Victor Davis Hanson: Is the Era of ‘Climate Change Orthodoxy’ Dying?

The Daily Signal

News, Government, Politics, Daily News

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

Decades of consensus around so-called climate catastrophe are now running into new economic, technological, and geopolitical realities. Mix in AI and its unprecedented demand for large-scale electricity generation, and we have a global climate conversation that demands to be reckoned with. Victor Davis Hanson breaks down how the foundations of decades of “green orthodoxy” are shifting on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” “The people who have been the avatars of climate change, never suffer the consequences of their own ideology. Barack Obama said the planet would be inundated pretty soon, if we didn't address global climate change. Why would he buy a seaside estate at Martha's Vineyard or one on the beach of Hawaii if he really did believe that the oceans would rise and flood his multimillion-dollar investment? “The inconsistency of the global warming narrative, the self-interest in the people who promote it, and the logic that they have not presented, empirically, the evidence that would convince us that we have to radically transform our economies on the wishes of a few elites that do not have the evidence, but do have a lot of hypocrisy in the process.” (0:00) Introduction (0:58) Shifting Perspectives on Climate Change (2:28) Global Skepticism (5:12) Geopolitical Factors (6:16) Third World Demands (8:30) Hypocrisy Among Climate Change Advocates (9:49) Conclusion 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠ 👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enabling notification: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1⁠ 👉More exclusive content are available on Victor’s website: ⁠https://victorhanson.com⁠ 👉The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: ⁠https://secured.dailysignal.com/⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	For most of my life, at least for the last 35 years, we have accepted the climate change orthodoxy.
0:07.0	There was always debate, but the dominant narrative said, no, we have to radically change our economy
0:12.0	and move away from fossil fuels to renewable, and that was usually wind and solar.
0:19.0	I didn't think in my lifetime that I would see an end to that.
0:22.6	And then something's happened lately, artificial intelligence.
0:25.6	This seems to be the greatest technological breakthrough since the industrial evolution
0:29.6	takes huge amounts of electricity.
0:31.6	We don't have it.
0:32.6	We're going to have to build 100, one gigawatt plant.
0:35.6	That's the size of a large nuclear reactor. We're going to have
0:39.1	to build 100 per year, or the equivalent of clean coal or natural gas. And we will not get it
0:45.7	by subsidizing wind turbines and solar panels. Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hanson for the Daily Signal.
1:03.6	For most of my life, at least for the last 35 years, we have accepted the climate change orthodoxy. We used to be global warming and then when
1:14.4	things were not always warming, but they were cooling. They changed the name to climate change to
1:20.3	suggest whatever the temperature extreme was. It was all due to carbon emissions caused by, in general,
1:27.2	humans, but in particular, Westerners who were
1:30.3	polluting the planet with heat. That was the dominant narrative. I didn't think in my lifetime
1:36.8	that I would see an end to that dominance, even though there were inconsistencies. The planet
1:42.6	is 4 billion years old and man has only been here for 300,000 years,
1:47.8	and we only have accurate record keeping of temperature fluctuations for the last 150 years. And even
1:55.0	within that period, we have cyclical changes between decades of abnormal temperatures, whether too hot or too cold.
2:04.9	Before the Industrial Revolution, in some cases, by tree rings and ice in the Arctic sampling.
	...

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