Pirate's Cove

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.

Read: Bummer: Climate Anxiety Is Bad For Solving Climate Crisis (scam) »

This is a new bit of climacrazy from a Warmist

Can’t Reach The IRS By Phone? Blame Climate Change

John Sheeley couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He was listening to brand new IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig deliver a keynote address at a tax conference in the summer of 2019. Commissioner Rettig told the group of tax professionals that, in addition to the obvious staff shortages and budget cuts, another reason calls to the IRS were going unanswered was the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA). According to Commissioner Rettig IRS phone representatives are cross-trained to answer phones for FEMA in the event of a natural disaster. Indeed entire IRS call centers can be reallocated from the IRS to FEMA when necessary. While that’s good news for those needing to reach FEMA during or immediately after a natural disaster it’s terrible news for an already chronically beleaguered IRS, taxpayers, and tax practitioners.

This is your fault, you know. All that Bad Weather is your fault. Thanks a lot.

One of the lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic was that while it is never cost effective to have resources simply sitting on hold in the event of an emergency it is prudent to do so. While permanently increasing FEMA’s number of telephone assistors to the number required during a severe and/or prolonged disaster may not be possible or even desirable, given the increasing pace and severity of meteorological events such as wildfires, hurricanes, polar vortex episodes, etc. it may be prudent to provide some level of permanent increase to the agency’s current number of telephone assistors. Additionally, if Congress continues to pass new tax legislation with immediate and/or retroactive effects they should probably also consider the effects on IRS phone centers and maybe, just maybe, consider cross training some other agency’s phone team (the Social Security Administration possibly?) to handle FEMA-related overload. Of course, it’s just a suggestion.

And the solution is to hire even more federal employees to answer phones. But of course!

Realistically, FEMA shouldn’t be that big, they are there just to coordinate emergency responses between different states, like how you’ll get power employees going to other states after a big ice storm or hurricane, as well as between state, county, local, and private sector to the federal government. Not to be in control or the primary agency in charge.

Read: If You Can’t Reach The IRS By Phone It’s Your Fault For Driving A Fossil Fueled Vehicle »