Making Children Crazy

It’s not just a high school student from Sweden. Children around the world are agitated about climate change. They have been fed so much apocalyptic rhetoric that they are now suffering from anxiety. Many are suffering from chronic anxiety.

The Washington Post story (via Maggie's Farm) does not tell us whether the children of our Asian competitors are suffering similar mental health problems, but clearly the children who have contracted this social contagion are not working on their calculus assignments. They are not acquiring the skill that will afford them the chance to excel at tomorrow’ jobs. 

Training to be social agitators, to be activists, they will work hard and long to take down the world energy grid. It's what they are learning to do. It's the only thing they are learning to do. That they have no concept of what will happen to the world, or better, to the Western world once rolling blackouts become a normal part of everyday life, is the least. They might read my post from yesterday on Life in Renewableland. 

They are young and easily manipulated. The activists who have occupied their minds are ensuring that they will be good for nothing else beyond making trouble.

Anyway, the Washington Post has the story:

Mitzi Jonelle Tan was a child when a typhoon knocked out the electricity at her home in Manila for days.

“When it was finally safe enough to step outside, all the big trees I grew up with were uprooted, and I cried,” the 23-year-old Filipino activist said. “I was practically born into the climate crisis.”

That’s what scares her the most. “I know what it looks like, and I know it will get worse,” she told The Washington Post. “And it’s like, ‘Will people care? Will they react?’ ”

So, she was born into the climate crisis. An amazing statement from someone who evidently has not had an education. One typhoon was all it took. As though a single weather event sufficed to convince her that the climate is changing. Beyond that, it convinced her that human beings are responsible for the change. Not just any human beings, but Westerners in particular. It's a curious notion, given that the leading polluting nations are places like China and India.

Again, weather events are not the same as the climate. And, beyond the fact that the climate always changes, many serious climate scientists caution against the notion that we can solve the problem if we replace fossil fuels by renewables. The latter is unrealistic, if not impossible, but that has not deterred the children’s crusade against industry and manufacturing.

Apparently, the climate change hysteria has gone global. Young people might not know how to do calculus, but they do know how to protest, to complain and to cause trouble:

From school strikes to the halls of power, young activists have turned the world’s focus toward climate change. They have rallied the largest protests in decades for the environment and brought it to the forefront of elections.

But growing up in an era of disasters like never before, people in their teens and 20s are also wrestling with another challenge: anxiety about the burning, flooding planet.

We would all be happier if the planet could make up its mind. Does it want to burn or to flood? Why not hope that the floods put out the fires?

A summer of floods in Germany, wildfires in Turkey and record heat in America have raised alarm about the need to act on climate change, and about its impact on mental health.

Experts warn of the emotional toll that will come from the warming of the planet, which for many people, now feels a lot more up close.

Dare we mention that every time you see the word experts your skepticism meter must jump up a few notches. These experts are not all that unhappy. If they are in the psycho field, these anxious teenagers will fill their offices for decades to come. Please don't tell me that they are very unhappy.

Think of it, disasters like never before. How do they know that there have never been such disasters in the earth’s history?

Aren’t they just being manipulated by the media, by the hype. How do they know that these are not just weather events? Was the flood in the New York subway system the product of climate change or was it a function of the mismanagement of the subway system? Are the California wildfires the product of greenhouse gas emissions or were they stoked by the environment activists who file lawsuits every time any government agency tries to clear the brush and to reduce the kindling?

But, the current mass hysteria is causing young people to have significant mental health issues. Now you might ask yourself whether they are having these issues because they are being manipulated by adults into compromising their future success by frittering away their time and energy on protests. Are they suffering anxiety because the more time they spend fighting for environmental justice the less time they will spend acquiring the skills that will allow them to function in the world economy?

Obviously, these children think like children.

In a survey across 17 countries on Tuesday, the Pew Research Center found that more and more people saw climate change as a looming threat. The study found that young people tend to worry more about it harming them than older adults.

“I think it’s because there’s our whole future ahead,” Tan said. “We’re always told, ‘Oh, you’re so young, there’s so much you can still do.’ And then it’s like BAM, is there?”

She has watched floodwaters inundate villages in the Philippines, which has ranked both among the most high-risk countries for climate change and the most dangerous for land defenders.

This Philippine activist is hard at work trying to stifle industry, to return her country to the state of nature. Yet, the Philippines are not a wealthy country. Does it really need people agitating against economic growth?

The environmentalist has tried to channel the uncertainty into her work, talking about the environment at schools, helping farmers get irrigation equipment and joining fishing communities fighting new casino projects.

“A lot of my anxiety really stems too from the knowledge that this isn’t just happening, people are doing it actively … world leaders, the fossil fuel industry,” she said.

Amazingly, this scientifically illiterate children believe that wildfires and monsoons are being produced by climate change. They believe that any bad weather event has been caused by too much carbon dioxide in the air. And they use these events to feed their anxiety:

For many young people, the feeling that governments have betrayed them fuels a sense of doom, according to Caroline Hickman, lead author of a study into how 16-to-25-year-olds feel about the response to climate change.

In India’s Maharashtra, where monsoon rains and landslides killed dozens of people this summer, Jahnavee Palsodkar is fighting to reverse river pollution in her city, but says adults often dismiss her distress. “Right now, we’re seeing out-of-control wildfires and heavy rains,” said the 18-year-old student. “If things are so bad now, what kind of world will I have to grow up in?”

Young people around the world, but only around certain parts of the world, are feeding on a diet of gloom and doom, of hysterical apocalyptic rhetoric.

As it happens, I suspect that if you go to China and Japan and South Korea you will not find young people in a similar state of anxiety. Or, should we call it panic?

In some Asian countries, in the most prosperous Asian countries, children are more likely doing their homework and waiting their chance to prevail over the hysterical ninnies that the rest of the world is actively producing.