Is This the End of the ‘Climate Cult’?

Yesterday marked 10 years since the Paris Climate Agreement. And it is precisely the time when many are asking, Is this the end of the great climate panic?

• The European Union will reportedly scrap its 2035 ban on internal combustion engines. The Net Zero Banking Alliance has been shut down. Bill Gates has admitted that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and other issues are more important. The Washington Post says climate change is no longer even a Democratic talking point.

If the climate cult is dead, good riddance to it and its failed prophecies. I vividly remember being taught in school that by the time I grew up, we’d probably have to wear face masks outdoors due to the worsening pollution. Sure enough, we did have to wear face masks—not because of pollution or any other real threat to our breathing, but because governments went into full oppression mode over a Chinese microbiologist who ate pangolin.

But I fear it’s too soon to declare the great climate panic over. Why? Because this was never really about the climate or science. Everyone wants clean air and water, obviously. This wasn’t about that: It was about control.

“What is happening here is not about the environment,” wrote Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry at the time. “It is about destroying the United States.”

“Environmental regulation gives significantly more power to bureaucrats,” he wrote. “The governments most in favor of confronting climate change are the socialist, Marxist-type governments that want to control everything.”

Those bureaucrats are on the back foot. The real reason the socialists have stopped talking about climate change in America in particular is that they don’t want to empower these government agencies now that President Trump controls them.

There’s another deadly problem with this movement: “All the talk about climate change has pushed God out of the picture,” wrote Mr. Flurry. “The radical left blames every problem on climate change. But the Bible says that most of it is from God!”

Weather curses will increase. Blaming them on man-made “global warming” or “global cooling” or “climate change” diverts our attention away from the repentance we so desperately need and focuses us on self-destructive bans on internal combustion engines and the like.

“The solution to our problems is not a Paris Agreement,” concluded Mr. Flurry. “It is heeding the warning message God is trumpeting, and turning our hearts to God!” Ten years on, that should be clearer than ever.