STEVE HAYWARD: The Death Rattle of Apocalyptic Environmentalism. The era of apocalyptic environmentalism is fading, and its recycled doomsday warnings now sound more desperate than dire:

This kind of climate obsession won’t disappear quickly or easily, but it ignores how radically the ground was shifting even before Bill Gates delivered his hammer blow. None of the American TV news networks, for example, sent reporters to this year’s COP, and major print media are rapidly cutting back on climate coverage. A few reporters at the conference filed stories wondering whether this would be the last COP meeting.

The arrival of “abundance liberalism” (discussed here previously) gingerly repudiated climate catastrophism and embraced increased production of conventional hydrocarbon energy, but the young advocates of abundance liberalism, like Ezra Klein, probably don’t realize that instead of being something new, they are actually a throwback to a nearly forgotten kind of liberalism. And therein lies a long story arc of the last two generations.

The liberalism of the 1960s under President John F. Kennedy was formally called “growth liberalism.” While the main component was a justification for Keynesian-based “fine-tuning” of the economy, the overall goal was growth — lots of it. It’s why Kennedy embraced tax cuts: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

But then, by the end of the 1960s, Thomas Malthus suddenly appeared to nudge Keynes aside. The “limits to growth” suddenly became the dominant idea: we were running out of natural resources (and soon), and we were killing ourselves with pollution. Typical of the time was a Newsweek magazine cover story featuring an empty horn of plenty with the ominous headline, “Running Out of Everything?” Which would end us first? Humanity was doomed unless economic growth was slowed or stopped. Neither claim was correct: we weren’t running out of natural resources, and effective pollution control technologies were soon developed, albeit usually at high cost, excessive bureaucracy, and litigation. The age of “decoupling” had arrived; that is, economic growth proved perfectly compatible with — if not the precondition of — continued resource development and rapidly falling pollution.

The left have been in combined state of permanent malaise and eco-apocalypticism since the late 1960s. Partially spurred on by Silicon Valley realizing the enormous power costs of AI and the sheer exhaustion of almost 60 years of doomsday rhetoric, perhaps they can finally retire this self-defeating worldview.