It’s time to stop telling our children that they’re going to die from climate change. Many young people feel like their future is in peril. To make progress on climate change we must move past doomsday scenarios.
. The results were damning. More than half said “humanity was doomed”; three-quarters said the future was frightening; 55 percent said they would have less opportunities than their parents; 52 percent said family security would be threatened; and 39 percent were hesitant to have children as a result. These attitudes were consistent across countries rich and poor, big and small: from the United States and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Philippines, India, and Nigeria.
One of the most recent and alarming examples of this doomsday mindset came from a group of young activists before the German elections. The group, who call themselves the Last Generation, went on hunger strike for almost a month. Several ended up in hospital. One told his parents and friends that they might never see him again. Another told a journalist that the hunger was “nothing compared to what we can expect when the climate crisis unleashes a famine here in Europe in 20 years.
Third, the pace of almost-real-time updates means we are bombarded with news of the latest disaster. These stories matter, but they don’t give us an accurate perspective on how the frequency and consequences of disasters are changing overall. In fact, they give us a false perspective. The data tells us a different story:because climate change has no impact on the severity of disasters. We’re just much more resilient to them.
Finally, I am skeptical that this mentality is effective in driving change. It often makes us feel like any effort is futile. That we’re already out of time. Anger can, for short periods of time, be useful in kickstarting action. But it sometimes comes at the cost of clear thinking on how we actually make progress. And once anger transitions into hopelessness, we struggle to achieve much at all. Hopelessness is no better than denial.
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