The Trojan horse at Climate Week 2025

OPINION:

It’s that time of year again, when the world’s climate elite converge on New York for their annual pilgrimage. Climate Week 2025 is filling the skies with private jets and the streets with motorcades, while in between cocktail receptions and panels, the emissaries of environmental virtue instruct the rest of us to do with less.

The United Nations General Assembly is also in town, offering a convenient stage for the political left’s global climate agenda. For decades, it has imposed costly mandates — emissions targets, fuel standards and regulatory frameworks — that punish the U.S. energy sector, push allies toward unreliable renewables and allow major emitters such as China to ignore deadline after deadline without consequence.

That agenda is on full display at Climate Week, this time with a carefully chosen figure meant to lend bipartisan credibility.

Benji Backer, the 27-year-old founder of the American Conservation Coalition and Nature Is Nonpartisan, is billed as the conservative voice of the climate movement. Polished and adept at wrapping himself in MAGA-friendly language, he is precisely the sort of figure the movement hopes will render its program more palatable to young conservatives.

However, his record tells a different story. Mr. Backer has called President Trump “despicable and indefensible,” praised Greta Thunberg’s “critical role” in shaping climate awareness and endorsed government control over 30% of America’s land for environmental purposes. He supports many of the policies long championed by liberal climate activists, including subsidies for “green hydrogen,” government-created incentives that redirect markets toward wind and solar, and expanded restrictions on fossil fuel development.

Mr. Backer is invaluable to the climate left. After decades of failed predictions and economically destructive policies, the movement has a credibility problem with ordinary Americans. A self-declared conservative willing to echo their premise — that carbon dioxide is an existential threat and fossil fuels must be aggressively curtailed — gives an illusion of bipartisan consensus.

Never mind that the movement’s agenda hasn’t worked. The flagship U.N. climate agreements have cost trillions of dollars without meaningfully altering global temperature trends. The largest emitters, especially China, remain on the same trajectory, exempt from serious restrictions. Billions of dollars in subsidies for wind and solar have produced an energy grid that is more expensive and less reliable.

The movement’s apocalyptic deadlines have come and gone without the promised catastrophe. Climate-related deaths are down 99% since the 1920s. People around the world are living longer, healthier and wealthier lives, and the primary driver of that progress has been access to affordable, abundant energy, overwhelmingly from fossil fuels.

Mr. Backer’s “commonsense” branding can’t hide the fact that his approach would take us in the opposite direction. By accepting the left’s framing of the problem and the solution, he offers not a conservative alternative but a more marketable version of the same failed plan.

Fortunately, the Trump administration is intent on moving in the opposite direction. It is ending the regulatory war on domestic oil, gas and coal, restoring investment in American energy production, and recognizing that wind and solar cannot replace reliable baseload power. It refuses to treat carbon dioxide as the enemy and instead focuses on technology, efficiency and innovation that expand prosperity without sacrificing energy security.

American energy dominance means stable, affordable prices for American families, a secure supply chain for our nation and our allies and the ability to withstand global price shocks without reliance on OPEC or hostile regimes. It ensures that the power needs of a growing economy — from households to next-generation technologies such as artificial intelligence data centers — are met with reliable, abundant domestic energy.

That prosperity is worth defending. Affordable, abundant energy is the foundation of modern life. It has lifted billions from poverty, extended life expectancy and enabled freedoms and comforts unimaginable a century ago.

Climate Week is doing what it always does: staging a spectacle, declaring the crisis graver than ever before, and demanding more control over how we live, work and consume.

Mr. Backer may be the most useful prop in that performance, but he is not the voice of conservative environmentalism. He is the cover for an agenda that has failed on its own terms and now seeks to survive under a different brand.

We need to reject the repackaging and stay focused on what works: energy abundance, economic growth and the freedom to pursue both without apology.

• Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.