Milton Friedman once quipped that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” To that one may add the histrionics of the environmental lobby.

Thirty-five years ago, in 1990, William F. Buckley wrote this gem of a paragraph: “In the 1960s, when the ideological swingers spoke of nothing else than the dangers of strontium 90, a royal commission in London closed its report on the dangers of radiation with the wonderful sentence, “On the whole, then, it is our conclusion that the requirements of good health warn against the consumption of any food.” In Great Britain you can get away with a nice little wisecrack like that at the end of a solemn report. If such a statement were issued by a congressional committee, I know at least 35,000 people who would starve to death.” Just so.

This is to say, then, that apocalyptic renderings of modern human existence are nothing particularly new. That permanence, however, subjects them, every now and then, to a bit of dampening, brought on by the persistence of reality, which no government has yet managed to centrally plan out of existence.

Last month when Bill Gates blew the whistle — saying in a rather level-headed memo “climate change is not going to wipe out humanity” — some took that as the catalyst marking a relaxation of climate-related hysteria. To judge from the reactions of the climate-invested crowd you would have thought Mr. Gates had called for the ritual sacrifice of puppies, or the reinstatement of prayer in schools. But pressures greater even than the Word of Bill Gates had already begun to exert themselves.

Reality socked Ford Motor Company rather hard, for instance, regardless of what Gates had to say or not. Ford announced earlier this week that it was discontinuing its electric vehicle program, after years of having been enticed — or more properly, coerced — into it by government policy. The company also mentioned that they were looking to take about $19.5 billion in charges, mostly from the devaluation of its EV business, which has lost something on the order of $13 billion since 2023. General Motors pulled back from its EV production last October, taking a $1.6 billion hit. Said Ford CEO Jim Farley: “Instead of plowing billions into the future knowing these large EVs will never make money, we are pivoting.” Yes, to cars and trucks for which there is actually a market. Obviously the long-overdue elimination of federal EV tax credits by the Trump administration was the final nail, but the very fact that a market only existed — and even then, at below subsistence levels — because it was being heavily subsidized by government suggests that perhaps the market just wasn’t there and could not be magically invented by quixotic public policy.

Meanwhile, the same governments that yesterday were tripping over themselves in a race to see who could set zero emission target dates the soonest are suddenly confronted with the rapid approach of those target dates and no way to meet them. Not to mention the advent of energy-hungry new technologies like AI and their attendant data centers. And this is on top of electrification mandates. Even in Colorado, where devotion to net-zero is practically a State religion, the Colorado Energy Office is prudently proposing modest rollbacks of their targets.

The obvious solution to the quandary of meeting growing demand for electrical power without going back to coal is to finally embrace nuclear energy, which the state is taking tentative steps to do, over the howls of objection from the environmental crowd whose only solution seems to be – just say no to data centers.

The most illustrative example of the collision of with reality is overseas, in Western Europe, which finds itself in quite an existential pickle. Russian aggression — which came as a surprise to no one except our last three Presidents and most of their European counterparts — has been challenging European faith in climate policy for a few years now. But the problem is becoming more acute, as European leaders look warily to their east, recognize a very real risk of war with Moscow, then look at their own depleted arsenal, and finally look trepidatiously across the Atlantic at a United States that seems intent on leaving the continent to their own devises. Europe and Great Britain know they need to rearm, that the threat from Russia is real, and that it will be mollified not through appeasement, but through strength. They are also suddenly realizing that they have spend decades misallocating resources on a hypothetical threat, leaving them chillingly underprepared to confront a very real one.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.