Climate Activists ‘Exaggerating,’ Liberal Journalist Says, Denouncing ‘Shrill Eco-Catastrophism’ 77%
By Ira Stoll78%
6/29/2026, 1:15:43 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Ad Hominem, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 50.5% saturation with 276 hits. Analysis detected 1,570 faulty-reasoning hits from 547 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 68.6% and a BS Rank of 77% (5,082 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 76.80% of the article peer group.
A liberal journalist who worked at the Washington Post and Time and who wrote a book urging people to fight climate change by eating less meat now says climate change activists are “exaggerating.”
Michael Grunwald, author of the 2025 book We Are Eating the Earth and also of an entire book praising Vice President Joe Biden for his "clean-energy transition" leadership of President Obama’s $800 billion in stimulus spending, makes the accusation in an article in the spring issue of Liberties.
That journal is edited by Leon Wieseltier, who had a long run at The New Republic.
"[S]ome climate activists have an annoying habit of exaggerating how badly things are going," Grunwald writes in the Liberties article, "Climate Change and the Primacy of Politics."
"Global warming is making droughts and floods worse, but it is not making them happen.
In fact, global warming does not always make everything worse; tropical hurricanes, for example, do not seem to be getting more frequent, defying a lot of shrill eco-catastrophism.
Apocalyptic rhetoric about how it’s game over for the climate if we do not cut greenhouse emissions 43% by 2030 is not only annoying but wrong.
There’s no such thing as game over for the climate. … there is no inflection point where we all suddenly die or are all doomed.
There is only better and worse."
The bulk of the article is about how "very bad" President Trump is.
"For the sake of the whales, the country, and the climate that envelops the whole world, what matters most is beating him and his enablers," Grunwald writes.
Along the way of the predictable Trump-bashing, though, is some entertaining and surprising criticism of Grunwald’s colleagues in the environmental movement.
Grunwald says their extremism is counterproductive both on the substance and for the way it alienates mainstream voters.
"Climate issues are more complicated than the nose-ringed Just Stop Oil pests who glue themselves to museums or the contemptuous Bluesky in-crowd that snarks about insufficiently radical Democrats would have you believe," he writes.
"The climate left is often clueless about politics, and sometimes also about climate; the knee-jerk naysayers who fight zero-emissions nuclear plants, solar panels in tortoise habitats, and the transmission lines necessary to distribute renewable power to metropolitan areas are not doing the environment any favors."
He also notes some potential areas of bipartisan cooperation.
"[T]here is bipartisan enthusiasm for geothermal projects that transform underground heat into clean round-the-clock energy.
The same is increasingly true for nuclear power."
Pinged Grunwald, who was my colleague on a student newspaper in college and who I’ve stayed in friendly if distant touch with over the years (he lives in Florida), to ask if he had anything to add.
He emphasized that he thinks Trump is a bigger problem for the environment than the "climate left."
He wrote back to me, "Eco-catastrophism is bad but if the world followed Trump's lead we would have a real eco-catastrophe!
I don't think conservatives should support his Stalinist efforts to prop up the obsolete coal industry either."
He also noted that by climate movement standards he’s center-left and known already in those circles for opposing "degrowth," the Sunrise Movement, and the Green New Deal as stalking horses for socialism.
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95%flagged-word coverageMichael Grunwald
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