In a long, drawn-out piece that warmed my heart, The New York Times Magazine, a climate activist and journalist waxed poetic about the awful reality that world leaders are quietly, or not so quietly, abandoning climate change and “sustainable development” as key issues in their agendas.
David Wallace-Wells’ piece goes into detail about all the ways that people who once touted NetZeto and who made extravagant promises about transforming the economies of the world into green energy powerhouses are now reversing course, although not fast enough for my taste.
Paris wasn’t just a brief flare of climate optimism. To many, it looked like the promise of a whole new era, not just for the climate but also for our shared political future on this earth. Back then, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, liked to talk about how sustainability would be for this century what human rights was for the previous one — the basis for a new moral and political order. His successor, António Guterres, turned out to be an even more emphatic climate advocate, treating the Paris Agreement as though its significance approached, if not exceeded, that of the U.N. charter itself.
By design, the treaty wasn’t a one-shot solution, just a first step. Other steps, it was broadly assumed, would follow — toward faster climate action, yes, but also toward greater global cooperation, mutual obligation and solidarity. High off the success of its Millennium Development Goals, the U.N. had just released its far more ambitious Sustainable Development Goals, which brought the rich nations of the world into its lasso of responsibility. Diplomats talked optimistically about an emergent partnership they called the G2, with the United States and China cooperating on the world’s biggest challenges, as they had in Paris.
A decade later, we are living in a very different world. At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP29), the president of the host country, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, praised oil and gas as “gifts from God,” and though the annual conferences since Paris were often high-profile, star-studded affairs, this time there were few world leaders to be found. Joseph R. Biden, then still president, didn’t show. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris or President Xi Jinping of China or President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission. Neither did President Emmanuel Macron of France, often seen as the literal face of Western liberalism, or President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, often seen as the face of an emergent movement of solidarity across the poor and middle-income world. In the run-up to the conference, an official U.N. report declared that no climate progress at all had been made over the previous year, and several of the most prominent architects of the whole diplomatic process that led to Paris published an open letter declaring the agreement’s architecture out of date and in need of major reforms.
The Paris agreement was always about transferring wealth from rich countries to poor ones, taxpayers to climate grifters, and mobilizing credulous voters on the left into passionate attachment to their “leaders.”
The grift has been breathtaking in scope–trillions of dollars have been essentially stolen from Western taxpayers–and all we got was failing green energy projects (Ivanpah, anyone?), massive environmental damage, increased costs, energy shortages, destroyed farms, social discord, and a generation freaked out because adults told them that they were all going to be boiled alive.
World leaders got great parties and vacations, and lots of political donations and sinecures.
But I am burying the lede, as I often do. I may write about the article’s main topic later, although Beege has the best climate change snark. What jumped out at me was a paragraph that encapsulates one of the many big problems with the left’s relationship to speech.
“People got tired of us being jerks and stopped listening to us.” https://t.co/1Sh9N7cHNB pic.twitter.com/pH3p1oVt1x
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) September 24, 2025
Climate protest almost disappeared, and when it returned a few years later, the numbers were much smaller, the reception much chillier. Climate activists were once venerated as moral authorities by heads of state and a broadly liberal mass media; now they are being given jail sentences stretching multiple years for the crime of merely planning protests that might block up commuter traffic or for throwing paint against plexiglass they knew would protect the artwork hung behind it — a victimless publicity stunt if ever there was one.
Needless to say, I don’t see it that way at all. In fact, if I had my druthers, security personnel at museums would be armed and authorized to shoot the bastards, and police or ordinary citizens should be authorized to knock the protesters blocking traffic out and drag them off the road. The ones who are glued to the roads or parking places where you could get around them should be left there to starve.
I don’t say this merely because I dislike the protesters. I certainly agree that they should be able to speak and get permits to legally have their voices heard. That is the American way!
It’s just that these acts are hardly “victimless.” The assaults on our art and history are attacks on our very civilization, and may in fact cause damage to irreplaceable artifacts. I would have happily shot the Taliban who destroyed the Buddhas, and that was well before they got into terrorism against Americans.
They were attacking the invaluable legacy of human civilization. I would feel the same way about destroying a unique Muslim artifact or cave paintings done by Neanderthals.
Liberals seem to have a very…liberal idea of what protest or speech means, and I am not just referring to their inability to understand that somebody disagreeing with them is not “violence” worthy of censorship.
They also seem to believe that riots or destruction are legitimate protests. Taking over a city center and turning it into a lawless zone is a “Summer of Love,” and attacking ICE officers is totally fine and to be encouraged.
THROW THEM ALL IN JAIL.
💥FAFO.💥BREAKING: A MASSIVE GROUP OF ICE AGENTS JUST RUSHED AND TAZED ANTI-ICE RIOTERS BLOCKING THE GATES OF THE NEWARK ICE FACILITY. pic.twitter.com/DRlnDyWWa2
— 🦅 Eagle Wings 🦅 (@CRRJA5) June 14, 2025
Campus occupations are “speech.” Holding Riley Gaines hostage is “speech.” Throwing things are people or assaulting them is “speech.”
Riots, you will recall, are a proper public health response to perceived racism.
That’s not how it is supposed to work.
The scene in the Cannon House Office Building rotunda on Capitol Hill as Hamas sympathizers chant under a banner calling for a “CEASEFIRE.” Of note, demonstrations are not allowed in congressional buildings, per Capitol Police. pic.twitter.com/9RcCIjUzud
— Spencer Brown (@itsSpencerBrown) October 18, 2023
There are countless examples, so I won’t belabor the point. We all know them well, and we all secretly or not-so-secretly cheer when we see motorists drag climate protesters off the road roughly. There is nothing victimless about holding up traffic for hours, endangering jobs, lives, emergency services, and the like.
I think most Democrats understand that, and more than a few get annoyed at the protesters because they actually harm their causes and make them look bad. But most Democrat leaders egg them on, subtly or not.
TSU defends left-wing mob that chased conservative debaters off campushttps://t.co/mez8Q02GqT
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) September 25, 2025
That is not speech, though. It is expressive, of course. There is a message–more of a message than stripping for money, which has been ruled protected speech.
But it is not free speech because it violates the rights of others. It harms people. Not the speech itself, of course, but the speech accompanies actions that are, indeed, punishable.
Liberals like to characterize conservative speech as an act of violence, even genocide. But they claim that acts of violence, in the service of liberal causes, constitute speech.
Once again, this is Critical Theory at work. And once again, it is total bul-$it.
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