Group identity, social status, and a credential-dominated policy establishment have made the climate narrative increasingly resistant to disappointing results. The result is a policy trap in which failure rarely leads to reconsideration, but instead to demands for even more climate policy.

By Evert Doornhof
Energy bills rise, electricity grids become congested, and industrial projects wait years for connections. Energy-intensive businesses postpone investment or relocate. Large shares of weather-dependent wind and solar require grid capacity, balancing, storage, interconnection, demand management, or dispatchable backup, while governments encourage electrification.

One might expect a fundamental review. Are the chosen instruments working? Are their costs proportionate to their benefits? Are there more reliable alternatives?

Yet the usual response is the opposite. Grid congestion calls for more investment. High energy prices justify accelerating renewables. Disappointing emissions reductions call for stricter targets. Public resistance calls for better communication.

Why does visible policy failure so often produce more of the same policy?

Over several decades, climate policy has become embedded in the identity, institutions, and material interests of a highly educated governing class. The result is a self-reinforcing system that struggles to treat disappointing outcomes as counterevidence.

The neglected story of human resilience
Begin with a fact that rarely occupies the centre of climate communication: humanity has become dramatically more resilient to natural hazards. Long-term data compiled by Our World in Data and EM-DAT show a dramatic decline in global mortality from natural and weather-related disasters, particularly when measured per capita. Even total deaths have declined substantially despite a world population roughly four times larger.

Hazards have not disappeared; historical records are incomplete, and losses can still be enormous. But vulnerability is clearly not fixed.

Forecasting, stronger buildings, productive agriculture, public health, and emergency response save lives. In Bangladesh, cyclones that once killed hundreds of thousands now cause far lower death tolls when warnings, shelters, and evacuations work.

Prosperity, technology, reliable energy, and adaptation have made people safer. Yet this success story sits uneasily within a political narrative built around escalating emergency. If human vulnerability can be reduced through development and practical adaptation, it becomes harder to justify every policy choice through the language of permanent emergency. Within such a narrative, good news is not merely uninteresting; it can weaken the urgency that the policy programme depends on.

Illustration 2/video: Marcel Crok, “There Is No Climate Emergency”—short English-language explanation of declining disaster mortality and rising human resilience.

Climate policy as identity and status
American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi writes about “symbolic capitalists”: highly educated professionals who work with words, ideas, data, and symbols. They are concentrated in universities, media, government, law, consulting, finance, and NGOs—the institutions that define social problems and confer prestige.

Education does not protect people from tribalism. Cognitive sophistication can instead provide more rhetorical skill with which to defend existing commitments and absorb counterevidence into an established worldview.

The effect becomes stronger when an opinion conveys social status. In many professional settings, support for ambitious climate policy signals expertise, modernity, and moral responsibility. Fundamental doubt can be interpreted not simply as disagreement, but as ignorance, selfishness, or hostility to science.

Climate beliefs can both describe the world and locate the believer within a social hierarchy. Once a position becomes a badge of group membership, changing one’s mind carries a social and professional price.

This mechanism acquires political force because university-educated professionals are heavily overrepresented in parliaments, ministries, regulatory agencies, media, universities, NGOs, and consultancies. This credentialed class helps decide which risks are urgent, which experts are credible, and which solutions remain respectable.

The people bearing the costs often have less agenda-setting power. To a policymaker, a higher electricity bill may be a distributional effect to be softened with a subsidy. To a low-income household or an energy-intensive manufacturer, it may be existential. The reputational and moral rewards often accrue to those who design and advocate ambitious policy, while many of the material burdens are borne elsewhere.

How the narrative protects itself
A dominant policy frame survives not only because many people sincerely believe in it. It also develops filters that keep disconfirming information at a distance.

The first is selection. A heatwave, flood, wildfire, or hurricane is rapidly presented as a warning about climate change. Falling disaster mortality, successful adaptation, or the role of population growth and rising property values in rising losses receive much less attention. One kind of information fits the prevailing story immediately; the other requires explanation and dilutes the sense of urgency.

The second filter is labelling. Terms such as “climate denier,” “disinformation,” or “fossil-fuel mouthpiece” are not arguments. They place a speaker outside the moral and intellectual community. Once the label sticks, audiences feel licensed to disregard a claim without examining its evidence.

Guilt by association encourages self-censorship. Editors decline contributions, researchers avoid citations, and organisations distance themselves from stigmatised critics. Participants understand the reputational risks.

Finally, institutions reinforce one another. Governments set targets; agencies fund research around them; advisory bodies evaluate implementation; media present the results as expert consensus; and governments cite that consensus in return. Each institution can act sincerely while the system leaves little room to question the chosen route.

Why every setback justifies acceleration
A robust proposition must be vulnerable to reality. Climate policy, however, has acquired explanations that preserve the framework under almost any outcome.

High energy prices are attributed not to the cost and complexity of the transition, but to continued dependence on fossil fuels. Grid congestion does not indicate a mismatch among weather-dependent generation, demand, and infrastructure; it shows that too little has been invested in the grid. Industrial decline shows that companies failed to modernise. Variability will eventually be solved by batteries, hydrogen, interconnectors, demand management, or technologies not yet operating at the required scale. Public resistance reflects misinformation or inadequate communication.

In this way, every setback becomes an argument for acceleration. Policy cannot fail because failure is defined as a shortage of policy. The programme becomes functionally resistant to falsification.

Institutional interests reinforce this tendency. A large transition economy now links utilities, consultants, NGOs, universities, government departments, ESG professionals, banks, and investment funds. Many careers, budgets, and institutional mandates have become tied to the continuation and expansion of the agenda. This does not require corruption: sincere conviction and institutional self-interest can reinforce each other.

There is also a rising political cost of reversal. After years of binding targets, enormous expenditure, and moral condemnation of critics, admitting a wrong turn becomes painful. Technical fixes, fresh subsidies, and delayed deadlines are politically easier than fundamental reconsideration.

The dangerous inversion
Here lies the deepest contradiction. Humanity’s falling vulnerability was achieved through prosperity, infrastructure, technology, and abundant energy. Heating and air conditioning protect people; agriculture, water management, and transport reduce the effects of droughts and floods. Wealthier societies can build stronger homes and evacuate people in time.

If climate policy makes energy materially more expensive or less reliable, weakens industry, and slows economic development, it may erode the very capabilities people use to protect themselves from climate risks. A policy intended to make society safer can reduce adaptive capacity, especially among poorer households and in developing countries that still lack reliable energy.

This is not an argument for doing nothing, or a denial that greenhouse gases affect climate. It is an argument for restoring human welfare as the organising principle of climate and energy policy: affordability, availability, reliability, and resilience. Adaptation should be prioritised where risks are concrete. Nuclear power should be allowed to compete on equal terms. Wind, solar, storage, hydro, fossil fuels, and emerging technologies should be judged not solely by their projected emissions but by their overall contributions to affordability, reliability, land use, material use, and system resilience.

Escaping the trap
No central conspiracy is required to explain the persistence of climate policy. It is an emergent system in which moral conviction, group identity, status incentives, career structures, financial interests, and institutional self-confirmation all point in the same direction. Intelligent and well-intentioned people can thereby sustain a programme whose outcomes become increasingly difficult to reconcile with its promises.

The way out begins with intellectual modesty and genuine pluralism. Let competing scientific interpretations and energy scenarios meet in public. Publish total system costs, benefits, trade-offs, and uncertainties. Judge critics by their evidence rather than their labels or associations. Most importantly, specify beforehand which outcomes would cause a policy to be revised or abandoned.

The decisive question is not whether political leaders care enough about the climate, but whether they are willing to let observed outcomes correct their policies. If every failure merely justifies more intervention, the climate policy trap remains closed. Reconsideration should be seen as evidence of governing maturity, not moral betrayal. Only then can the climate debate return to an open comparison of risks, costs, benefits, and alternatives.

Evert Doornhof has long been active in the financial world in commercial and management roles. After the COVID pandemic, he changed course when he observed how quickly personal freedoms can be restricted. He is now committed to shedding light on crises that appear to be manufactured or exaggerated. Among other things, he is active with the Clintel Foundation, where he manages social media and has written several articles. His previous contribution to The Liberum can be read here.