The antidote to climate anxiety
We need to stop offering kids pint-sized solutions to tanker-sized problems
A funny thing happened when I tried to tell my eleven year old about Hannah Ritchie’s new book, Not the End of the World. Ritchie begins by discussing the staggeringly bleak attitudes about the future prevalent among young people today. In survey after survey, kids express absolute dread of the future, to the point that significant numbers say they don’t want to have kids of their own, since that would mean bringing innocent babies into a MadMax-style climate dystopia.
My kid read through the first few pages and just sort of shurgged, dismissing it with a “well, his book is definitely not for me.”
“How come?” I asked.
“Because you’re my dad,” he said, “so I know these kids are just nuts. We can definitely beat climate change — a bit of iron in the ocean, a bit of salt in the clouds and Bob’s your uncle!”
OK, he’s definitely been reading too many British books.
Still, it made me smile.
The kid’s not even a little bit anxious about the climate. And it’s not because he doesn’t know about the issues. We talk a lot about climate change in this house. Incessantly. I’ve made sure that they’re, if anything, hyper-aware of the dangers.
Still, climate anxiety is a totally alien concept to him and to his sister.
Why?
Because I keep talking to them about the alternatives we have for dealing with it: the real, climate-scale alternatives, not the saccharine lifestyle-alteration dreck that their generation usually gets fed.
They understand realities most kids their age have never been taught. As a result, they can hold two ideas in their head at the same time: yes, runaway climate change is potentially catastrophic, but no, catastrophe is in no way inevitable.
It’s very, very evitable.
We have the technologies, today, to avoid it.
And once you get that through your head, it becomes very hard to believe we’ll choose to walk lemming-like over the cliff of climate doom.
Why would we?
Climate anxiety isn’t what happens when you grasp the scale of the climate problem.
Climate anxiety is what happens when you grasp the chasm between the scale of the problem, and the scale of the solutions the climate mainstream keeps peddling.
Faced with the mayhem of a +3 degree world, a climate movement that can think of nothing beyond wind-and-solar and hectoring people to go vegan feels grotesquely inadequate to the task. This is why normal kids despair: they’re not dumb, they can see the solutions grown-ups are selling to them are not up to the task.
Climate anxiety is, in the end, a rational response to being asked to put our faith in pint-sized solutions to tanker-sized problems.
My kids understand we have big big problems. They also know we have big big solutions close at hand. They’re not in denial, and they’re not in despair. They understand there’s still quite a lot of resistance to actually implementing the solutions we have, but they tend to assume that people will come around, because the alternatives are just unthinkable.
I’m pretty sure we’d have a much healthier society, and a much more constructive climate debate, if their attitudes were more widespread. As we talked about Ritchie’s book, I could see my 11-year old felt genuinely sorry for kids his age that look to the future with the kind of foreboding Ritchie describes. “It must be horrible to live that way. How do they even drag themselves out of bed in the morning?”
“I dunno, kid…” is all I could manage to say in return. “I really don’t know.”
Adding to the chorus of gratitude for this piece and all of your efforts. Converting my subscription to paid today! This message needs to be amplified.
As a Gen-X parent of Gen-Z young adults, I believe that growing their resilience is the most important thing I can do for their future and that of my (hopefully) grandchildren.
I think there is too much overstating of climate change on the Left and associated media that is unnecessarily increasing climate anxiety that needs to be called out more, i.e. too many people are led to believe that things are worse than they really are. The further right always gets called out, but never the further left, which is just as damaging. As just one example, Greta tweeted a climate prediction from a scientist in 2018 exclaiming catastrophe in 5 years...she then deleted the tweet in 2023 when that catastrophic prediction didn't come true...this is coming from the most influential climate advocate for young people in the world at the time. How much unnecessary anxiety did this cause? Too much. There is a clear pattern of the left overblowing and presenting biased information about things like wildfires, hurricanes, and more, when much of these events are much more complicated and can't just be chalked up to climate change. Furthermore, they aren't offering any real solutions as far as energy or or transportation alternatives, seeing as how none of them are living any more frugally than they could be if they simply chose to do so...i.e. energy demand is not going to go away.