The Empty Spectacle of the U.N. Climate-Change Summit

As President Joe Biden limps into Glasgow, there are only two things holding back his big, showy climate agenda: politics and economics.

If you happen to be one of those people who insists that climate change should be “beyond politics,” then you are certainly entitled to the sentiment — but spare us any lectures about “democracy” in the future, because politics is how liberal-democratic societies go about their public business.

And the politics here do not favor dramatic action, whatever is said or notionally agreed to in Glasgow.

Joe Biden and his Democratic allies face the same problem as other would-be climate saviors throughout both the developed world and the poorer countries: There is very little popular support for radical social and economic change in pursuit of climate goals. Even a sharp-as-a-doorknob goofus such as President Biden understands this, which is why his anti-coal program was the first thing the White House put on the altar when negotiating with Senator Joe Manchin for universal pre-K and tuition-free community college. Climate change, they tell us, is an existential threat, against which bold and radical action must be taken — but not if it means Democrat-voting millionaires in Greenwich, Conn., and Cambridge, Mass., have to pay for their own babysitters.