys consistently find that the public does not buy the “climate crisis,” ranking it at the bottom or next to the bottom of their major issue concerns.

Downs predicted in his article—written less than a year after the first Earth Day launched the modern environmental activist movement—that the issue-attention cycle for environmental issues would be longer than for most other matters, which has certainly proved to be the case for climate change.

Read the whole thing.