It is always easier—and more profitable—to align oneself with existing wealth and power
than to resist it on the principled grounds of justice, equity, or stewardship. While the
pursuit of profit rewards speed, scale, and indifference, conservation demands restraint
and the acceptance of limits. The incentives are fundamentally lopsided: on one side, the
gains from exploitation are immediate, private, and compounding; on the other, the
rewards of conservation are delayed, diffused, and socialized. Those who seek profit have
the obvious motive and the ample means to dominate the discourse, while those who
argue for restraint must expend their own time, resources, and credibility with no hope of
reimbursement. It is asymmetrical warfare made personal.
Climate change politics is perhaps the largest and most literal theatre of this asymmetry.
After centuries of fossil-fuel extraction, the planet has warmed beyond the narrow
Holocene temperature range within which human civilization emerged. The inheritors of
the same human character traits that created this condition continue to profit from its
persistence. Wealth generated by exploitation easily drowns out scientific warnings with a
louder, better-funded song of denial, delay, and distraction.
In this ideological conflict, the real “conservatives” are not those defending fossil-fueled
profits, but their science-backed opponents attempting to conserve the natural ecosystems
upon which life on Earth depends. The fight remains asymmetrical: one side stands on
principle against another for whom principle is an inconvenient luxury—and an existential
threat to private profit.
To name names: Bari Weiss and “ex-activist” Lucy Biggers of The Free Press (thefp.com)
serve as modern archetypes of this "easy path." It is difficult to imagine a journal of serious
environmental reporting commanding the $150 million reportedly paid to Weiss by David
Ellison’s Paramount–Skydance, the new owners of CBS News. Is Ellison anti-
environmental? Perhaps not inherently; but ideological alignment is easy, and it pays the
rent. To be clear: the focus here is not on these individuals as people, but on the structural
decay that occurs when media organizations align their incentives with power rather than
truth.
CBS has created a structural coupling between professional reporting and ideologically
driven commentary, much to the detriment of its own journalism. While CBS’s online news
stories—at least as of January 2026—remain timely and professional, the Free Press
articles tethered to the bottom of every environment page are anything but. These links
direct readers toward climate-denialist commentary under the amusing lie, “Go deeper with
The Free Press,” only to land them in a shallow pool of unscientific polemics.
Prominent among these offerings in January 2026 is Ted Nordhaus’s “I Thought Climate
Change Would End the World. I Was Wrong.” Even as a confession of youthful naivety, the
piece is barely of interest; it possesses neither the depth nor the relevance to engage with
the actual rigor of climate science or the mounting pressure of climate reality.
But the superficiality goes much deeper. Alongside Nordhaus is a polemic by Bari Weiss’s
entire editorial team, apparently: “ The Cost of Confused Climate Science “, 3 December
2025 (paywalled). Their target is “alarmism,” and it quickly becomes clear that thefp.com is
resolved to protect its readers from the unsettling conclusions inherent in the scientific
method. The team seizes upon a recent retraction by the journal Nature regarding a paper
on economic damages from global warming, branding it as part of a “long pattern” where
scientists supposedly make “outsize claims in the hope of influencing public debate.”Yet, no—this narrative is demonstrably false and the weight of published scientific
literature actually evinces the exact opposite. For instance the history of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is characterized by constant upward
revisions. Far from being hyperbolic, its projections for global warming and climate shift
have been historically, and perhaps dangerously, conservative.
In a seminal 2013 study—now cited over 500 times—titled “ Climate change prediction:
Erring on the side of least drama? ”, Brysse et al found “… scientists are biased not toward
alarmism but rather the reverse: toward cautious estimates, where we define caution as
erring on the side of less rather than more alarming predictions. We call this tendency
“erring on the side of least drama (ESLD).” That is: scientific papers are almost universally
written with a conservative bias, objectively favoring the least alarming predictions.
To be sure, the public advocacy of an individual is not an institutional projection of scientific
consensus. While a scientist arguing for urgent action might select the evidence that most
forcefully supports their case, the institutional reality is different: every national Academy of
Science on Earth is unequivocal on the reality of human-induced global warming. This
does not imply that every climate scientist is cautious in tone, nor that scientific
communication is always free of heat. Instead, it reflects the well-documented tendency of
institutional assessments to privilege consensus and methodological caution—often erring
by marginalizing uncertain but high-impact risks until the evidence becomes
overwhelming.
Take for instance the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report AR5 (2018) chapter regarding sea-
level change. The report notes that confidence in sea-level rise projections increased
precisely because of "improved physical understanding" and the "inclusion of ice-sheet
dynamical changes" that were previously omitted. The institutional history of the IPCC
reports is the opposite of alarmist overreach, rather a steady, reluctant climb toward reality
as physical risks became too undeniable to ignore. Processes initially dismissed as too
uncertain to quantify—most notably rapid ice-sheet loss—have repeatedly proven to be
real, measurable, and faster than the "drama-free" models allowed. Even the canonical
CO₂–temperature relationship has proven unsettlingly accurate, tracking observed
warming not overshooting it.