Well, this is a funny how-do-ya-do. Climate cultists came up with the phrases eco-anxiety, which is meant to be all about the climate emergency, leading to climate anxiety. Unfortunately, this could be Bad for Doing Something about climate doom
Op-Ed: Is climate anxiety bad for the planet?
The American Psychological Assn. defines “eco-anxiety†as a “chronic fear of environmental doom.†Lots of people are feeling it.
A 2020 survey of people ages 8-16 showed that 73% were worried about the state of the planet. Since 2009, the number of Americans worried about the threats posed by climate change increased by 44%. Two-thirds of Americans are worried about climate change, and these numbers are still on the rise.
But if it takes anywhere between 10% to 51% of any given population to care about an issue to make significant change, why hasn’t all this climate anxiety led to more dramatic change?
Because, let’s be honest, Warmists primarily care about this theoretically, not practically. They are happy to yammer about all the Doom, but, not interested in actually doing something in their own lives. They don’t want to pay more, see their cost of living rise, switch out their fossil fueled vehicles for EVs, move into a tiny house, pay tens of thousands for solar panels, hand wash clothes, give up their AC and heat, etc and so on. And their anxiety, which has been mainstreamed, doesn’t help
Contrary to popular progressive belief, we don’t necessarily need to get more people to care about the climate; climate anxiety is rampant, and people overwhelmingly care enough to tip the scales.
Perhaps the answer lies in the term itself. Perhaps climate anxiety as a concept fails to motivate the kind of changes we need to see. As the science writer Britt Wray has argued, the term runs the risk of pathologizing and depoliticizing the problem, making it solely a mental health concern rather than a systemic problem rooted in economic, historical and social structures. Assuaging individuals’ climate anxiety without challenging these systems only addresses the symptoms, not the causes, and places the burden of fixing the problem on individuals.
Got that? It’s bad that it makes it a mental health issue, rather than a political issue, meaning less chance of politicians jamming through restrictions on people’s lives and all sorts of taxes and fees. Wait, I thought this was about science, not politics?
A second problem with “climate anxiety†as a term is that it is too amorphous to conjure the kinds of actions required to mitigate climate change. We feel too small to do anything about it. Climate change in general is hard for people to perceive as a risk because it is too big, too far, or too in the future, to feel in time and space. It seems uncannily designed to not be perceived as a risk. We may feel climate change’s effects, such as increased heat, extreme weather events, rising sea levels and more infectious diseases like COVID, but climate change itself is imperceptible. It is thus hard to figure out what our object of worry is, and so we don’t know what to do to avoid the threat. In other words, climate just doesn’t make the cut as a villain in this story — it isn’t like a burglar breaking into your house at night, or even your house on fire, as Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist, asks us to imagine.
Did they just Blame COVID on ‘climate change’?
No wonder we feel powerless: access to 24/7 news (most of which portrays climate change in a doomsday frame) and our addictive doom-scrolling makes the problem seem so big that it’s not even worth fighting. The reality is bad, but believing that an apocalypse is inevitable is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, an army of people is working to address climate change from every imaginable angle; they’re just not covered in the news that most of us consume.
Hey, you Warmists set the stage for treating it as Doom. Blame yourselves. You created this.
You can use your climate anxiety for immense good. The planet needs you to be resilient, not anxious to the point of debilitation. Paying attention to your mental health, in this case, will help the survival of life on the planet.
You can start by living the life your Beliefs say you should force Other People to live.
I’m just waiting for Climate fatalism to kick in. The idea that doing anything about the Climate is just too hard and ultimately futile so we should just save our money for more important things… like hookers and coke. This is already a thing, but climate activists won’t admit it for fear of it coming true. It is their own fault for spinning this story of never ending climate doom where the only solutions are reverting to a stone age culture and a 90% reduction in global population (but not in their neighborhoods). All the youth want to “fix the climate”, but none of them want to personally do anything about it.
the left are perveyors of doom. Always have been. We are all going to starve. The earth is going to freeze, the earth is going to warm. The Ice is going to melt. Hollywood makes movie after movie pedalling DOOM and Apocalypse. The Walking Dead was a smash hit and one of the most watched TV shows of all time for about 6 years before it turned into a dumpster fire of just plain bad writing as they tried their hand at wokeness.
The left pedals fear and when they have you terrified they offer the solution. They have been doing it to the poor and the Black community for a 100 years. They haven’t solved anything but they promise one more elction and it will be fixed.
Well this time around they aint kidding. You offer them the power and they damn sure will fix stuff. Hell they will break it so they can fix it. The left is a Terrorist organization that makes white nationalists look like boy scouts.
Filled with Peta Terrorists, Eco Terrorists, Fascists, Antifa, Anti government crazies. Gangs, Convicted felons and the like it is no wonder they keep pushing for more felons to vote, more MS-13 gang members from south of the border to fill our streets.
DEFUND the POLICE is now the GOP’s fault according to their newest talking point. The GOP voted against an infrastructure plan that would FUND THE POLICE…..lololol….OF course they don’t tell you the same plan would have also turned elections over to the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.
Yeah. There is not a crisis that does not go to waste with this batch of whackos and if its not broken, they will break it then offer to fix it for Trillions.
Our esteemed host wrote:
The distinguished Mr Dowd has already made it perfectly clear: he’s not going to do anything himself, no matter how much he pontificates about it, unless we are all forced to comply. He has told us before — and I wish that I’d saved the comment — that one person, acting alone, cannot do anything.
But I actually do do something, albeit my motives aren’t pure; I am not fighting
global warmingclimatechangeemergency, but use our solar-and-wind powered clothes dryer because Elaine says it makes the bedding smell nicer. I didn’t replace the incandescent bulbs with LEDs for environmental reasons, but because they illuminate with less heat produced and less sparktricity used.Thing is, I don’t demand that other people do the same, and don’t want to have the government force others to comply.
Mx Dana exemplifies the nuCon strategy, which is to personalize the argument. In fact, he has no idea how I live. He is correct that what we are doing in the US and China is not enough to reduce CO2 emissions to stop or even slow global warming. It’s likely the few nuCons living in the Northwest US are rethinking their positions on global warming.
He doesn’t realize that HE has responded to market forces to transition to LED lights to save money. His clotheslines save money. We’ll assume he has trees that shade his house in summer but allows sunlight to warm him in winter.
Doomers will doom, I’ll just go on living and push back on their schemes to limit my lifestyle and liberties.
It’s amazing how much liberty you have when you live in an area where there isn’t a huge city government trying to regulate everything you do.
Which is why the feds are trying to take over the burbs via zoning. They’re coming for us where we live.