The climate hysteria peddled by the anti-industrial Environmentalists and the statists of the political Left has gone beyond debate over energy or a choice between untouched nature vs. industrial progress and human flourishing. The hysteria is causing real psychological harm to young people. A Nature study found:
The survey — the largest of its kind — asked 10,000 young people in 10 countries how they felt about climate change and government responses to it.
The results, released in a preprint on 14 September1, found that most respondents were concerned about climate change, with nearly 60% saying they felt ‘very worried’ or ‘extremely worried’. Many associated negative emotions with climate change — the most commonly chosen were ‘sad’, ‘afraid’, ‘anxious’, ‘angry’ and ‘powerless’ (see ‘Climate anxiety’). Overall, 45% of participants said their feelings about climate change impacted their daily lives.
This unnecessary anxiety is causing real behavioral changes. In a propaganda-laced “news” article, CNBC reports that “A growing number of people are reluctant to bring a child into a world that’s set to be ravaged by climate change in the coming decades.”
And it’s affecting people’s monetary choices, threatening their future financial security. The New York Times reports that, due largely to climate change fear, young people are saving less. One fearful individual said, “I’m not going to deprive myself some of the comforts of life now for a future that feels like it could be ripped away from me at any moment.”
This is the mental disaster that climate catastrophists have sown. And now young people are reaping the damage.
Psychologists coined a new term for this phenomenon—climate anxiety. This, in a period of history when human life has never never been safer from climate dangers and there has never been a more promising time in which to be a teenager. The present is amazingly good, and the future brighter than ever—unless the climate/environmental Chicken Little doomsayers manage to crush it.
Despite the wholly unnecessary eco-anxiety (another term for it) being inflicted on the young, the climate catastrophists just keep piling on. In a Tampa Bay Times piece by Rose Wong, Climate change also affects mental health. Call it eco-anxiety, wrote:
Mental health professionals have a term for the stress and grief many feel about the planet’s future: eco-anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association defines it as “chronic fear of environmental doom.” It can lead to anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
This, from Rose Wong, the Times’s “mental health reporter”! The sub-heading of Wong’s article reads, “Climate change doesn’t just threaten the planet. It also affects the mental health of those grappling with the consequences.” Can't this mental health reporter see that it's not climate change that is causing the young’s mental health problems? It’s the false "Climate change threatens the planet" Chicken Little catastrophizing that is causing the eco-anxiety she laments? Wong herself is part of the problem.
The title of this blog post is too mild. This is not mere miseducation. It is educational malpractice. More, it is child abuse. The constant barrage of environmental/ecological/climate doom mongering is causing real harm. The environmentalist/statist Left doom campaign must not be called out for what it is—a criminal conspiracy. It’s a campaign to frighten people, especially focussed on the young, into voting for the fascist political agenda of the Left. The conspiracy encompasses the political, education, media, and even the business fields. For some, it may be unintentional. But let’s be clear. Anyone who utters the term “climate crisis” or “save the planet” is guilty. This includes Rose Wong.
Let’s also be clear about something else: panic mongering is wholly unnecessary. We can honestly acknowledge and deal with the negatives of climate change and other environmental problems without panicking the young into real mental health damage. Plenty of thinkers have documented and countered the false narrative being peddled that human flourishing is incompatible with successfully mitigating the challenges posed by economic and industrial progress to the climate or environment. The climate is not in crisis. The planet is not doomed. To the extent we encounter climate or environmental dangers, freedom, markets, Capitalism, science, and innovation is the answer. Not economic destruction; not political tyranny; not, as the U.N. asserts, a need to impose totalitarian top-down "unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society".
You don’t have to look too hard to get the whole truth.
Related Reading:
My Quick Take on 'Opposing Views: Is Climate Change A Problem?'
New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs
‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism
The 'Watermelon' Analogy is Real, and it is Dangerous
Environmentalists, Luddites, and Collectivism
Paris Climate Agreement Adopted: New Central Plan for the World’s Economy and Climate—Ronald Bailey for Reason.com
Is Climate Indoctrination Coming to NJ Government Schools?
The question of whether to seek political leverage by driving children to despair seems to be getting more and more negative answers these days. For instance Kelsey Piper, who as “a Staff Writer for Vox’s new vertical with a focus on the global poor, animal welfare, and risks affecting a stable future for our world” seems an unlikely candidate for a fit of sanity of any sort, just wrote:
“My 5-year-old daughter is now old enough to read a lot of books and magazines aimed at children, and it’s given me a whole new perspective on the discourse wars over how we talk about climate change, conservation, and the future of the planet. As I’ve written about before, climate change is going to be bad, and it will hold back humanity from thriving as much as we should this century. It will likely cause mass migration and displacement and extinctions of many species. What it won’t do, however, is make the Earth unlivable, or even mean that our children live in a world poorer than the one we grew up in. As many climate scientists have been telling us, the world is a better place to live in — especially for people in lower-income countries — than it has ever been, and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950.”
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