Ed. Note: Robert L. Bradley Jr’s opinion-page editorial, reprinted below, appeared in the Houston Chronicle last Sunday, April 12, 2026. Tomorrow’s post will explain the significance of Bradley’s op-ed given the Chronicle’s long-standing bias against fossil fuels.
CERAWeek was in town last month, joined by climate activists who showed up to protest. The reality, however, is that climate activism is in retreat.
The so-called “energy transition” is potholed by an unprecedented number of solar bankruptcies, electric-vehicle retreats, and corporate pullbacks from wind, hydrogen, and carboncapture projects.
A roadmap to phase out fossil fuels was defeated at the last United Nations conference on climate change, in line with a recent prediction by the International Energy Agency that oil demand will increase for decades. Texas, for its part, produced a record two billion barrels last year.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency even recently reversed its earlier decision that carbon dioxide and other manmade greenhouse gases are a danger to health and human welfare.
Plenty of Democrats are also rethinking their climate policies. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is moving to weaken the state’s climate regulations. Even the radical Sunrise Movement seems to have pivoted to pro-Palestinian activism over climate concerns.
Yes, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other warming gases are rising. But this is hardly the “existential threat of our time,” as President Joe Biden once put it.
Rather, this is an opportunity for optimism.
Ignore the rhetoric about “disinformation” or “deniers.” The case for cooler heads starts with a litany of other falsified exaggerations propounded by self-proclaimed defenders of the scientific consensus. In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” predicted imminent riots in U.S. streets from food shortages. Four years later, The Club of Rome’s “The Limits to Growth,” written by MIT-credentialed authors, predicted near-term resource crises, including peak oil and peak gas. In the same decade, global cooling fears were touted in books and articles.
Those fears never came to fruition, and climate change is following a similar path.
John Holdren, President Obama’s two-term science advisor, once warned that as many as a billion people could die by 2020 from climate change. That clearly hasn’t happened.
The reality is that the climate changes over time. Since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century, global temperatures have increased about two degrees. Some of this increase is natural. Humanity and nature are finding ways to adjust to this change. In our era of conditioned air and other modern conveniences, the technology for adaptation is unprecedented.
What about those weather extremes, such as hurricanes, floods and droughts, that humanity can’t so easily accommodate? A recent report by the U.S. Department of Energy found no long-term increases in extreme storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or droughts.
Meanwhile, fossil fuels are still ascendant, partly from a backlash against “green” energy by those most directly affected. Many are pushing back against a top-down energy transition. More than 1,100 wind, solar, and battery projects have been delayed or defeated at the grassroots level, reflecting the problems of intermittent, fragile, land-intensive, transmissionintensive, government-dependent renewable energy.
Energy physics explains the backlash by consumers and communities. Earth’s Sun, working over the ages, created a stock of embedded, concentrated energy that is far superior to the daily flow of solar rays. Solar in its most efficient form is oil, gas, and coal.
Progressives may bristle at rhetoric calling climate alarm “a hoax” and the Green New Deal “a scam,” but the world keeps turning, and consumer-voters are sensitive to green-energy inflation.
Consumer-chosen, taxpayer-neutral energy is the opportunity cost of the Green New Deal. Global lukewarming is more the reality than a runaway greenhouse-gas effect. Adaptation, with the aid of fossil fuels, is the policy prescription. Such middle ground can allow cooler heads to prevail in a future filled with optimism.
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Robert L. Bradley Jr., is CEO of the Institute for Energy Research, which he founded in Houston in 1989 and is now centered in Washington, D.C.
Bradley was far too generous and polite in referring to the incredibly gullible, innumerate, scientific illiterates as “Progressives.”
What they actually are is morons.