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William Teach notes that the left’s panic pornapalooza is hurting kids
Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world
Some “climate anxiety” is the product of telling kids — falsely — that they have no future.My 5-year-old daughter is now old enough to read a lot of books and magazines aimed at children, and it’s given me a whole new perspective on the discourse wars over how we talk about climate change, conservation, and the future of the planet.
As I’ve written about before, climate change is going to be bad, and it will hold back humanity from thriving as much as we should this century. It will likely cause mass migration and displacement and extinctions of many species.
That’s exactly the kind of discourse that makes kids mental messes
What it won’t do, however, is make the Earth unlivable, or even mean that our children live in a world poorer than the one we grew up in. As many climate scientists have been telling us, the world is a better place to live in — especially for people in lower-income countries — than it has ever been, and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950.
“I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life,” Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia, told Ezra Klein in his column this week about overcoming climate despair.
Writing aimed at adults doesn’t always do the best job of striking a balance, though not everyone agrees on precisely what that balance is. Books like The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, to my mind, do a reasonable job of describing some extreme scenarios that really are worth contemplating, but they still don’t add up to an uninhabitable Earth, or even one that’d be an awful place to live.
Reason? Not from the Cult of Climate Catastrophe….
