A former chemist from Maine just published an opinion piece meant to rally the climate faithful—and instead made the strongest case yet that the free market is solving the problem without Washington's help.
Joseph Hardy, writing in the Portland Press Herald, leads with the required doom: fires in Spain and France, a Western heat dome, Canadian smoke. The usual liturgy. But then something funny happens. He lists the actual data, and it's almost all good news.
Wyoming—a coal state with a conservative governor and legislature—has hit 30% wind generation, with more coming. The Amazon is seeing its lowest deforestation rate in a decade. China has reclaimed 125,000 square miles of the Gobi Desert and nearly two-thirds of its new car sales are electric. India and the EU are installing grid solar at record pace. In Australia, solar has overtaken coal. Half of new U.S. homes use heat pumps. Solar panels are 10% more efficient than just 15 years ago. Battery storage systems are cutting peak fossil fuel use. Greenhouse gas emissions have peaked in many countries and are plateauing elsewhere.
Hardy calls these "positive developments" and says efforts to reverse global warming are becoming "unstoppable." That word matters. If the trends are unstoppable—if technology, market forces, and falling costs are already driving the transition—then what exactly justifies the emergency powers, the mandates, the trillions in spending, the regulatory apparatus that lets bureaucrats tell you what stove you can cook on and what car you can drive?
The Press Herald framed this as a feel-good hope piece. But read it straight and it's an indictment of the entire alarmist industry. The data Hardy cites comes from innovation, not regulation. From competition, not central planning. From drillers' techniques repurposed for geothermal, not from some EPA directive.
Hardy acknowledges that climate impacts will continue—more storms, heat waves, droughts. He's not dismissing the physics. But he also admits the solution is already scaling worldwide without requiring the political class to seize control of the economy. That's the part the establishment press never emphasizes, because it undermines the entire justification for their preferred policy agenda.
If the market is already delivering the goods, the only thing government mandates accomplish is concentrating power and redirecting money to connected interests. Follow the dollars: subsidies flow to donors, green loans go to well-connected firms, and the working American gets higher energy bills and less freedom.
The climate lobby wants the crisis more than the cure. The cure is already here, and it doesn't require a permission slip from Washington.
Here's the open question: if a true believer like Hardy can look at the data and call the transition unstoppable, why is his side still demanding emergency powers? Maybe the crisis was never the point.
