Pirate's Cove

It’s not terrifying enough for them to give up their own use of fossil fuels, often to just go take selfies, nor their fast fashion, nor constantly getting new smartphones, nor the enormous amounts of energy they use to stream everything on a constant basis. They won’t stop fighting, though, for government to raise their cost of living, tax/fee them heavily, restrict their freedom of speech and life choices

Climate change is terrifying. These young people won’t give up fighting it.

Southern Californians emerged from a prolonged and punishing heat wave this week only to be greeted by a world on fire. Major blazes in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties are gnawing through sun-baked hillsides, threatening lives and properties and blanketing the region with noxious ash and smoke. (An earthquake on Thursday only ramped up the tension.)

Are they trying to link the earthquake in? Why mention it?

The hellish conditions offer an all-too-real preview of a climate future dominated by more extreme temperatures and larger, faster and more frequent wildfires driven by fossil fuel emissions.

Hellish!

It’s no surprise, then, that young people are collectively concerned about what lies ahead. A recent Yale survey indicated that Gen Z and millennials are the most likely generations to be alarmed about global warming.

Their anxieties — and their commitment to solutions — inspired my colleagues to fan out across our beats to better understand how young people were grappling with climate change and extreme weather. One thing we heard over and over: People are anxious. After all, it’s hard not to feel existential dread at a moment when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are soaring, global temperatures are breaking new records and climate hazards are touching more and more lives.

They have been inundated with prognostications of doom. That everyone is going to die. That a mass extinction will happen. That all the corals and sea life will die. That the planet will boil. So, yeah, they’ve been turned into emotional messes, just like cults do. This is a state sponsored cult, though, with it being taught in schools, with lawmakers and bureaucrats doing it. With most news outlets preaching doom.

One way to address these fears, my colleague Rosanna Xia wrote in this powerful essay, is to focus less on individualism and more on the collective.

Oh, communism. Surprise?