If science is to act usefully as a public good, it is as a reality check on political and social folly. Crafting a sound energy policy, for example, should be informed by the laws of thermodynamics and Maxwell’s equations. For roughly the past three decades, however, our political custodians have been crafting energy policy around something like phlogiston, that mythical “fire substance” that alchemists said permeates all matter. Thus, we have the phantasmagorical dreams of windmills, solar panels, rainbows, and flowers actually being taken seriously among alarmingly large swathes of policymakers, politicians, cultural elites, and a compliant public. In this determined pursuit of folly, great expense and effort have been expended to cultivate an army of scientific apologists who were prepared to argue that, you know, maybe there’s something to this phlogiston thing after all.

This determined pursuit of phlogiston folly was justified by its own golden tablets myth, the so-called greenhouse gas endangerment finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), issued in 2009. So began one of the greatest scientific betrayals of public trust of all time. In 209 pages of impressive tables, graphs, and computer projections, this bureaucratic doorstop outlined the dire consequences that would follow if the government did not seize total control of the world’s energy economy. Here’s a partial list:

• People would die.
• Infectious and parasitic diseases would rise.
• Heat waves would wipe out the chronically sick and very young.
• Cold waves would polish off the remainder.
• There would be more storms, floods, and droughts.
• Forests would be wiped out by fires and insect pests.
• Asthma would spread.
• Crops will fail, and famine will ensue.
• Weeds would spread.
• Livestock would be decimated.
• Water scarcity would worsen.
• Fisheries would collapse.
• Sea levels would rise.
• Energy production would decline.
• Nuclear power plants would melt.
• Island nations would sink like Atlantis beneath the rising waves.
• Vulnerable ecosystems would collapse.
• Birds would be deprived of nests.
• Butterflies would be no more.
• Oceans would become acidic baths that would dissolve coral reefs.
• Polar bears would starve and die.
• Indian tribes would be hardest hit.

None of it was true.

The website Watts Up With That? has provided a handy timeline—with receipts—of all the failed dire climate predictions since 1966. Reading them evokes a mix of amusement and despair. On the amusing side sits the Swedish doom goblin, Greta Thunberg. Despite her pretensions to be the climate Joan of Arc, she is more a tinpot Aimee Semple McPherson, cooking up ever more zany schemes to keep the spotlight on her and—unlike Joan of Arc—the donations flowing in. One can, if pushed, understand why supposedly sober world “leaders” fell for her schtick, avariciousness and vacuity being the admission tickets into their elite club. But what about the alleged 98 percent of scientists who were roped in? What explains them?

The most charitable explanation is crowd-following. Scientists, like everyone else, have a natural fear of being outside the social “consensus,” a fear that in extremis, gives rise to the madness of crowds and mass delusions, like the Salem witch trials. In his film Inherit the Wind, Stanley Kramer tried to cast the anti-evolution movement that swept the early 20th-century South as a latter-day Salem. It was a bogus historical (hysterical?) narrative. In 2006, former vice president Al Gore tried to pull off a similar trick with his own cinematic adventure, An Inconvenient Truth, which prompted a mass hysteria of its own, among its baleful products, the EPA’s endangerment finding.

Science is supposed to be the antidote for this, but more often than not, it feeds the mass mania, because scientists are as susceptible to the madness of crowds as anyone. In the early 20^th century, for example, eugenics was the “settled science” of its day, much like we have been told that “climate science” is presently. In the 1920s, virtually the entire scientific elite was on board with eugenics, swept up in the enthusiasm of the then-emerging science of genetics. It proved to be a passing scientific fancy: the scientific “consensus” behind eugenics had largely fallen apart by the 1930s. But its baleful political effects lasted far longer. Eugenics-inspired forced sterilization laws remained on the books in several states for another 40 years, an object lesson for why we should be glad that scientists do not rule the world. (Our own era has its analogues beyond climate change.)

When it comes to the mass scientific delusion of climate change, however, the prospective damage is far worse because there is a great deal more power and money at stake. Estimates of the cost of mitigating “climate change” range from $1 trillion to $10 trillion annually, which dangles an irresistible bauble to politicians who equate spending with solutions. All that spending will have a negligible effect on the climate, of course, but it will support a vast network of grift, to favored companies, favored NGOs, and governments that, to be clear, are trading in phlogiston. This includes the network of colleges and universities, government funding agencies, and publishing houses that elsewhere we have named the Big Science Cartel.

The EPA’s endangerment finding was the root of much of this mischief, and the recent decision to revoke it was a long-overdue act of political and scientific hygiene. We should not, however, mistake it for a stake in the heart of climate mania. Like those eugenics-inspired forced sterilization laws, climate panic has penetrated so deeply into the culture that it will march on, continuing to do damage, even if federal policy is no longer feeding it. It continues to fester at the state and local levels.  

Here’s a local story from where I live. The newly-elected Democrat mayor of Syracuse, Sharon Owens, has made “addressing climate change” a priority of her new administration. To be fair, she is just renewing a commitment to “sustainability,” another zombie idea that won’t go away. It should be noted that Syracuse can do nothing meaningful to “address climate change” other than to say hello. The city’s “carbon footprint” amounts to 0.00015 percent of total global CO2 emissions, so nothing that the city of Syracuse can do will have the slightest effect on “climate change.” Rather, it’s a means of garnering political influence. You have to dig deep to find it, however.

A major part of Mayor Owens’s climate initiative is “urban forestry”—a fashionable term for planting trees in cities. Syracuse is actually in pretty good shape on this score: about 27 percent of its land area is already tree-covered. But there’s money in search of a crisis, and New York State has $15 million of urban forestry grants to hand out. Mayor Owens is ready to step up.

Her plan, it should be emphasized, is not to plant trees, but to craft a master plan to plant trees—naturally informed by scientific expertise. Which costs money. Among the results: an inventory of all trees in Syracuse—about 1.5 million—including a database of precise locations for 48,350 of them. The master plan’s ambitions are modest: raise tree cover from 27 percent to 30 percent over ten years. That requires planting five trees each working day for a decade. The same goal could be attained by asking each of the city’s 146,000 residents to plant one tree about every decade, hardly a big ask. But there’s money to be had for climate mitigation, and there will always be politicians willing to blow it.

While Syracuse’s tree drama has a comic opera air around it, the climate mania also plays out as a raw grab of state power over local autonomy. I live in one of the glacial valleys of upstate New York that, for want of a well-placed glacial drumlin, would be one of the state’s finger lakes. As part of its climate mitigation plan, the state of New York is pushing to convert the state’s energy infrastructure to achieve “net zero.” This means decommissioning coal- and natural-gas-fired power plants and replacing them with solar and wind power generation. Inexplicably, the state’s master plan also calls for decommissioning nuclear power plants—even while nuclear-powered American warships steam toward Iran—but hey, there’s that phlogiston thinking again.

Climate, being an “existential crisis,” the state of New York expects all citizens to do their part. For my neck of the woods, this means accepting the placement of 24 massive wind turbines along the ridges of my valley. The project goes by the ironic name of Maple Harvest.

The boards of the three towns where Maple Harvest would plonk its massive concrete feet are adamantly opposed. Raw NIMBYism plays a part, but there are also serious concerns about the unstable soils of the glacial moraines where the turbines would be installed. Operations of the many local dairy farms would also be disrupted. Normally, local zoning laws would stop a project like Maple Harvest in its tracks. But part of the state’s climate mitigation plan includes a provision to override local zoning laws if the state determines there is a “climate emergency,” which, of course, the state has determined there is, never mind what the EPA now says. So, those turbines are going in, no matter what the local residents have to say. One wonders about the money changing hands to keep that grift going.

So, while we give thanks to Lee Zeldin for driving a stake through the heart of the EPA’s greenhouse gas endangerment finding, the climate zombie marches on, fed by money, influence, and the ever-present political self-aggrandizement. Science has so far been unable to stop this zombie’s march. Where science has failed, maybe a fierce pack of liability lawyers will do the trick, now that citizens can sue state and local governments, something they could not have done had the endangerment finding remained in place.

Follow J. Scott Turner on X.