YES, PLEASE: When It Comes to Climate and Energy, Let’s Retire the Politics of Fear.

Sometimes it feels like the climate change crusaders are oblivious to everything going on around them. For decades, they’ve been resorting to the same tired strategies to convince us that doom and gloom are just around the corner if we don’t change our ways. What they ignore is that their tactics aren’t working – more people than ever are tuning them out.

Americans in particular have grown wise to the predictions that don’t come true and the demands that don’t make sense. In fact, so badly has science become blatantly politicized that the number of people who have a great amount of trust in science keeps shrinking.

That fact was backed up by a recent Pew Research Center report that found that “Americans’ confidence in scientists remains lower than it was prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.” To many of us, it is now obvious that the inconsistent guidance on Covid and many pandemic edicts that were later found to be ineffective and even misleading demonstrated that science was not above being overtly politicized.

While the Pew study noted a Democrat-Republican disparagement regarding trust in science (Democrats trust it more, Republicans less), only 28 percent of all U.S. adults said they have “a great deal” of confidence in scientists “to act in the public’s best interest.”

It didn’t used to be that way — and it wasn’t the public that changed.