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) »