Climate Policy Without Adult Supervision
Climate change is a serious problem being addressed, in many capitals, with unserious politics. On one side, you have apocalypse entrepreneurs whose business model depends on permanent crisis, every storm, fire, or heatwave repackaged as final proof that we are “out of time.” On the other, you have professional deniers who’ve built a cottage industry around insisting the entire scientific enterprise is a global hoax, as if tens of thousands of researchers have conspired primarily to sell you an induction stove.
Between these two shrill poles lies the neglected territory of adult policy: acknowledging climate risk without outsourcing energy decisions to performative activists or petro-authoritarians. That middle ground would accept a few unfashionable truths. First, global emissions are a math problem, not a morality play. Second, modern economies run on reliable, dense energy; slogans cannot power grids. Third, if you push costs onto the working and middle classes in the name of “saving the planet,” you will lose them, and they will elect people who promise to tear the whole agenda up.
Real climate seriousness looks very different from the current theater. It means aggressively permitting nuclear plants rather than treating them as exotic hazards. It means incentivizing innovation across the board, carbon capture, advanced geothermal, better storage, while recognizing that fossil fuels will remain part of the mix for decades. Furthermore, it means being honest that manufacturing millions of “green” technologies requires mining, refining, and geopolitically messy supply chains that we should want to control, not outsource to regimes with fewer scruples.
Most of all, it means treating citizens as grown-ups. If the public hears only absolutist demands (“and fossil fuels now”) and apocalyptic deadlines, they will eventually tune out, sensing, correctly, that the politics is untethered from practical reality. A durable climate strategy must survive elections, recessions, and technological surprises. That won’t happen until grown-ups reclaim the conversation from both the professional alarmists and the professional contrarians, and start talking in the language of trade-offs rather than fantasies.
