“The Headquarters of Globalist Lefty Communication”. (Source: Shutterstock)

Jo Nova
Date: 6 October 2026

Welcome to a new era of weasel words:

Katrin Bennhold, the New York Times writer, knows exactly what kind of class war this is, not that she is honest enough to say so, but look at the first two paragraphs. The problem is the redneck hillbillies and yellow-vest tradies and the kind of people who campaigned for Brexit. “The climate is just another battleground in the culture wars” she says — making it clear that people with culture are the smug ones who know what’s best for the workers, and are going to fix the weather anyway, but just not talk about it.

A few years ago, I covered the Yellow Vest protests in France, where workers rebelled against a fuel tax billed as a green measure. I interviewed protesters at German car plants lamenting the shift to electric vehicles, which reduces the number of jobs. Now, in Britain, I’m watching the same people who once campaigned for Brexit campaign against renewables, which they say have raised energy bills. (There’s something to that; read on.)

Across the West, the climate has become another battleground in the culture wars. That’s one reason why, despite an alarming list of deadly climate disasters around the world, you don’t hear as many politicians talk about the climate anymore. But that doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about it. Today I write about the politics driving a climate change rebrand.

Right wing populists

The core problem, she explains is the ‘right wing populists’:

But why are politicians and others in power so hesitant to talk about the climate?

Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic have taken aim at climate policies as a liberal elitist project that hurts working-class people.

So that must hurt then, that their political enemies have nailed the truth to the mast exactly as it is and she has no way to prove them wrong. Climate is not only toxic for voters, it’s ammo for the lawyers too. The Big Bankers have realized that if they talk about trying to change the climate the Republican lawyers will come after them for failing in their fiduciary duty to shareholders and investors. It’s so bad they have to drop ‘Net Zero’ too!

Brussels increasingly pitches its climate agenda as “energy independence.” In Britain, where I live, a committee of British lawmakers last month suggested the government drop the term “net zero” altogether, because it had become so toxic.

Her one and only tiny concession to the unwashed masses is that electricity has got more expensive, but that’s only a temporary thing “for a few years”.

In Europe, the people campaigning against “net zero” — the goal of getting carbon emissions to zero — accuse governments of driving up their energy bills. (Their arguments find traction in part because they’re not wrong. The process of constructing a grid that can efficiently distribute renewables comes with a price tag that some politicians have been reluctant to talk about, and that will drive electricity bills up, not down, at least for a few years.)

She can’t even bring herself to say “they’re right”, she can only manage “not wrong”.

“The Planet is Unwell”

Handily, she translates the science for all the five year old readers of The Times who need to know national energy policy but don’t understand decimal numbers bigger than … one:

Europe’s hottest summer on record. A collapsing glacier in Nepal. Wildfires …

That’s what 1.5 degrees Celsius in warming above preindustrial levels looks like. It’s a number I found difficult to wrap my head around until a climate expert explained it to me this way: Imagine your body temperature going up by 1.5 degrees. You feel unwell. Now imagine it rising by 2 degrees — you’re seriously ill.

The planet is unwell. For many, that alone makes the case for aggressively shifting away from fossil fuels to renewables.

This is a bed time story to scare a toddler. It’s hard to believe the New York Times was once called “America’s newspaper of record”. Ms Bennhold must think the workers are very, very stupid, after all, “the Planet is unwell” (obviously) and renewables are the “cheapest they’ve ever been” (her words) yet the people on the dumb side of the culture war still don’t want them. Strangely, Ms Bennhold has not even one raised eyebrow of curiosity about why thousands of farmers, truckers and engineers keep using the horrible, expensive, planet wrecking fossil fuels. She could have phoned one up to ask, but that was a bit too much investigating. Luckily for her moral compass this “reframing has the virtue of being true”. (Though it’s just a nice side bonus, not the reason for doing it). Because dear simpletons, energy security is important — think of the Russians, The War, The Middle East! The handy multipurpose pocket-knife words for any Lefty debate. Just say Russia and it will all make sense. We need solar panels and wind turbines so that when the next oil crisis comes we can harvest our food with our electric combine harvesters that no one has invented yet. This name change will fail like all the other ones.

This article was published first on joannenova.com.au on 3 October 2026.

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