Even the New York Times Admits It – Watts Up With That?

It has taken a full decade, but the mainstream press is finally catching up to what we at Watts Up With That (WUWT) have been saying since the day the Paris Agreement was signed: it was built on sand, unenforceable, and destined to crumble under the weight of its own political posturing. Now, in a remarkable piece of candor, the New York Times admits what has long been obvious to anyone outside the climate activist bubble: the age of Paris is over, and the world has lost its appetite for climate politics.

In a sprawling retrospective, David Wallace-Wells (yes, the same writer who once branded himself the chronicler of “climate catastrophe”) now concedes:

“A decade later, we are living in a very different world. … 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prominent architects of the whole diplomatic process … published an open letter declaring the agreement’s architecture out of date and in need of major reforms”.

Sound familiar? It should. Back in 2015, Paul Driessen wrote on WUWT that The ‘Binding’ Paris treaty is now just voluntary mush. Unlike the Times, we didn’t need ten years to figure it out. Six years ago we posted: The Climate Decade that Was: Failed Predictions, Tour De Paris, and the Gretas

Now, Wallace-Wells, the Times’ resident prophet of doom, opens his essay with a question that would have been unthinkable to print in 2015: “How do we think about the climate future, now that the era marked by the Paris Agreement has so utterly disappeared?”.

This is the same Wallace-Wells who made his name spinning apocalyptic scenarios of climate collapse. His book The Uninhabitable Earth was practically a handbook for the Greta Thunberg generation. Yet now, even he is conceding that the global political consensus on climate action has dissolved into indifference and backsliding.

A decade ago, Paris was sold as nothing less than the salvation of humanity. Barack Obama declared that the agreement was “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got”. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon claimed sustainability would define the 21st century the way human rights had defined the 20th. His successor, António Guterres, elevated the treaty to near-scriptural status, suggesting its significance rivaled the U.N. charter itself. Pundits, activists, and world leaders congratulated themselves on ushering in a new era of global solidarity.

At WUWT, we weren’t fooled. On the very day the Paris agreement was signed, I wrote that it was “a non-binding collection of political promises, unenforceable and destined to unravel”. We noted that the agreement contained no enforcement mechanism, no penalties for failure, and relied entirely on the good faith of politicians whose careers depend on short-term voter approval. It was obvious then, and it is undeniable now, that this was a recipe for failure.

The Times admits that the unraveling has been swift. When Paris was forged, the United States was still a net importer of energy. Today, it is the world’s largest producer and exporter of refined oil and liquid natural gas. The Biden administration’s much-heralded Inflation Reduction Act, hailed as the single largest climate bill in U.S. history, has been gutted and dismantled under President Trump’s second term. As Wallace-Wells notes, Trump has not only canceled approvals for new renewable projects, he has literally “paved over that same Rose Garden” where Obama celebrated Paris.

But America is not the only player abandoning climate pieties. Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney—once the high priest of climate finance—made his first act in office the repeal of Canada’s carbon tax, and he was rewarded with a landslide victory. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist by training, now boasts about her nation’s booming oil and gas industry while enjoying one of the highest approval ratings of any world leader. Europe, once the vanguard of green virtue, is retreating as well. Laws once touted as proof of planetary salvation are being weakened, watered down, or repealed under pressure from populist coalitions and economic reality.

The mood has shifted so dramatically that Jason Bordoff, a former Obama energy adviser and now head of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, admits: “You can’t walk more than two feet at any global conference today without ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ being thrown around as the order of the day. … But it’s not clear to me that anyone knows what those words mean other than this whole climate thing is just too hard”.

In other words, the very people who once lectured the world about “existential threats” are now shrugging their shoulders and calling it “too hard.” This, after years of hectoring ordinary citizens to give up reliable energy, pay punitive carbon taxes, and trust in grand promises that were never going to materialize.

One cannot help but recall the fevered rhetoric of just a few years ago. At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, then–Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned, “It’s one minute to midnight on that Doomsday Clock, and we need to act now.” Prince Charles (now King) declared it was “literally the last-chance saloon.” Barack Obama told young people to “stay angry” and “channel that frustration” into ever more demands for climate action. The mainstream press ate it up, as did activists who treated climate politics as a secular religion.

But today, those same conferences are sparsely attended. President Biden skipped COP29, as did Vice President Harris, China’s Xi Jinping, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and France’s Emmanuel Macron. Even the U.N.’s own reports admit “no climate progress at all” has been made.

Why? Because when push came to shove, voters simply weren’t willing to pay. This is something WUWT has documented repeatedly. Polls show that while people will tell surveyors they “care about climate change,” it ranks dead last in voter priorities, and support collapses when costs are attached (WUWT, 2019). As we pointed out during Europe’s energy crisis, when forced to choose between freezing in the dark or burning more coal, people chose warmth and light every time.

The Times, in its own roundabout way, now validates this. Wallace-Wells concedes that “polls show that voters don’t actually prioritize decarbonization and, crucially, aren’t willing to pay much to bring it about”. That’s precisely what we’ve been saying for over a decade: you can’t build climate policy on the assumption that the public will sacrifice endlessly for hypothetical benefits.

To be sure, the Times tries to find a silver lining. Wallace-Wells notes that renewable energy investment has surged in recent years, with solar installations now measured in terawatts instead of megawatts. He emphasizes that “93 percent of new power worldwide came from clean sources” in 2024. But even this acknowledgment is tempered with a concession that such growth “is not yet enough to push global emissions downward”. And, crucially, he admits that what growth exists is being driven not by top-down treaties or activist demands, but by markets and consumers: “Decarbonization could not be reliably imposed from above on moralistic terms and would have to be powered instead by market forces, private investment and the informed consensus of a price-conscious public”.

That line could have been lifted straight from WUWT. We have long argued that technological innovation—when it makes sense economically—will naturally find its way into the energy mix. It does not require endless climate conferences, bureaucratic targets, or punitive taxes. It requires affordability, reliability, and demand.

The irony is rich. For years, critics of Paris—including myself—were dismissed as “deniers” for pointing out that the agreement was structurally doomed. Now, with the entire world backsliding, the same voices who scolded us are echoing our conclusions. Wallace-Wells admits that “perhaps it was always foolish to believe the world might fulfill the headline dream of Paris, and keep warming close to 1.5 degrees, and perhaps the promises to do so were always empty, as the most informed always suspected”.

Exactly. Empty promises, designed more for political theater than practical action. Paris was never a roadmap; it was a mirage.

And let’s not forget the broader consequences of these failed policies. In Europe, energy shortages forced governments to spend more on direct fossil fuel subsidies than on renewables during the Ukraine crisis. In Germany, the vaunted Energiewende collapsed into higher prices, unreliable grids, and renewed coal burning (WUWT, 2024). Meanwhile, China has quietly seized dominance of the green supply chain, producing 74 percent of global solar and wind projects and exporting panels so cheaply that they are flooding markets from Pakistan to sub-Saharan Africa. The West’s grandstanding has left it weaker, not stronger.

What we are witnessing is the slow-motion collapse of a delusion. The climate establishment promised salvation through international treaties, moralistic speeches, and punitive economic policies. Instead, they delivered broken promises, higher costs, and a geopolitical shift that left China in command of the very industries the West hoped to control.

At WUWT, we have been consistent. We warned that Paris was unenforceable. We pointed out that voters would never accept the sacrifices demanded. We documented the failures of renewable mandates, the hypocrisy of elites, and the unintended consequences of policies that put ideology ahead of reality.

Now, at long last, even the New York Times can no longer deny it.

The Paris Agreement did not save the planet. It did not usher in a new era of solidarity. It did not fulfill its grand promises. It was, as we said from the beginning, a mirage—one that distracted from practical solutions while enriching a class of political elites and green investors.

The age of Paris is over. And we told you so.

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