Leadership Quote by Don Young

Fatalism dressed up as plain talk: that is the engine of Don Young's line. "If it is warming" opens with a shrug disguised as skepticism, a way to keep the premise at arm's length while still sounding reasonable. Then comes the pivot to "it's happened before" and the mangled "cyclitic" (cyclical) claim, a familiar move in American political rhetoric: recast a human-driven crisis as just weather doing what weather does. The argument isn't scientific so much as strategic. It relocates responsibility from policy to geology, from voters to deep time.

The subtext is even clearer in the last clause: "regardless of what you and I do". That's not merely an opinion about climate systems; it's a moral alibi. By flattening individual and collective agency into irrelevance, the quote drains urgency from the room. If nothing we do matters, then regulation is theatre, investment is waste, and political conflict is optional. It's a permission structure for staying put.

Context matters because Young wasn't a talk-show provocateur; he was a long-serving Alaska congressman, representing a state where extractive industries are both lifeline and identity. In that setting, climate policy doesn't arrive as abstract stewardship. It arrives as a threat to jobs, revenue, and sovereignty. The "it's cyclical" framing functions as cultural insulation: it protects a way of life by making the problem feel ancient, inevitable, and therefore not really a problem that demands sacrifice now.