The Climate Machine

This is not an investigation into whether climate change is real. It is an investigation into what has been built on top of it. The fossil fuel industry spent sixty years manufacturing doubt about a danger its own scientists had already confirmed. The green energy industry built a donor class and a financial apparatus that profits from the policies it advocates. A carbon credit market emerged in between, promising to let the rest of the economy buy its way to a clean conscience, and by the evidence of its own regulators and certifiers, mostly fails to do what it claims. Above all of it sits a conference circuit that flies to Switzerland by private jet to discuss what everyone else should be doing differently. This is a record of who is profiting from the argument, drawn from peer-reviewed science, congressional investigations, and the reporting of ProPublica, Greenpeace, and the Brennan Center, among others.

What 485 Million Years Actually Shows

If you want to understand the climate debate, the first thing you need to do is zoom out. Not to 1950. Not to the Industrial Revolution. Not even to the last ice age. You need to go back to where the actual record begins, and sit with what it shows before anyone has had the chance to tell you what it means.

In September 2024, a team of researchers from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the University of Arizona, the University of Bristol, UC Davis, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a study in Science that most Americans never heard about. The paper, authored by Emily Judd, Jessica Tierney, and five colleagues, was titled "A 485-Million-Year History of Earth's Surface Temperature." It was the most comprehensive reconstruction of global mean surface temperature ever assembled across the Phanerozoic eon, built by statistically integrating proxy data from ocean sediments, fossil records, and climate model simulations.¹

What it found was not a story of a planet in crisis. It was a story of a planet in constant, dramatic flux.

Over the past 485 million years, Earth's global mean surface temperature has ranged from approximately 11 degrees Celsius to 36 degrees Celsius. That is a 25-degree range, driven by forces that had nothing to do with human industry, internal combustion, or carbon emissions from burning coal: volcanic activity, plate tectonics, changes in solar output, the slow drift of continents, and the feedback loops between CO2, ocean circulation, and ice sheet dynamics that operated on timescales no political term has ever been long enough to address.¹

Where does today fall on that range? Toward the cooler end. The planet has spent the majority of its documented history significantly warmer than it is right now. The Early Eocene period, roughly 54 to 48 million years ago, saw global temperatures substantially higher than today, particularly at high latitudes. The Paleocene was warmer. The Cretaceous was warmer. For most of the time complex life has existed on this planet, the climate was what we would today call a crisis.²

This is not a fringe position. It comes from NOAA, NASA, the USGS, and the peer-reviewed literature. The National Centers for Environmental Information, a primary arm of the federal government, states plainly on its own website that paleoclimate research reveals "several periods of unusually high warmth" predating anything in the modern record, and that climate change is a normal part of Earth's natural variability.³

None of this is what you hear in the debate.

What you hear in the debate almost always begins with ice cores. The EPICA and Vostok Antarctic ice cores, published in Nature in 2004, extend the detailed temperature and CO2 record back approximately 800,000 years. This is the dataset that appears in documentary films, in congressional testimony, in high school classrooms, and on the slides of every climate presentation you have ever seen. It is genuinely important science. It shows that current CO2 concentrations exceed anything in that 800,000-year record by a significant margin.⁴

But 800,000 years is not the history of the Earth. It is not even a footnote in the history of the Earth. It is 0.017 percent of the planet's age. Selecting that window and presenting it as the relevant frame for understanding where we are is a choice. OpinionIt is not the only scientifically defensible choice, and it is worth asking who benefits from keeping the camera zoomed in.

When you pull back further, to the 5-million-year record assembled from ocean sediment cores by Lisiecki and Raymo, and further still to the Cenozoic cooling trend documented across 65 million years by Zachos and colleagues, a different picture begins to emerge. The planet has been on a long-term cooling trajectory for tens of millions of years. The NCEI acknowledges this directly: a cooling trend has existed for at least the past 5,000 years, and that trend reversed abruptly in the modern era.³

That reversal is real. The United States contributes to it. American industry, American energy consumption, and American emissions are measurable components of what has happened to global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. That is not in dispute here, and Opinionanyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, probably something that involves not regulating the product they are making money from.

But here is what is also true, and what the debate almost never has room for: the planet has been here before, and gotten here without us. It has been warmer. It has had higher CO2. It has undergone changes far more dramatic than anything in the modern instrumental record, driven entirely by forces that no treaty, no carbon credit, and no congressional hearing has any power over. OpinionUnderstanding that context does not make the current warming irrelevant. It makes the people who profit from selective presentation of that context worth examining very carefully.

OpinionThe fossil fuel executive who funds doubt about current warming is lying about one thing. The documentary filmmaker who starts the temperature graph at 200,000 years ago and calls it the complete picture is omitting another. Both are using incomplete science in the service of financial and political interests. The only difference is which direction they need the audience to look.

OpinionThe Earth does not care about either of them. It has been through worse. The question is who is getting rich while we argue about it, and whether any of what they are selling is actually pointed at a solution.

The Sixty-Year Cover-Up

In 1979, the United States Department of Energy commissioned a report on carbon dioxide and climate change. Federal scientists delivered a conclusion that should have reoriented American energy policy for the following half century. "We now have incontrovertible evidence," the report stated, "that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change." The cause, the report continued, was "man's use of fossil fuels and exploitation of the land."¹¹

The report did not reorient anything. What happened instead is one of the most thoroughly documented corporate cover-up operations in American history, and it was conducted not by shadowy actors but by companies whose names appear on gas stations in every city in the country.

Exxon knew first.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Exxon funded its own internal climate research program. The scientists it employed produced models and projections that, as a peer-reviewed analysis published in Science in 2023 concluded, "accurately projected and skillfully modeled global warming due to fossil fuel burning" and "reasonably estimated how much CO2 would lead to dangerous warming."¹² Exxon's own researchers told the company, in internal documents, what the federal government was simultaneously telling the public: burning fossil fuels was changing the atmosphere, and the trajectory was not benign.

What Exxon did with that information is now a matter of congressional record.

In April 2024, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Senate Budget Committee released a joint bicameral staff report titled "Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak." The report drew on internal documents obtained through a two-year congressional investigation. Its central finding was unambiguous: fossil fuel companies "do not dispute that they have known for more than 60 years that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, yet have worked for decades to undermine public understanding and to deny the underlying science."¹¹

The mechanism for that denial was not improvised. It was borrowed.

In 1953, the American tobacco industry faced a problem. Accumulating scientific evidence was linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, and the public was beginning to pay attention. The industry's response, coordinated through a PR firm called Hill and Knowlton, was not to dispute the evidence directly. It was to manufacture the appearance of scientific uncertainty. That strategy was later crystallized in a 1969 internal memorandum from Brown and Williamson, a subsidiary of R.J. Reynolds, which stated plainly: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public."¹⁵

That memorandum became a blueprint.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, historians of science at Harvard and Caltech respectively, spent years tracing what happened to that blueprint after the tobacco wars wound down. Their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt documented something that should have been a national scandal: the same individuals, the same PR firms, and in some cases the literally same talking points that had been used to cast doubt on the link between smoking and lung cancer were subsequently deployed to cast doubt on climate science. The same network of think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, served as the institutional infrastructure for both campaigns.¹⁵

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute formalized this strategy in a document called the "Global Climate Science Communications Plan." The plan was explicit about its objective. Victory, it stated, would be achieved when "the average person" and the media "understand the uncertainties in climate science." It proposed recruiting and training scientists willing to challenge the mainstream consensus, placing opinion pieces in newspapers, and developing materials for use in school curricula. OpinionIt was not a scientific initiative. It was a marketing campaign, designed to create the impression of a debate that the science itself had largely resolved.¹⁶

Since then, according to Greenpeace, ExxonMobil alone has spent more than $30 million funding think tanks and advocacy organizations that promote climate denial.¹² The Union of Concerned Scientists obtained 85 internal memos from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, and Peabody Energy, totaling more than 330 pages, documenting the coordinated nature of the campaign. Among the tactics documented: forged letters sent to members of Congress, secret funding of supposedly independent scientific voices, and a sustained effort to keep a manufactured controversy alive in the press long after the underlying scientific question had been settled in the literature.¹³

OpinionThis is important to say clearly: the fossil fuel industry's campaign of deliberate deception was conducted in the country that had, at that point, produced more cumulative carbon emissions than any other nation in history. The United States built its postwar economic dominance on cheap energy, and the companies that supplied that energy understood what it was costing the atmosphere and chose, methodically and deliberately, to make sure the public did not. That is not an environmental argument. It is a documented record of institutional dishonesty directed at the American people by American corporations for the financial benefit of their shareholders.

And yet.

OpinionThe story does not end with the fossil fuel industry, and anyone who tells you it does is also selling something. Because while Exxon was funding doubt on one side of the ledger, a different set of financial interests was building a different kind of machine on the other side. One that would prove equally skilled at converting public concern into private profit, and equally uninterested in whether the underlying problem actually got solved.

That machine has a chairman. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. And his fund manages $31 billion.

Al Gore, Generation Investment Management, and the Solyndra Collapse

In 2000, Al Gore's net worth, as documented in his final financial disclosure as Vice President, ranged between $1.4 and $2.5 million, the majority of it the value of his family's property in Tennessee. He was a recently defeated presidential candidate, a former senator from Tennessee, and a man who had spent much of his public career warning about the dangers of climate change. By 2015, his net worth was estimated at between $172 million and $200 million, depending on the methodology and assets counted. The intervening years had seen the release of An Inconvenient Truth, a Nobel Peace Prize, and the co-founding of a London-based investment fund called Generation Investment Management.¹⁷

OpinionThe relationship between those facts is not a coincidence. It is a business model.

Generation Investment Management was co-founded by Gore and David Blood, the former chief of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, in 2004. The firm's investment thesis is straightforward: the transition away from carbon-based energy is inevitable, the companies best positioned to profit from that transition will generate superior returns, and the policies that accelerate that transition are therefore good for both the planet and the portfolio. As of 2022, Generation claimed approximately $30 billion in assets under management. In 2024, the firm reported profits of just over 157 million pounds, with 89 million pounds distributed to members.^17,18

There is nothing illegal about any of this. OpinionThere is also nothing incidental about it.

In October 2013, Gore and Blood co-authored an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that carbon-based fuel assets represented what they called "stranded assets," investments that would become worthless before their presumed value was depleted, due to a combination of stricter government regulation, displacement by renewable energy, and political campaigns pressuring investors to divest from fossil fuels. The Capital Research Center observed that these were not merely investment predictions. OpinionThey were descriptions of the policy agenda that Gore publicly promotes and that Generation Investment Management is financially positioned to profit from.²⁰

OpinionWhen Gore speaks at Davos about the urgency of climate action, his audience is not just hearing from a concerned former vice president. They are hearing from the chairman of a fund that benefits, directly and measurably, from the regulations and mandates he is advocating for. That is not a conspiracy. It is a conflict of interest, and it is one that the same media institutions that spent years investigating ExxonMobil's financial motivations have been remarkably incurious about.¹⁸

Gore has also defended his personal carbon footprint by purchasing carbon offsets. The company that receives some of those payments has been partially owned and chaired by Gore himself. A 2023 proxy statement challenge filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative advocacy organization, cited data indicating that as of 2017, only 5.7 percent of Gore's total energy usage came from renewable sources.¹⁸ The offsets he purchases to compensate for the remainder flow, in part, back into enterprises in which he holds a financial stake. OpinionThis is the architecture of the climate economy at its most refined: a closed loop in which the advocate, the investor, the policy, and the offset market are all connected to the same set of hands.

Generation is not alone. It is the most prominent example of a much larger phenomenon. OpinionGreen energy has become its own donor class, and that donor class has its own political party.

The clearest case study is Solyndra.

In 2009, the Obama administration awarded a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, a California-based solar panel manufacturer. It was the first loan guarantee issued under the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office, and the administration held it up as a model of what the stimulus-funded green energy economy would look like. President Obama visited the plant in person. Vice President Biden praised it. The company was presented to the American public as proof that government investment in clean energy could create jobs, reduce emissions, and build the industries of the future.²²

In August 2011, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy. It laid off 1,100 employees and ceased operations. The $535 million in taxpayer-guaranteed funds was lost.²³

What the subsequent investigation revealed was more troubling than a bad bet.

The DOE's own Office of Inspector General, in a joint investigation with the FBI, found that Solyndra officials had engaged in a "pattern of false and misleading assertions and statements" in their efforts to obtain the loan guarantee. Employees at the Department of Energy told investigators they felt "tremendous pressure" from superiors and from the Obama administration to approve loans. The Government Accountability Office had issued a critical report on the loan program as early as July 2010, finding weak controls and shortcuts in the approval process, before the collapse.^24,21

The House Energy and Commerce Committee spent eighteen months and reviewed 215,000 pages of documents. Its final report described Solyndra as a "cautionary tale" of political pressure overriding due diligence. Buried in those documents was a detail that received far less attention than the bankruptcy itself: billionaire George Kaiser, one of President Obama's most significant fundraisers in the 2008 election, was a primary Solyndra shareholder.²²

The loan guarantee program that funded Solyndra was first authorized in 2005, under President George W. Bush. Democrats expanded it significantly through the 2009 stimulus law. OpinionBoth parties built the mechanism. One party's donor class collected the proceeds. That is how the green energy economy has functioned in practice: bipartisan infrastructure, partisan beneficiaries, and the taxpayer holding the bag when the math does not work out.

OpinionNone of this means clean energy is a fraud. There are engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs working in renewable energy without political connections, without revolving door access, and without a fund that profits from the regulations they advocate for. Their work is real and some of it is genuinely important. What corrodes that work is precisely the presence of actors like the ones described above, who attach themselves to a legitimate cause and extract from it everything the cause is worth while the underlying problem continues unsolved.

OpinionThe fossil fuel executive and the climate investor share more than the public debate acknowledges. Both have a financial interest in the argument continuing. Both benefit from the absence of honest policy. And both have spent considerable resources ensuring that the people most likely to be harmed by either the pollution or the failed solutions are the last ones in the room when the real decisions get made.

A Market That Fails Most of the Time

In theory, the carbon credit is an elegant idea. A company that cannot reduce its emissions pays another party to reduce emissions on its behalf. The net result is the same: one ton of carbon that would have entered the atmosphere does not. The market does what markets are supposed to do, allocating the reduction to whoever can achieve it most efficiently, and the atmosphere comes out ahead.

OpinionIn practice, the carbon credit market is one of the most consequential financial frauds operating in plain sight in the world today, and the documentation comes not from fossil fuel lobbyists or right-wing think tanks but from ProPublica, from California's own regulatory bodies, from peer-reviewed research, and from the investigative arms of the institutions that built the system.

Start with the number that should have ended the debate.

Multiple peer-reviewed analyses converge on the same grim finding. A 2024 study published in Nature Communications examining the twenty largest purchasers of voluntary carbon offsets found that 87 percent of credits carry a high risk of not providing real and additional emissions reductions. A separate analysis circulating through peer review in 2023 put the effective failure rate at approximately 88 percent, meaning only around 12 percent of offsets in circulation create a real, verifiable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The remaining credits deliver no measurable climate benefit whatsoever. They are, in the language of the researchers, phantom credits: financial instruments that allow their purchasers to claim carbon neutrality while emitting at full capacity, backed by projects that either never worked, stopped working, or never existed in the form their certifications described.²⁹

Eighty-eight percent. OpinionIn any other regulated market, a product that failed to perform its stated function 88 percent of the time would be the subject of criminal referrals. In the carbon market, it is the subject of press releases.

ProPublica reporter Lisa Song spent years documenting how this works on the ground. In 2019, she published an investigation that used satellite imagery to track what had happened to Brazilian forest areas that had been granted carbon credits for avoided deforestation, meaning credits issued on the promise that trees that would otherwise have been cut down were being preserved. Four years after the credits were issued, half of those areas had been cleared. The trees were gone. The credits remained in circulation. The companies that purchased them were still reporting carbon neutrality.²⁶

The following year, Song returned with a second investigation, this time focused on California's cap-and-trade program, which had been held up as a national model for market-based climate policy. Working with MIT Technology Review and drawing on research from the nonprofit CarbonPlan, she found that the program had issued up to 39 million carbon credits without real climate benefit. Between 20 and 38 percent of the forest offset credits issued under the program as of that point were, in CarbonPlan's term, "ghost credits," offsets with no verifiable environmental value that were nonetheless being sold to California polluters to justify continued emissions.²⁸

California's Air Resources Board disputed the findings. It sent a letter to ProPublica challenging the methodology. It did not ask for any corrections. The credits remained in circulation.²⁸

The Massachusetts Audubon Society, one of the oldest conservation organizations in the country, provides perhaps the most clarifying example of how the system actually incentivizes behavior. In 2015, the organization presented California's top climate regulator with a scenario: it could heavily log 9,700 acres of its preserved forests in western Massachusetts over the following years. By threatening to cut the trees down, it became eligible to earn carbon credits for not cutting them down. It then sold those credits to California polluters. OpinionThe forests it had long managed as wildlife habitat became a financial instrument, and the instrument paid best when the threat to the habitat was most credible.²⁷

OpinionThis is not a loophole. It is the logical endpoint of a system designed by people who understood it well enough to profit from it.

The architecture of the carbon market ensures that money flows regardless of outcome. The certifying bodies, chief among them Verra, the world's largest carbon credit certifier, charge fees to validate projects. The banks that broker credit transactions collect spreads on every trade. The exchanges where credits are bought and sold take their percentage. An investigation by the Guardian in 2023 found that the majority of rainforest offset credits certified by Verra may be worthless. Verra disputed the findings. The credits continued to trade.³⁰

The United Nations Clean Development Mechanism, the international body that oversees offset projects in developing countries, has not been immune. A 2016 study cited in ProPublica's reporting found that 85 percent of CDM offsets had a "low likelihood" of creating real emissions reductions. The UN Environment Programme, which claims to have been carbon neutral since 2008 through a mix of reductions and CDM offsets, acknowledged the concerns and said it had reduced its reliance on those credits over time. It did not stop using them.²⁶

John Kerry, while serving as the United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, defended his use of private jets in part by citing his purchase of carbon offsets. The offsets he purchased to compensate for the emissions from those flights existed within the same market whose integrity the investigations above document. OpinionHe was, in other words, paying into a system that its own investigators found delivers no real climate benefit 88 percent of the time, and presenting that payment as environmental responsibility.³⁴

OpinionThe people who designed this system are not stupid. They understood what they were building. A market that generates fees, commissions, and reputational benefits for its participants while requiring no verifiable reduction in atmospheric carbon is not a failed climate solution. It is a successful financial product. The fact that it was sold as the former while functioning as the latter is not an accident of design. It is the design.

OpinionThe American public was told the carbon market was how the private sector would solve what governments could not. What the private sector actually built was a casino where the house always wins, the chips are called carbon credits, and the planet is the one sitting across the table.

Davos, and the Distance Between Words and Tarmac

Every January, the world's most powerful people travel to a ski resort in the Swiss Alps to discuss, among other things, what the rest of the world needs to do about climate change. The World Economic Forum in Davos draws heads of state, central bank governors, Fortune 500 CEOs, celebrity activists, and the kind of billionaires who have staff to manage their other staff. The agenda is dense with panels on sustainability, decarbonization, and the urgency of the climate crisis. The attendees arrive, overwhelmingly, by private jet.

The numbers are not in dispute. They come from Greenpeace.

In 2023, Greenpeace International commissioned the Dutch environmental consultancy CE Delft to analyze private jet traffic at seven airports serving the Davos area during the 2022 World Economic Forum. The findings were published ahead of the 2023 meeting, presumably in the hope that someone attending would read them before boarding. All private jet flights to and from those airports during the 2022 WEF generated 9,700 tonnes of CO2. That is the emissions equivalent of approximately 350,000 average gasoline-powered cars operating for the same one-week period. Private jet traffic during the conference was four times higher than during an average week at those same airports.³¹

One in ten participants at the 2022 World Economic Forum arrived by private jet.³²

By January 2026, the most recent data available, airport authorities estimated approximately 1,000 additional aircraft movements at airports serving Davos during the conference week. A Greenpeace CEE report released on January 15, 2026 confirmed that private jet traffic had tripled since 2023 and risen 10 percent compared with the prior year. With approximately 3,000 participants attending, the data suggested roughly one private jet flight for every four guests. Around 70 percent of those flight routes could have been completed by train within a day. A single hour on a private jet emits approximately two tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of what an average car produces over an entire year.³³

Private jets are not merely carbon-intensive relative to trains. They are approximately ten times more carbon-intensive than commercial aircraft and fifty times more carbon-intensive than rail travel, according to a 2021 report from the European transport research group Transport and Environment.³¹

The WEF's response to this annual documentation of its attendees' travel habits has been to promote Sustainable Aviation Fuel as a mitigating technology. Sustainable Aviation Fuel currently accounts for less than 0.1 percent of global jet fuel consumption. The forum's own website states that environmental threats continue to rank at the top of its Global Risks Report. OpinionIts attendees' behavior suggests a rather different private assessment of the urgency.³³

OpinionThis would be worth noting about any conference. It is worth noting with particular care about this one, because the people flying into Davos on private jets are not merely wealthy individuals with carbon-intensive travel habits. They are the architects, funders, and public faces of the global climate policy apparatus. They are the people whose decisions determine what gets measured, what gets regulated, what gets subsidized, and what gets ignored. The gap between what they say in the panel sessions and what they do on the tarmac is not incidental to the story of how climate policy actually works. It is the story.

John Kerry served as the United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate under President Biden, making him the highest-ranking American official dedicated exclusively to climate diplomacy. In that role he traveled extensively, attending COP conferences, bilateral meetings, and international summits at which he delivered speeches about the necessity of immediate, ambitious action on emissions. He traveled frequently by private charter jet. When the practice was reported and questioned, Kerry defended it by arguing that his schedule required it and that he purchased carbon offsets to compensate for the emissions. He flew commercial to COP27 in Egypt in November 2022, after the private jet travel had become a public issue.³⁴

The offsets he cited belong to the market examined in Part Four of this piece.

Al Gore, whose energy usage as of 2017 drew only 5.7 percent from renewable sources, has said that he sometimes chartered private jets but generally flew commercial. He compensates for his emissions through carbon offsets purchased from enterprises in which he holds a financial interest.¹⁸ He delivered remarks at the 2023 Davos forum calling on multilateral lending institutions to dramatically increase climate finance for developing countries. The forum's attendees arrived, as documented above, in a fleet of private jets generating the equivalent of 350,000 cars worth of emissions for the week.

Oxfam published a report in November 2023 finding that the richest one percent of the global population is responsible for as much carbon pollution as the poorest 66 percent combined, roughly five billion people. A separate Oxfam report from November 2022, analyzing the investment portfolios of 125 of the world's wealthiest billionaires, found that their carbon impact is more than one million times higher than the average person in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.³⁵

OpinionThe average person is nonetheless the target of the policy conversation happening inside the Davos conference rooms. Carbon taxes on gasoline. Restrictions on natural gas stoves. Mandates for electric vehicles that remain out of reach for median-income households. Dietary guidance toward lower-carbon food choices. The behavioral modifications being discussed and eventually legislated are aimed, almost without exception, at people who will never be invited to Davos and who did not arrive there by private jet.

Greenpeace's transport campaigner Klara Maria Schenk, whose organization produced the research cited throughout this section, put it plainly in a statement accompanying the 2023 findings: "The rich and powerful flock to Davos in ultra-polluting, socially inequitable private jets to discuss climate and inequality behind closed doors. Davos has a perfectly adequate railway station. Still, these people cannot even be bothered to take the train for a trip as short as 21 kilometers."³¹

OpinionThat statement was issued by an environmental organization. It was directed at the people running the climate movement. That tells you something about the distance between the movement's public face and its private conduct that no fossil fuel lobbyist could have manufactured.

Two Donor Classes, One Unresolved Argument

There is a version of the climate debate that gets presented to the American public as a conflict between two fundamentally different visions of the future. On one side, the argument goes, are the fossil fuel interests, the polluters, the deniers, the people who have decided that quarterly earnings matter more than the planet their grandchildren will inherit. On the other side are the environmentalists, the scientists, the clean energy entrepreneurs, the people who have looked at the data and decided that something has to change. The fight, in this telling, is between greed and conscience.

OpinionThat framing is itself a product being sold to you. And both sides are selling it.

OpinionWhat the campaign finance record shows is not a battle between greed and conscience. It is a battle between two donor classes, each of which has purchased a political party, each of which requires that party to keep the argument going rather than resolve it, and each of which walks away from every election cycle richer regardless of who wins.

The fossil fuel industry's investment in the Republican Party is the better documented of the two, in part because it has been the subject of sustained investigative attention. OpenSecrets data shows that the oil and gas industry has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to federal candidates and party committees over the past two decades, with between 85 and 90 percent of that money flowing to Republicans in most election cycles. The return on that investment has been measurable: withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, rollback of EPA methane regulations, expansion of drilling on federal lands, and the systematic defunding of renewable energy research during Republican administrations.²⁵

The green energy industry's investment in the Democratic Party is less frequently examined with the same rigor, but the numbers are comparably significant. The clean energy sector, broadly defined to include solar, wind, electric vehicles, battery technology, and the financial instruments built around them, has become one of the Democratic Party's most significant donor blocs. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the largest climate legislation in American history, directed approximately $369 billion toward clean energy investments. The companies that received those investments, and the investment funds positioned to profit from the transition it mandated, were among the legislation's most enthusiastic supporters and among the Democratic Party's most consistent financial backers.²⁵

OpinionThis is not a coincidence. It is the system functioning as designed.

OpinionThe result of having two fully captured parties is an argument that never resolves. The fossil fuel donor class needs a Republican Party that blocks climate legislation. The green energy donor class needs a Democratic Party that passes climate legislation. What neither donor class needs, and what neither party therefore has any incentive to produce, is climate legislation that actually works, that imposes costs on both industries equally, that holds international partners to binding standards, and that prioritizes measurable atmospheric outcomes over domestic political and financial positioning.

Consider the legislative record. The United States has been having a serious national conversation about climate change for more than three decades. In that time, Congress has not passed a single piece of legislation imposing a direct price on carbon emissions applicable across the economy. The cap-and-trade bill passed the House in 2009 and died in the Senate. The Clean Power Plan was enacted by executive order, challenged in court, and eventually limited by the Supreme Court. The Inflation Reduction Act used subsidies and incentives rather than mandates or carbon pricing, a design choice that was not accidental: Opinionsubsidies create winners among the donor class, while carbon pricing creates losers, and the donor class on both sides has more influence over legislative design than the public does.²⁵

The promises, meanwhile, accumulate. Every presidential candidate for thirty years has promised serious action on climate. Every administration has produced its version of a plan. The atmosphere has not noticed.

OpinionWhat the donor class on both sides has in common is that an unresolved crisis is more valuable to them than a solved one. The fossil fuel industry needs the crisis to remain unacknowledged long enough to extract maximum value from existing assets. The green energy industry needs the crisis to remain urgent long enough to justify continued subsidies, mandates, and public investment. The think tanks, lobbying firms, consultants, lawyers, and communications professionals who serve both sides need the argument to continue indefinitely because the argument is their business model.

The American voter, positioned between these two donor classes and asked every two years to choose which set of financial interests should manage the response to a genuine environmental problem, is the only participant in this system who has no financial stake in its continuation. The voter is also the only participant with no meaningful influence over its outcome.

OpinionThis dynamic is not unique to climate policy. It is the standard operating procedure of American legislative politics applied to a subject where the stakes are higher than most. What makes climate different is the moral freight the issue carries, which makes the exploitation of it more corrosive and the cynicism of the actors involved more striking. People are genuinely frightened about what is happening to the planet. That fear is legitimate. And it is being harvested, systematically and efficiently, by people on both sides of the argument who have no intention of making it go away.

OpinionThe fossil fuel executive and the clean energy investor are not enemies. They are colleagues in the management of public attention. One needs you afraid of regulation. The other needs you afraid of the climate. Both need you afraid. Fear is the product, and the American political system is the distribution network.

OpinionWhat neither of them needs is for you to look at the full picture: who funds the research, who writes the legislation, who certifies the offsets, who flies to the conferences, who collects the subsidies, and who has been sitting at the table every single time a serious solution almost happened and then did not.

What Else Is Happening While We Argue About the Weather

In 2023, the world was simultaneously managing the following: an active war between Russia and Ukraine that had displaced millions of people and restructured global energy markets; an escalating conflict in the Middle East following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel; renewed tensions across the Taiwan Strait; a civil war in Sudan that the United Nations described as one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet; and military coups across the Sahel region of Africa that were redrawing the geopolitical map of an entire continent. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute documented that global military expenditure surged to a record $2.44 trillion in 2023, the largest year on year increase since 2009.³⁶

The dominant topic in American domestic political media that year was, depending on the week, either climate change or the political response to climate change.

OpinionThis is not an argument that climate change is unimportant. It is an observation about how attention works, who manages it, and what tends to happen in the parts of the world that are not being looked at while the managed conversation is taking place.

The Council on Foreign Relations Global Conflict Tracker, a primary reference for ongoing armed conflicts, currently lists dozens of active conflicts across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Many of them involve resources: oil, minerals, water, arable land. Some of them involve the same energy interests whose financial influence over domestic climate policy was documented in the previous section. None of them receive the sustained, emotionally mobilizing coverage that the climate debate generates in American media. The Costs of War Project at Brown University has documented that American military engagements alone have displaced tens of millions of people and cost trillions of dollars over the past two decades. OpinionThe people making those decisions are, in many cases, the same class of actors whose foundations fund the climate conversation.^37,38

OpinionThe pattern is worth sitting with. When governments and the financial interests behind them need public attention directed somewhere specific, the climate debate is a remarkably effective instrument. It is global in scope, making local accountability difficult. It is long in timescale, making results impossible to verify in any single political term. It is morally freighted, making critics easy to dismiss as either corrupt or indifferent to the fate of the planet. And it generates an essentially unlimited demand for the financial products, policy frameworks, and institutional infrastructure that the donor class on both sides has spent decades positioning itself to supply.

Meanwhile, the environmental problems that do not generate those market opportunities receive almost no comparable attention.

Water quality in the United States remains a serious and largely unaddressed public health issue. The American Society of Civil Engineers has repeatedly graded the nation's drinking water infrastructure with a C minus or below. Lead pipes still serve millions of American homes. Agricultural runoff contaminates groundwater across the Midwest. The crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents were poisoned by lead in their municipal water supply for years while state and federal officials failed to act, received a period of intense media coverage and then largely disappeared from the national conversation without the underlying infrastructure problems being resolved.³⁶

Ocean plastic is accumulating at a rate that marine biologists describe as catastrophic for ocean ecosystems. Soil degradation from industrial agriculture is reducing the productive capacity of farmland across the planet. Deforestation continues at scale in the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia, driven by agricultural expansion and logging interests that operate largely outside the carbon credit frameworks supposedly designed to stop them. These are concrete, measurable, addressable problems. They do not, however, lend themselves to the creation of trillion-dollar financial markets, and they do not generate the kind of donor-class investment that buys political attention.

OpinionThe carbon molecule is worth money. The plastic bottle floating in the Pacific is not. That difference in financial value maps almost perfectly onto the difference in political attention each receives.

Now add the international dimension, because it is where the arithmetic of the entire domestic debate collapses.

China is currently the world's largest annual emitter of CO2, responsible for approximately 30 to 31 percent of global carbon dioxide output depending on the metric and year. The United States is second, contributing approximately 11 to 14 percent of global emissions depending on whether total greenhouse gases or fossil fuel CO2 alone are measured. India is third, and on a trajectory that makes it likely to surpass the United States within this decade as its economy and energy consumption continue to expand. Together, China, the United States, and India account for approximately half of all global CO2 emissions.³⁶

The Paris Agreement, signed in 2015 and held up by its architects as the framework through which the world would address climate change, does not bind China or India to any specific emissions reduction. What it requires of them are Nationally Determined Contributions: voluntary pledges, set by each country itself, reviewed every five years, with no enforcement mechanism and no penalty for non-compliance. A country that misses its pledge faces no fine, no sanction, and no legal consequence of any kind. The agreement is, in the precise sense of the word, unenforceable.³⁶

China's current pledge under the Paris Agreement is to peak its carbon emissions by 2030. Not to reduce them. To peak them, meaning the world's largest emitter has international permission, under the framework celebrated as the solution to the climate crisis, to continue increasing its output for years. After the peak, China has committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, a date far enough in the future that no current political leader in any country will be accountable for whether it happens.³⁶

India's pledge is to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy, meaning the emissions per unit of economic output, by 45 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. This is compatible with India's total emissions continuing to rise substantially as its economy grows. India has also committed to net zero by 2070, fifteen years after China's target and forty-five years from now.³⁶

There are no inspectors. There are no penalties. There is no court.

Against this arithmetic, consider what the domestic American climate debate has produced: carbon taxes proposed and rejected, cap-and-trade systems that issue ghost credits, green energy subsidies that funded Solyndra, offset markets that work 12 percent of the time, and a conference circuit that generates 9,700 tonnes of CO2 per week from private jet traffic alone. The United States does contribute to warming. That contribution is real and it matters. OpinionBut the proposition that the American consumer, paying more for energy, driving a mandated electric vehicle, and sorting recycling into color-coded bins, is the variable that determines the trajectory of a problem to which China and India are voluntarily contributing roughly 40 to 44 percent of global output with no binding obligation to stop, is not a scientific argument. It is a political one, and it serves the people making it rather than the atmosphere they claim to be protecting.

OpinionThe genuine environmentalists, the ones without financial conflicts and without donor class backing, have been saying versions of this for years. Effective climate policy requires enforceable international agreements with real consequences for non-compliance. It requires technology transfer at scale so that developing economies can grow without replicating the carbon-intensive path that industrialized nations took. It requires honest accounting of where emissions actually come from and who is actually responsible for them. And it requires political leadership that is not for sale to either the fossil fuel industry or the green energy industry.

OpinionNone of that is what is currently on offer. What is on offer is the argument itself, carefully managed, generously funded, and designed to continue indefinitely while the people running it get paid and the atmosphere does what it was going to do regardless.

Three True Things That Do Not Cancel Each Other Out

There is a version of this story that is simpler than the one told across the preceding seven parts. In that simpler version, the fossil fuel industry is the villain, the climate movement is the hero, and the only thing standing between the planet and salvation is the money flowing from one to the other. That version is comfortable. It assigns blame cleanly. It tells you who to trust and who to distrust, which party to vote for and which industry to boycott. OpinionIt is also, as the documented record shows, incomplete in ways that have been enormously profitable for the people selling it.

The honest version is harder. It requires holding more than one true thing at a time.

The first true thing is that the Earth is warming and the United States contributes to it. This is not a politically motivated claim. It is what the instrumented temperature record shows, what the proxy data confirms, and what the federal government's own scientific agencies have documented across decades of research. American industry burned fossil fuels at a scale that no other country matched for most of the twentieth century. American companies knew what that was doing to the atmosphere and chose to hide it. The people harmed by that decision were not the executives who made it. They were the communities built downwind of the refineries, the coastal populations whose infrastructure is threatened by rising seas, and the agricultural regions where changing precipitation patterns have disrupted food production. Their experience is real and it deserves to be taken seriously.^5,11

The second true thing is that the institutions claiming to address that warming have been captured, financially and politically, by actors whose interest is in the management of the crisis rather than its resolution. The carbon credit market delivers no verifiable climate benefit 88 percent of the time. The conference circuit generates more emissions in a week than most people produce in years. The green energy donor class extracts subsidies and mandates from the political party it funds, and the fossil fuel donor class extracts deregulation and drilling rights from the political party it funds, and the atmosphere is not a participant in either transaction.^29,31

The third true thing is that the arithmetic of the problem cannot be resolved by the domestic American political debate as it is currently structured. China emits approximately 30 to 31 percent of global CO2 annually under a framework that permits it to keep increasing that output until 2030. India emits and grows under voluntary pledges with no enforcement mechanism. The Paris Agreement, the centerpiece of international climate diplomacy, has no inspectors, no penalties, and no court. OpinionAsking the American consumer to bear the cost of a transition that the world's two largest and fastest growing emitters are not obligated to make is not a climate policy. It is a transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the donor class that designs the policy, enforced by a moral framework that makes the transfer difficult to question without being accused of not caring about the planet.³⁶

These three things are all true simultaneously. OpinionThey do not cancel each other out. The fact that the climate movement has been captured by financial interests does not mean the underlying warming is fabricated. The fact that the warming is real does not mean that every proposed solution is honest or effective. The fact that China and India present a structural barrier to global resolution does not mean the United States should abandon environmental standards. And the fact that American standards exist does not mean that the people profiting from their implementation have any genuine interest in the problem those standards are meant to solve.

An honest conversation would start by separating the science from the politics that have been draped over it. The peer-reviewed geological record is not the property of either political party. The 485-million-year temperature reconstruction published in Science in 2024 belongs to the same body of knowledge as the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report. Both are real. Both are relevant. OpinionThe first contextualizes the second in ways that the people managing the public debate have found inconvenient, because context complicates the urgency that both donor classes require to keep their respective fundraising machines running.^1,41

An honest conversation would treat the carbon credit market as what the evidence shows it to be: a financial instrument that has failed at its stated purpose and should be either fundamentally restructured with binding verification requirements or abolished in favor of direct emissions regulation with real enforcement. ProPublica, the Brennan Center, and The Intercept have each published work documenting the gap between what the carbon market claims to do and what it actually does. That documentation exists. OpinionIt has not produced reform because the market is too profitable for the institutions that would need to reform it.^26,27,28

OpinionAn honest conversation would demand of international climate agreements what we demand of any other international agreement that matters: enforcement mechanisms, independent verification, and consequences for non-compliance. The argument that China and India will not accept binding terms is probably true under current diplomatic conditions. It is also an argument for different diplomatic conditions, not for pretending that voluntary pledges constitute a solution. If the problem is as urgent as the people flying to Davos on private jets say it is, then the response to a framework with no enforcement mechanism should be to build one, not to hold domestic carbon tax seminars while the two largest emitters operate without constraint.^33,36

An honest conversation would acknowledge the Americans who are doing genuine work on these problems without financial conflicts of interest. The researchers reconstructing Earth's temperature history from sediment cores. The engineers developing grid-scale energy storage that does not depend on a subsidy to be economically viable. The conservationists working on soil health, ocean plastic, and water quality without a carbon credit to sell. These people exist. OpinionThey are not the faces the debate puts forward, because they do not have the money to buy those faces, and because their work is aimed at actually solving problems rather than monetizing them.

OpinionAn honest conversation would tell the American public what the geological record, the campaign finance data, the congressional investigations, the ProPublica reporting, the Greenpeace emissions analysis, and the text of the Paris Agreement all point toward when read together: the people running this debate on both sides have made themselves very comfortable with its continuation. The fossil fuel industry has spent sixty years ensuring the problem would not be addressed. The green energy industry has spent thirty years ensuring the response would not be effective. The conference circuit has spent two decades flying to Switzerland to discuss what everyone else should do differently. And the political system has spent the entire period converting genuine public fear about a genuine problem into campaign contributions, subsidies, and regulatory frameworks that serve the donor class first and the atmosphere when convenient.

The Earth does not have a lobbyist. It does not make campaign contributions. It does not fly to Davos. It does not hold a seat at the table where the decisions about its future are made.

It does, however, keep a record. Sediment cores, ice cores, ocean chemistry, tree rings, and fossil pollen document everything that has happened to this planet across half a billion years with a fidelity that no press release, no congressional testimony, and no investment prospectus can match. That record shows a planet that has survived temperatures we cannot currently imagine, atmospheric compositions that would be unrecognizable today, and changes far more dramatic than anything in the modern instrumental record.

It also shows, without ambiguity, that what we are doing to the atmosphere is new, that it is fast by geological standards, and that the last time conditions changed this quickly, large numbers of species did not survive the transition.

OpinionThat fact deserves a serious response. What it has received, so far, is a very profitable argument.

OpinionYou decide what to do with the difference.