The Green Cathedral Crumbles: Victor Davis Hanson Declares the End of Climate Change Orthodoxy, By Brian Simpson

For half a century, the high priests of climate alarmism have thundered from their pulpits, academia, Davos, the halls of Congress, that the planet teeters on the brink of apocalypse. Fossil fuels are Satan's brew. Windmills and solar panels are our salvation. Sceptics? Deniers, heretics, threats to the children and polar bears. Trillions in subsidies, regulations, and virtue-signalling poured into this orthodoxy, reshaping economies, demonising carbon, and turning "net zero" into a sacred chant. Question the data? You're cancelled. Point out the failed predictions? You're a fossil yourself.

Enter Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover Institution's grizzled classicist and keen-eyed chronicler of civilisational rise and rot. In a recent ZeroHedge breakdown that's rippling through the sceptic spheres, Hanson proclaims what many whispered in the shadows: the dominance of green ideology is over. Not because the science flipped overnight, though the inconsistencies in temperature records and millennial climate cycles have always been there, but because reality, that stubborn thing, finally crashed the party. "I didn't think in my lifetime that I would see an end to that dominance, even though there were inconsistencies," Hanson admits, his voice a mix of astonishment and vindication.

This isn't some fringe rant. Hanson's autopsy of the green corpse is a masterclass in how empires of the mind fall: not with a bang, but with the cold slap of economics, technology, geopolitics, and — above all — hypocrisy.

The AI Power Crunch: When "Save the Planet" Meets "Feed the Algorithms"

Start with the elephant in the server farm: artificial intelligence. The tech barons who once greenwashed their private jets with carbon offsets are now begging for gigawatts like addicts at dawn. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Hanson's Exhibit A, isn't mincing words. To keep the AI arms race humming, we'll need "100 [one-gigawatt plants] per year or the equivalent of clean coal or natural gas." That's not a rounding error; it's a tectonic shift. Altman's internal memos plot a path to 250 gigawatts by 2033, enough juice to power India's 1.5 billion people, or twice ExxonMobil's annual CO₂ spew. Wind and solar? Cute for bird-choppers and desert mirrors, but they're intermittent jokes next to the baseload beasts AI demands. Nuclear? Sure, but good luck permitting that in blue states. Natural gas and coal? Suddenly, they're not villains; they're necessities.

Hanson nails it: the green narrative demanded we ditch reliable energy for unreliable virtue. Now, the same Silicon Valley apostles who preached austerity are hawking fusion dreams and modular reactors, anything to keep their hallucinating machines online. The irony? AI's voracious appetite could guzzle more power than entire nations, forcing a pragmatic U-turn: build the plants, damn the dogma. As Hanson puts it, this demand shift may have "permanently crushed the ideology of so-called 'climate change.'"

Cracks in the Elite Facade: Gates, Kings, and the Sceptic Surge

The orthodoxy's collapse isn't just technological; it's tribal. Even the high priests are backsliding. Bill Gates, the Microsoft messiah who bankrolled green tech with billions, just dropped a memo that reads like a confession: climate change "will not lead to humanity's demise." No more "doomsday view" — it's time to pivot from emissions obsession to malaria eradication and poverty busting. He'd even "let the temperature go up 0.1 degree to get rid of malaria." Hanson highlights this as the ultimate apostasy: "he no longer believes that there is an impending climate change crisis." When the guy who wrote How to Avoid a Climate Disaster now calls the alarmism a distraction, the cathedral shakes.

Then there's Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf, environmental patron saint since the '70s, who jetted to COP30 in Brazil to ask the billion-dollar question: "How much are we supposed to pay?" Europe's 6% of global emissions? Already slashed, he notes, while the "rest of the world is much, much worse." No more blank cheques for the Global South's coal binges. Even a lifelong green monarch is tapping out.

Hanson ties this to a broader scepticism: Trump's incoming energy policies, axing subsidies for flops like California's ghost-train high-speed rail, signal the end of enforced piety. Geopolitics seals it — China's building 429 gigawatts of coal-fired plants yearly while lecturing the West on virtue. The Third World? They want growth, not green hair shirts. As Hanson observes, the narrative's "inconsistencies" in data, hockey-stick graphs that melt under scrutiny, predictions of drowned cities that stay dry, are finally outweighing the sermons.

But the kill shot? Hypocrisy. Hanson eviscerates it with surgical glee: "The people who have been the avatars of climate change never suffer the consequences of their own ideology." Barack Obama, doomsayer of rising seas, snaps up waterfront mansions in Martha's Vineyard and Hawaii, prime flood zones if the models held water. Al Gore's mega-estate guzzles more power in a day than a hundred families in a year. John Kerry jets to conferences on carbon footprints. Nancy Pelosi's Napa vineyard? A testament to fossil-fuelled luxury.

These aren't slips; they're symptoms. The elite preach sacrifice while insulating themselves in gated enclaves of excess. Empirical evidence? Thin gruel of adjusted datasets and models that can't hindcast the Medieval Warm Period. As Hanson thunders, the logic "has not presented, empirically, any evidence that would convince us that we have to radically transform our economies on the wishes of a few elites that do not have the evidence, but do have a lot of hypocrisy in the process."

Hanson's proclamation isn't triumphalism; it's a wake-up. The green bubble burst not because the planet cooled (it hasn't), but because the costs, blackouts in California, frozen winds in Texas, trillion-dollar boondoggles, finally eclipsed the benefits. AI's hunger forces a fork: cling to intermittent fantasies and watch China lap us, or unleash the reliable energy that built the modern world.

This end isn't anti-environment; it's pro-reality. Clean air, abundant power, innovation without ideology, these were always possible without the cult. Hanson, ever the historian, sees echoes of past hysterias: eugenics, Prohibition, Soviet five-year plans. All promised utopia, delivered chains.

The climate change ideology didn't die of truth-seeking. It choked on its own contradictions. Welcome to the reckoning.

https://www.infowars.com/posts/victor-davis-hanson-proclaims-the-end-of-climate-change