The Politico lament titled “‘We’ve lost the culture war on climate’” offers a rare moment of clarity from within the echo chamber of environmental orthodoxy.

“There’s no way around it,” admits Jody Freeman, former climate advisor to Barack Obama. “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement”.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/trump-biden-obama-climate-regulations-legacy-00395857

But she—and the authors—never pause to ask why the war was lost. The answer isn’t about political maneuvering or industry lobbying. It’s much simpler: the left sacrificed the last of its credibility during COVID, and no amount of apocalyptic climate branding can bring it back.

COVID: The Bonfire of the Authorities

The same people who now ask Americans to trust sweeping climate rules are the ones who insisted lockdowns would “stop the spread,” that cloth masks were life-saving talismans, and that vaccines prevented transmission. They suppressed dissent, gaslit the public, and rewrote yesterday’s lies into today’s mandates.

During COVID, the American public witnessed a catastrophic failure of expertise—not in science per se, but in institutional honesty. Bureaucrats contradicted themselves weekly, all while pretending infallibility. “The science” was less about the evidence and more about control. And when people began asking why, they were called dangerous.

Now those same voices return with charts, forecasts, and pleas for regulation, insisting that failing to curb CO2 will be a disaster.

“Failing to curb power plants’ pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity.”.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/trump-biden-obama-climate-regulations-legacy-00395857

Sound familiar?

That narrative structure—the breathless projection of catastrophe, the rigid insistence on compliance, the moral castigation of skeptics—is precisely what Americans no longer believe. Because they’ve seen the machinery behind it. And they’re not going back.

Market Reality, Not Mandates, Is Driving Change

Even Politico’s own article unwittingly undermines its narrative. It acknowledges that coal use has plummeted—from 48.5% of electricity in 2007 to just 15% in 2024—while emissions from power plants have dropped by 38%. These outcomes didn’t come from the Clean Power Plan, which never took effect. They came from natural gas abundance, fracking, and market evolution.

This makes Freeman’s despair particularly telling. It’s not that emissions aren’t falling. It’s that people no longer think we need the state to manage every molecule to make it happen.

Even the Supreme Court, hardly a bastion of climate denial, ruled in 2022 that agencies like the EPA can’t regulate major sectors of the economy without direct congressional authorization. That wasn’t climate skepticism. It was constitutional hygiene.

Likewise, the rollback of Biden’s power plant rules by Trump’s EPA isn’t radical. It’s the legal and political reality catching up to a skeptical public—one that now sees through the moral panic.

When Narrative Control Fails, the Spell Breaks

The left didn’t just lose the policy fight. They lost control of the frame. And part of that collapse came from an unexpected source: the decensorship of Twitter.

When Elon Musk took the reins of the world’s most influential digital square, he didn’t just fire a few moderators. He exposed a vast censorship regime—one in which government agencies, NGOs, and media gatekeepers worked to suppress dissent. This included not just COVID heresies but also climate skepticism, criticism of electric vehicle mandates, and questions about energy grid reliability.

Suddenly, voices long deemed “dangerous” were heard again. Questions that were once unspeakable became unignorable.

It wasn’t just about free speech for its own sake. It was about breaking the illusion of consensus. Musk didn’t create a movement; he let the light in on one that already existed, long denied by a rigged system. And once people saw it, they couldn’t unsee it.

Control Versus Trust

The Politico piece is filled with laments over lost tools of control. Court rulings. Congressional gridlock. Executive rollback. But the unspoken truth is this: those tools only worked when they were shielded by trust. And trust died not with a bang, but with a thousand flip-flops—on masks, on mandates, on lockdowns, on model projections.

Now, climate advocates find themselves in the same boat, still peddling apocalyptic certainty while the public shrugs. They’ve been told the end is nigh for decades. They’ve watched the goalposts move. They’ve endured every hot day being labeled a harbinger of doom—only to see emissions fall and prosperity continue.

They’ve also noticed that every “solution” somehow involves more regulation, less choice, and more power for the people who got it wrong last time.

You Can’t Guilt People Who No Longer Trust You

Politico’s article ends by framing the next four years as potentially “lost” on climate. But that assumes something essential: that the public still wants to be led by the same cast of characters. They don’t.

The war is over not because people deny that climate changes, or that humans play a role. It’s over because they deny the credibility of those claiming to solve it. The culture war wasn’t lost in a courtroom. It was lost in the empty supermarket aisles of lockdown-era America, and in the liberated feed of a post-censorship Twitter.

You can’t guilt people who no longer trust you. You can’t control a culture that no longer listens. And you can’t regulate your way out of a credibility crisis.

The only way forward is honesty, humility, and a firm end to the presumption that “the experts” always know best. Until then, the war is not just lost—it’s unwinnable.

Whilst on a long car journey the other day, I was listening to BBC radio (I can’t remember now whether it was Radio 4 or the World Service, though I suspect it was the latter), when I heard a piece about a shortage of rice in Japan. I settled down to wait for the link to climate change, but it wasn’t forthcoming. What’s going on?

Having heard nothing more about it, I thought I would see if I could find out what the story is. It didn’t take me long to find an article that appeared on the Guardian’s website yesterday. The main headline seemed to fit the bill for what I regarded as the inevitable “climate crisis” angle: “Against the grain: as prices and temperatures rise, can Japan learn to love imported rice?”. However, the sub-title seemed to hint at a more nuanced story: “The political and cultural insulation of Japan’s beloved grain is falling apart, and experts warn the country’s relationship with the staple will have to adapt”.

Yes, the article does insert what is now an almost obligatory reference to adverse weather conditions (“Stockpiles, already depleted by record-breaking temperatures that affected the 2023 crop…”), but that’s just about all it has to say about weather or climate. It turns out that this is a story about protectionism, tight government control of rice stocks, soaring prices, pressure on household budgets, competition from abroad, panic buying in the wake of typhoon and earthquake warnings, and even demand from record numbers of tourists. There certainly doesn’t seem to be a shortage of rice globally, for suddenly Vietnam appears to be exporting four times as much rice to Japan as it did last year, South Korean rice is appearing on Japanese shelves, Taiwan’s exports to Japan are six times higher than in the first five months of 2024, and rice is even arriving in Japan from California. Stockpiled rice from harvests in 2020, 2021 and 2022 (which were presumably more than adequate) have also been released by the government.

Rice shortages in Japan, though, aren’t anything new. The article advises that there was a catastrophic crop failure in 1993. Wikipedia tells us that the 1993 rice shortage was due to a record setting cold summer” that year, so they probably can’t blame it on climate change. Mind you, it does sound as though rice weather is like the porridge in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and has to be just right – too cold in 1993, too hot last year, both years saw crop failures. Then again, was the heat really the problem last year? The same Wikipedia article suggests that “There was a heat wave in 1994 where the rice yields recovered and by the end of 1994, the situation had been resolved”. .

Another Guardian article last year again blamed the Japanese rice shortfall on hot weather last year and demand from tourists. That article inserted a new factor – changing diets that then changed back again, but after the agricultural damage had been done:

As diets in Japan become more westernised, demand for rice has fallen. Amid the country’s demographic crisis, lower rice prices have discouraged younger people from becoming farmers of the cereal, resulting in increasingly elderly growers and abandoned rice paddies giving way to nature and nearby wildlife, the Mainichi reports.

However, demand for rice rose to 7m tons between June 2023 and last month, up 100,000 tons from a year earlier and the first rise in 10 years. During the same period, foreign tourists more than doubled compared with a year earlier. Japan welcomed 17.78 million tourists in the first half of 2024, a million more than pre-pandemic levels, figures showed earlier this month.

And then I thought to myself that having first heard about the story on BBC Radio, there must also be an article somewhere on the BBC website. And it turns out that there is, from 21^st May 2025. By and large it confirms the stories that appeared in the Guardian last year and this, but then, comfortingly, normal service was restored:

The cost of rice is also soaring in South East Asia, which accounts for almost 30% of global rice production – economic, political and climate pressures have resulted in shortages in recent years.

Of course, absolutely no attempt is made to provide context or to explain how and why climate pressures have been a contributory factor in shortages in recent years. Indeed, thanks to the internet, it doesn’t take long to find an article from Thailand with the headline “Global rice production forecast for 2024/25 raised to record high. We also learn:

Global rice production for the 2024/25 season has been revised upwards by 3.1 million tonnes to a record 535.8 million tonnes (milled basis), nearly 3% higher than last year.

According to the Rice Outlook: April 2025 report by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), global ending stocks for 2024/25 have been increased by 1.7 million tonnes from the previous forecast, reaching 183.2 million tonnes. These stock revisions are largely concentrated in Southeast Asia, with upward adjustments for Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

India accounts for the bulk of the year-on-year increase in global ending stocks, with its reserves up by 1.5 million tonnes compared to the previous year. China’s ending stocks for 2024/25 are projected to remain unchanged at 103.5 million tonnes—the largest in the world—comprising 56% of total global rice stocks.

The report also highlights that global rice supplies for 2024/25 are projected to reach a record 715.3 million tonnes, an increase of 3.1 million tonnes from the previous forecast. This represents a year-on-year growth of 12.3 million tonnes and marks the second consecutive annual rise.

In other words, there is no climate change issue affecting rice growth, either globally or in south east Asia. For good measure, Our World in Data confirms that Japan’s issue is declining areas of land dedicated to rice cultivation, while rice yield per hectare in Japan has remained broadly constant over the last ten years.

I am perhaps being a little unfair, since apart from short (but apparently obligatory) references to climate change in articles produced by both the Guardian and the BBC, nobody is making a big deal about climate change in the context of this rather strange story. However, it’s worth making the point that economic, social, demographic, land use and other factors can often supply a more coherent story about issues such as this, with climate change trailing a long way behind (if it applies at all) as a factor. It certainly isn’t climate change “what done it”.

Footnote

The title to this article sprang to mind when I recalled my own visit to Japan, when I attended the football world cup there in 2002. At one England match a particularly (and by Japanese standards, unusually) portly security officer kept making an appearance on the terraces. Whenever he appeared, the England fans delighted in baiting him rather cruelly with a revised version of an old classic – “Who ate all the rice?”