Rather than a collective admission, I feel what's happening is the crotchety people are dying off, leaving us millennials and GenZ to clean up the mess. Thinks won't change until a critical mass of them are dead and gone.
The issue seemed to completely drop from public discourse during the Biden presidency as even people on the far left attacked and complained about high gas prices. Musk himself flip-flopped and said it's not really a pressing issue. The Biden administration ended up admonished oil companies for slowing exploration.
The president can almost be excused for his naivety - he's literally lived in a coastal penthouse his whole life. So in a way he's right - as far as he's aware it's a dead topic so it must have been a hoax.
Biden signed into law the largest investment in clean energy in US history, dwarfing everything that came before. Half the economy was trying to get their hands on some of that stimmy.