17 ms·

Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

• 650 5y ago
  Regardless of climate change, media outlets like NPR propagate this anxiety to young people.
  • yepthatsreality 5y ago
    The change in climate is what drives the propagation from outlets like NPR.
  • w-j-w 5y ago
    This is a good thing. Climate anxiety is the emotional response that might actually get people to act on the climate issue. Why are you framing this like a problem?
  • ksd482 5y ago
    Or young people can just think for themselves regardless of media outlets? What's your point?
    • ipaddr 5y ago
      Do they or have they been conditiom by a school system to listen to a teacher. Does npr fill that role?
  • giantg2 5y ago
    Eh, they're failing on more issues than just climate change. I think many people realize the rampant hypocrisy and political games that both sides play. It seems the ruling class grant themselves more and more power and privilege while imposing ever increasing restrictions on the population at large.
    • tibbetts 5y ago
      Only some people fall into the “both sides” trap and start thinking that cynicism is a virtue. It’s unfortunate, as this behavior encourages the very outcome to which you object. It’s much easier to take advantage of people who have given up.
      • yesOfCourse9 5y ago
        There are issues with both sides when the context is the environment. I don’t doubt we need technological logistics but after ensuring biological stability for the species, speculative economic activity is an environmental time bomb. There are plenty of drill baby drill Democrats, especially as the other side has gone off the deep end. Can the environment survive a Tesla in every garage? It’s still pushing the problem off until we die. We not afford arbitrarily drawn political boundaries on how far.
      • giantg2 5y ago
        It's not that the people have given up. There are small changes that seem to be happening, like rank choice voting, and calls for many other things, like trading restrictions on members of Congress. But really, it's easy to take advantage of people when the People have increasingly less power.
  • DangitBobby 5y ago
    The plugging your ears approach really is preferable, all things considered.
  • vincentpants 5y ago
    NPR isn’t the source of our anxiety, it’s people that don’t listen or take this seriously that do, like you actually. If you’re not actively trying to fix this, then you are part of the problem.
    • masijo 5y ago
      How are you trying to fix it? Serious question, no bad intentions meant.
      • vincentpants 5y ago
        Co-founded our local Hackspace, the first Mini Makerfaire, pushed for many municipal computer parsable open data initiatives. Lobbied for additional bike lanes and bike parking in our downtown corridor. Optimizing resource management for North American manufacturing (pending & hopeful). Giving talks about how there will be no techno salvation as long as we live under the Leibensweise formed by a civilization driven by resource extraction (capitalism). Sending supplies to protestors at Fairy Creek, and above all am currently making bread and eating it. And it’s so far from enough. What are you doing?
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    What propagates anxiety in young people is that they can't vote untill they are 18, their voting block is tiny and no-one represents their concerns in the system. Meanwhile folks in charge are dense as lead and vote for one party their whole life, but deride 'millennials'.
    • throwawaysea 5y ago
      The voting age should probably be raised, not lowered. The fact that those polled here cannot function normally day to day in large numbers due to climate anxiety (per this article) suggests those in this age group are far too immature emotionally and mentally to make good choices. Obviously I am speculating, but I bet many of those polled would answer differently ten years from now, or if they were working, or had a family. That experience is necessary to find balance and completeness in their worldviews.
      • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        I am sick of younger generations being derided and given no credit. It was students who protested the Vietnam war, climate change and brought the piece movement. It was older voters that supported Tump, Brexit and Iraq war. It was the young people that were drafted into the army to die half a world away. Can you point to a single issue where young people were the problem? Older voters are more likely to be partisan, closed minded and (yes, ghasp) sexist or racist. We have older folks that voted for the same party their entire life. If you grow old, senile and longer function mentally, you can still vote. We teach 17 year olds general relativity and differential equations but don't trust them to vote, when they will have to live with the consequences. PS. I am, myself, bordering on the 3rd decade now, but I can see this toxic attitude for what it is. Like classism and other ism's, ageism persists.
        • Aerroon 5y ago
          >It was students who protested the Vietnam war, climate change and brought the piece movement. It was older voters that supported Tump, Brexit and Iraq war. When the Iraq war started, how old were people who were young during the Vietnam war protests? 2003 - 1965 = 38 Young person that protested the Vietnam war + 38 years = old person I don't think that the Vietnam war protesters were in favor of the Iraq war, but it is the same generation that you're talking about. The young of today are the old of tomorrow. They will take their biases and ideas, temper them with experience and then be derided by the young of tomorrow for being too close-minded. We might teach 17 year olds general relativity, but we don't teach them how much work goes into making and maintaining all of the stuff they (we) take for granted in life. They might know that world hunger is a distribution problem, but it's not as easy to accept that and apply it to your thinking.
• changoplatanero 5y ago
  Most smokers are unable to quit. Most fat people are unable to lose weight. I worry that most civilizations are unable to cut carbon emissions.
  • junon 5y ago
    As much as I dislike smoking or obesity, those aren't the main causes of climate change. If we eliminated both of those entirely, today, we'd still have a crisis. That being said, I'll absolutely agree with the sentiment that "humans will always be human". We're not going to collectively try to fix this until it's too late. That's the saddest part.
    • vmception 5y ago
      So you understood the sentiment clearly but missed how those were analogies? Weird audience
      • junon 5y ago
        Yes, exactly. It's 3am, I misread the comment. Sorry.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      His point is more that humans can’t easily change, even if they know the solution.
      • junon 5y ago
        Yes, hence my second paragraph.
    • gorwell 5y ago
      Obesity isn't the main cause, but it is a growing contributor to climate change.
      • chillwaves 5y ago
• lisper 5y ago
  It's not just young people. I'm 56 and I'm going through a pretty serious personal existential crisis w.r.t. climate change. I think even the people who are worried about it don't realize quite how serious the situation is. I used to feel pretty confident that all of the really bad shit would not happen until after I was dead. I'm not nearly so confident any more. I now think there is a significant chance that I could live to see massive famines and the concomitant collapse of technological civilization. I've been losing quite a bit of sleep over it for a while now.
  • nimvlaj30 5y ago
    > God grant me the serenity > to accept the things I cannot change; > courage to change the things I can; > and wisdom to know the difference. Civilisation as we know it, and perhaps even humanity is in the process of ending. The ending is inevitable, whether it is now or nearer to the heat death of the universe. If you can personally try and affect change, then you should do it. But more likely, you are a slave to the same system that everyone else is. I'd recommend working on acceptance at this point.
    • ruined 5y ago
      if this is your attitude then at least get out of the way
      • pstuart 5y ago
        The thought that came to mind was "ok boomer". Edit: yeah, not positive but a knee-jerk reaction to the grandparent comment that essentially said "I got mine, Jack -- sucks to be you".
        • brutusborn 5y ago
          I don't understand; why would you post this? Do you think this will help the situation?
          • 5y ago
• chucke 5y ago
  Young people with no faith in their government? Rock and roll. Fuck the system!
• nanis 5y ago
  What exactly is "the" "right" climate?
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    Defining "the one single right climate" is hard. Defining "this change is bad" is substantially easier. Wet bulb temperatures of 35 degrees C in areas with billions of people and poor power infrastructure to run AC is bad, for example.
    • nanis 5y ago
      > Wet bulb temperatures of 35 degrees C in areas with billions of people I had to look up what that meant ... With this kind of nonsense being pushed around and with more than two decades of constant scary tales, no wonder the kids are nervous. I grew up without any air conditioning at all. Ever. In any building. Summer temperatures between 35 - 40 C with high humidity. I do not know what the "wet bulb" equivalent of that is, but it was warm, for sure. People will figure out how to deal with the weather. One of the most fun tourist attractions of my childhood was swimming/free diving around two thousand year old ruins under water. The changes of a bunch of self-interested central planners figuring out how to do what you want without killing you are nil.
      • s5300 5y ago
        Are you essentially saying that wet bulb is fake news because of your personal experience in which you didn't deal with wet bulb, especially on an extended timeframe? Do you believe that billions of people with poor infrastructure and no air conditioning are magically going to have infrastructure and air conditioning appear? There is a lot of strange posting going on in this thread for HN...
        • throwaway5752 5y ago
          There is a lot of strange posting going on in this thread for HN... You are sure right about that. Posts that are utterly lacking critical thinking, claims without evidence. It is embarrassing behavior for this forum. There is more data on this subject than possibly any other phenomenon on Earth, and visible, palpable change has occurred in recent memory.
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  Young people are also exposed to immense echo chambers that operate as runaway feedback loops, which manipulate their emotions, political views, and so on. This leads to extreme perspectives that are detached from reality. These two paragraphs from the article demonstrate this: > Positive feelings such as optimism were reported least among the respondents, researchers said. In fact, 77% said that they considered the future to be frightening, and 56% agreed with the viewpoint that humanity is doomed, according to the study. > For many young people, those feelings of fear and worry affect their ability to function, too, results showed. More than 45% of the respondents said the way they feel about climate change adversely affects their day-to-day lives. As a UW Professor of Atmospheric Science said (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-existential-threat.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-exi...), climate change is a problem but not an existential threat. Yet young people seem to think that humanity is doomed. That Professor faced much critique for holding such a balanced and nuanced view, and activists have tried to get him fired. Such aggressive attempts at narrative control, in institutions and social media, leads to extreme views among the young.
  • tfehring 5y ago
    What makes you think any of those beliefs are detached from reality?
  • tibbetts 5y ago
    Those perspectives can be said to be extreme, but I’m not seeing you make a case that they are “detached from reality.”
    • throwawaysea 5y ago
      Humanity isn’t “doomed”. Climate change may affect hundreds of millions and even so it is far away from an existential threat to humans. It also isn’t something that should cause someone to lose the ability to function day-to-day. That suggests immaturity, fragility, and a cognitive distortion (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing).
• gorwell 5y ago
  And because they have failed, they will probably handle it poorly with lockdowns. Will the young will be for or against that?
  • babelfish 5y ago
    What are you talking about? Those two things have nothing to do with each other (and this is actually the second time I’ve noticed you dogwhistling).
    • gorwell 5y ago
      Lockdowns reduced carbon emissions. https://earth.stanford.edu/news/covid-lockdown-causes-record-drop-carbon-emissions-2020#gs.at877y https://earth.stanford.edu/news/covid-lockdown-causes-record... https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3089/local-lockdowns-brought-fast-global-ozone-reductions-nasa-finds/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3089/local-lockdowns-brought-f... As for dog whistling, only dogs hear those and conspiracy theorists think they do.
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        An unprecedented global economic shutdown dropped emissions by 7%. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3 It's not the way out, nor has it been proposed by anyone serious to be.
        • lotsofpulp 5y ago
          People drastically decreasing consumption (i.e. moving less mass less distance) is the only way out in a realistic timeframe, if even possible now.
        • gorwell 5y ago
          I agree. But this is the ruling class we have. They thought it was a good idea to occupy Afghanistan for 20 years, and then botched the exit to top it off. Think they'll handle climate change more competently? That wouldn't follow the pattern we've seen for decades.
• AniseAbyss 5y ago
  Atheist without kids so I'll live. No skin in the game. But I was somewhat shocked when I saw people taking their family to see formula 1 cars drive laps in a national park. When you're not even willing to give up little things like motorsports or plastic straws this planet is about to be recycled.
  • tibbetts 5y ago
    The idea that personal choices about straws or motorsports are an important or effective response to climate change is a fallacy encouraged by organizations who benefit from climate change. If it’s all about consumer choice, then real reform will never happen.
    • nefitty 5y ago
      By that logic, anxiety is irrational. Acceptance of any outcome should be what we work on internally as individuals. Anger is arguably a much more productive emotion, politically speaking.
• mc32 5y ago
  I'm sure people are frustrated, but I wonder what the consensus, if you could fine one, would be. What exactly are they expecting governments to change? Policy, power generation, transportation, what? And will they accept the necessary or resultant policies and changes? The above are "easy" if you have a totalitarian regime where what the autocrats say go, goes: China, Saudi Arabia, etc., most other countries are more democratic and it takes time for change to happen.
  • andromeduck 5y ago
    Build more CANDUs
  • toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Tax carbon. Use cross border tariffs to prevent offshoring emissions. People will then make the economically rational decision to use public transportation, buy EVs, put solar on the roof, insulate their homes, buy heat pumps, and eat less meat.
    • Shicholas 5y ago
      This is the best solution for today’s world. I wish I could upvote this a million times.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Except it simply won't happen because people will not stand for everything becoming more expensive and inconvenient. They will not vote for people who will enact these policies.
        • toomuchtodo 5y ago
          Exactly this. The very policy we need that would be best is untenable because society has been built around cheap, dirty energy.
          • 5y ago
• unchocked 5y ago
  It's the thing that will most predictably change everything. Anxiety is anticipation with a negative outlook. Living under a power structure that's so inefficacious, and a culture that's so in denial, I think the kids would be crazy to be anything but - not only anxious - but more anxious than the rest of us are.
• lvl100 5y ago
  Boomers ruined this world so they can retire…no they won’t even retire.
  • eej71 5y ago
    I’ll point out that it was frequently the boomer generation that thought of themselves as the ones who would make it right. That they understood what was wrong unlike their idiot and narrow minded elders. This idyllic view of themselves and their values has saturated pop music from the 60s and since. Not sure the current youth will escape the derision of their own youth when their eventual turn as elder arrives.
• olivermarks 5y ago
  I strongly recommend 'Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All' by Michael Shellenberger https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_8CS2EJPGZWTF12Y1V9ZW https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&preview=new...
  • adamnemecek 5y ago
    What’s the summary?
    • tobiasu 5y ago
      Nuclear and shale gas shill writes how technology will solve everything.
      • ren_engineer 5y ago
        as opposed to solar and wind "shills" who say humanity is doomed if the government doesn't funnel billions of dollars to their industries? Each side has monetary incentives to push their view point Fact is that without the fear mongering about nuclear energy decades ago we'd probably be carbon neutral by now
  • benzible 5y ago
    Really, don't bother https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-shellenberger-mixes-accurate-and-inaccurate-claims-in-support-of-a-misleading-and-overly-simplistic-argumentation-about-climate-change/ https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-sh...
  • UncleMeat 5y ago
    Maybe it'd be better to read the opinions of relevant faculty instead. I know at least one climate science faculty who has publicly referred to Shellenberger as a "professional asshole" after being treated so poorly by Shellenberger. Shellenberger is just next in the long list of industry shills who peddle the same misinformation and then complain when researchers get mad at him, claiming endless victimhood.
• tppiotrowski 5y ago
  The economics of solar are good news. Hopefully we've hit an inflection point where coal power is no longer economical [1] [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90583426/the-price-of-solar-electricity-has-dropped-89-in-10-years https://www.fastcompany.com/90583426/the-price-of-solar-elec...
  • tuatoru 5y ago
    Coal hasn't been economical for at least two years, in the sense that the capital cost of new PV is less than the operating cost of existing coal. The problem is that developing countries like China and India are so desperately short of electricity (growth in demand is so high) that any new builds just add to existing production rather than replacing it. - Governments will prop up uneconomic generators to maintain total supply. I don't know how to scale up PV and wind quickly enough to just replace coal in this situation. Edit: the Chinese experiments with thorium molten salt and pebble-bed high temperature fission reactors are interesting here. If they can easily swap out coal furnaces with nuclear reactors and retain the other 80% of the power stations, they'll get great benefits in air quality and and emissions while making use of of their investment in thermal generation.
    • larzang 5y ago
      Peak Chinese coal consumption was 2013, it's still substantial but total usage has been falling along with percentage of total output for a while now.
      • tppiotrowski 5y ago
        Can you provide a citation?
        • OneEyedRobot 5y ago
          I can't say that it has dropped much. https://www.statista.com/statistics/265491/chinese-coal-consumption-in-oil-equivalent/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/265491/chinese-coal-cons...
• sentinel 5y ago
  Young people need to follow the news less. It’ll play up any little issue for eyeballs.
  • jazzabeanie 5y ago
    Some news is impossible to avoid.
• Manuel_D 5y ago
  > 56% agreed with the viewpoint that humanity is doomed, according to the study. Climate change is a serious issue, and one that stands poised to do a substantial amount of harm, but if the majority of young people think that humanity is doomed then I seriously suspect that there's misinformation about the impact of climate change at play here. Even the more pessimistic outlooks of climate change still leave substantial areas of habitable climate. Many societies would be harmed, and disproportionately among lower income equatorial countries, but I think it's a massive stretch to say that humanity is doomed based on our climate projections.
  • skyfaller 5y ago
    I think it's irresponsible to act as though the climate crisis is just a matter of weather, and not how also we will respond to it. Resource shortages caused by the climate crisis could cause resource wars, and if weapons of mass destruction are deployed during those wars, that could easily finish off homo sapiens. The mere collapse of civilization and mass death should be bad enough that we take drastic action to prevent it, but I do also think it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of human extinction.
    • Manuel_D 5y ago
      What shortages? The world overproduces food by no small margin. Starvation is a regional supply issue. In developed countries 30-40% of food often goes to waste. Alternative water supplies like desalination exist, and countries like Israel with constrained natural water supplies use it extensively. I think it's irresponsible to proclaim that humanity is doomed without a coherent argument as to why it won't be able to survive.
      • rewgs 5y ago
        Overproduction of food is irrelevant if regional supply issues exist. So why do they exist, why are they sticky and so apparently unsolvable? Desalination is prohibitively energy-intensive. More so in a world of shrinking resources. You're arguing for precisely why these shortages are a problem but you think you're arguing against their existence. A "shortage" is not simply a hard supply number -- it's also defined by how well the supply is utilized. And the problem is precisely that humans are, and will presumably continue to be, selfish and horrible at using even sufficient or even surplus supplies. So why in the world would anyone think that we'll adequately deal with actually shortages?
• sremani 5y ago
  Today Paul Graham has tweeted about coal consumption of the world from 2000, it paints a good picture where to look if you are focused on green house gases. 150 years ago, there are billion of us. Now we are 7 billion going up to 9 billion.. 150 years from now, if we are going to be a billion.. I am fine with it.
  • eej71 5y ago
    A population of 1b would be devastating setback. There’s a reason why some of us view environmentalists as misanthropes.
    • sremani 5y ago
      I am not an environmentalist -- I am more commenting on the uncommon time we are living. We shot up from 1 Billion to 7 billion in span of 150 years, and reversion to mean can happen, it is happening as lowering sperm count, and falling birth rates, climate change, global pandemics, war etc. Read my comment as glass 1/7th full, at least there is some water left. edit: As far as coal consumption from year 2000 goes, China has built massive coal consumption capacity and if China does not sign up to any of those Climate Change agreement, the rest is inconsequential since they are the workshop of the world now. You can tinker energy policy in US and Europe, but that means nothing if China is not on board.
  • after_care 5y ago
    Why is it okay to have less people? We have serious long term problems to solve aside form climate change, like how to become an interplanetary species and how to cure cancer. More people means (can mean) more brainpower working on things that benefit us all.
    • nverno 5y ago
      I'd take wild places over brainpower by a long shot
• toolz 5y ago
  I'm probably overly calm about climate change. I can't trust that science isn't trying to sensationalize the problem so much so that I end up discounting everything I read. Take this [1] paper for example I just happened upon. Look at this scary graphic they provide to convince the reader that wildfires are getting worse [2]. The paper goes on painting a terrible picture about the rising trend of wildfires in the U.S. Now let's look at the source for their graphic and look back further at earlier dates from the same source. [3] - kind of paints a different picture, no? So at what point am I, an average citizen supposed to be worried enough that I do my own systematic reviews of the literature and see who is just sensationalizing the problem? Maybe I'm the minority, maybe the "marketing" of global warming is exactly as it should be if the problem is indeed as dire as many would have me believe, but the obvious sensationalism just makes me wonder if everyone trying to sell me on this fear has just bought into the hype and as such I'll be a hard sell on this issue, because if it was real and dire - I doubt there would be such obvious sensationalism every time I look into it. [1] https://costofcarbon.org/files/Flammable_Planet__Wildfires_and_Social_Cost_of_Carbon.pdf https://costofcarbon.org/files/Flammable_Planet__Wildfires_a... [2] https://i.imgur.com/0FlXads.png https://i.imgur.com/0FlXads.png [3] https://i.imgur.com/zvbApzL.png https://i.imgur.com/zvbApzL.png
  • ripper1138 5y ago
    I suppose those sensational stories/papers get more attention so that’s the short answer? I’m with you though. My personal life has not been affected at all (yet) so I am fortunate. But it’s not worth the stress, I mean the top comment is someone saying they are losing a lot of sleep over climate change. Like buddy get a grip.
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    > Now let's look at the source for their graphic and look back further at earlier dates from the same source. [3] - kind of paints a different picture, no? Yes, but not in the way you're portraying it. The big shift downwards comes in a major shift in strategy in dealing with forest fires in the early to mid 1900s; it doesn't tell you much about the climate at the time. https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service-history/policy-and-law/fire-u-s-forest-service/u-s-forest-service-fire-suppression/ https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service... > In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report. Other federal land management agencies quickly followed suit and joined the campaign to eliminate fire from the landscape.
• freddealmeida 5y ago
  Young people are driven by propaganda and social trends. I don't see what the crisis is at all. Data, cleaned for bias, suggests very little difference. And certainly not in the West. Pollution is certainly a problem, such as in China, India, but I don't agree that the world climate is changing in a way that is abnormal. I'm anxious though about the drive for using climate as a premise to remove freedoms for some possible safety. Authoritarian regimes are increasingly taking power.
  • sorethescore 5y ago
    Everyone is driven by propaganda and social trends, it's naive to believe otherwise. If you can't see the crisis then either you're not looking or you don't understand the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change. The fact that China, India and the rest of the developing world are unlikely to fully adress their contributions to the problem only make the crisis more acute increasing the likelihood for authoritarian regimes to take power and act in whatever way they feel is in their best interest, regardless the consequences.
• Tycho 5y ago
  I’m not worried at all. Even if it turns out to be real and not just fun with statistics. People who say stuff like there’s no point in having children, the world is doomed, etc, need to get their head checked out. Or stop paying attention to social agenda advertising campaigns.
• cgrealy 5y ago
  They should be (anxious) and they're right (governments have failed them). Unfortunately, we've spent the last few decades ignoring the science and telling people they are the ones that can fix this, by recycling or taking less car journeys or eating less meat. And all of those things do help, but it's akin to fighting WW2 by asking everyone to write a strongly worded letter to Hitler. Climate change is a massive global problem that cannot be solved by individual countries, let alone individual humans. And yet the leading countries (and to be fair, pretty much every other country) have done nothing meaningful about it. I feel bad for anyone under 20.
  • spiderice 5y ago
    > I feel bad for anyone under 20. I feel bad for people under 20 due to people pushing this sentiment that they're doomed and they have no future to look forward to. That is currently doing more harm than climate change is. And it does nothing to solve the problem of climate change.
    • cgrealy 5y ago
      I feel bad for people under 20 due to people pretending there isn't an existential crsis and it'll all be fine if they just recycle. Unfortunately, that's still doing less harm than climate change actually is (and certainly will be in the future). And it does nothing to solve the problem of climate change.
• logicalmonster 5y ago
  I'm glad that social media wasn't around when I was growing up. If the media had the same chance to clickbait me into panic in my day, I'd have been genuinely scared to death about the ozone layer being depleted or acid rain making the planet unlivable by now, yet here we are. It's easy to panic about hot-button issues such as climate change when the media clickbaits you into endless doom and gloom and refuses to report on the safety and efficiency innovations in nuclear energy and the fact that whatever climate change exists has already been a solved problem for decades. The media is the cause of the biggest mental health crises on the planet. We're letting some of the most mediocre people drive society into ruin just to get people to sell a few extra ads.
  • trehalose 5y ago
    > already been a solved problem for decades How solved is it if the solutions aren't getting deployed?
    • logicalmonster 5y ago
      It will happen when it has to. Look into Scott Adams law of slow moving disasters. https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/04/15/fact-checking-adams-law-of-slow-moving-disasters/ https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/04/15/fact-checking-adam... To sum it up, whenever humans see a problem coming in the distant future, they find a way to solve it in time. Y2K is a great example of this: when stories about the effects of Y2K were popularized, some people thought that there would be no way to fix so many millions of lines of code in time and some of the marvels of human civilization like the electrical grid or the banking system might irrecoverably crash. Yet humans found ways to solve the issues and essentially nothing happened.
      • throwaway5752 5y ago
        Scott Adams is a cartoonist with a degree in economics and an MBA.
        • 55555 5y ago
• nanis 5y ago
  Maybe they worry about all the wind turbine blades we are burying so that governments can shovel money from one group to another's pockets.
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  > more than half said climate change made them feel "afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty." That seems like a bad survey. Why does 'guilty' get 'and/or' while the others do not? Guilty does not belong in the same question with the others. Maybe surveys like this one find what they are looking for because of the way the questions are asked.
  • antod 5y ago
    You're reading the reporting wrong. It is meant as: afraid and/or sad and/or anxious and/or angry and/or powerless and/or helpless and/or guilty ie the last "and/or" is defining what the commas mean. Just like "a, b, c, and d" or "a, b, c, or d" don't mean "a, b, (c and d)" or "a, b, (c or d)" And that was also a smaller summary list of options than the actual study had.
    • annoyingnoob 5y ago
      I suppose if we throw enough terms into a single question then it applies to everyone. What, exactly, do we learn with a question like that?
      • antod 5y ago
        The actual report had a histogram comparing the relative results of all those options against each other. The point I'm trying to make is that what you're calling out as a bad question is a summary in 3rd party reporting and not the actual questions in the survey or the report. It's a bit like judging a book based on someone else's book report rather than the book itself.
• mudlus 5y ago
  The government doesn't make discoveries, the government isn't creative. People are. Solving the problem of climate change can be helped by governments as a tool people use for coordination, but generally governments are best at defining rules, which are compulsory--this is antithetical to creativity. All this is to say, yes governments SHOULD fail us in solving this type of problem. Capitalism, though it is not the most popular tool in the zeitgeist right now, is a much better tool for solving this type of problem. If you have money, it's a good time to take on risk and invest in solutions. Uranium seems to be a popular one right now, as nuclear energy is the greenest energy generation tool we have, and problems from the past are being solved through better engineering currently (micro-nuclear). Private fusion investment is a much better long term investment, though it's unlikely you'll get a return in your life time, humans will get a return in the long run. The billionaires know this, look at who is investing in fusion right now.
• ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Alternative title: Younger generation sees disaster capitalism for what it is and realise they will have to liek with the consequences.
• brandonmenc 5y ago
  At this point, the only viable solution is geo-engineering, which has a great feature: you can do it unilaterally, without having to convince every single person to change their habits.
• tppiotrowski 5y ago
  All the bright minds on HN have failed them by not working on climate change because we need another Uber for pizza delivery startup...
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• egberts1 5y ago
  O_o
• aosmond 5y ago
  I am always amazed at the level of denial among the people. I speak of the comments to this article, not the young people in question. The IPCC reports are quite conservative. The reason the 2021 reports were so dire is because they began including some of the feedback loop modeling the scientists preparing the report have become more confident in. More is in the pipeline. Somewhere along the line, it got political. Maybe it was always political. Hard to say that society needs to fundamentally change without people feeling it encroaches upon their world view. You don't have to look very far to see our supply chain impacted by nature. Pandemics such as COVID were and are predicted to become more frequent. My local supermarket doesn't just have higher prices, the selection has gone down in many categories as the droughts and wildfires have impacted production. We are getting a taste of what has been long predicted. Deny all you want. I'm not saying the world will end this year, or next decade, but little by little, all the evidence I'm seeing is pointing towards the science being right. And it ain't pretty. The level of ambition among our governments is quite low. The people are selfish, more concerned with their property values and if their neighbour mows their bylaw required lawn, than if the next generation will be able to have a similar quality of life. Why wouldn't you be cynical if you were young? If you are a believer in conspiracies, what seems more likely to you? The climate scientists of the world conspiring to destroy the world economy? Or the powers that already be in this world desperately trying to hold onto their positions? I don't know about you, but I think the latter is far more likely.
  • throwaway5752 5y ago
    I can't regularly find fruit that was plentiful a few years ago at my grocery store. Produce this year was poor quality and wasn't available at the same times.
    • noduerme 5y ago
      We've had a shortage of onions in Oregon. A few hundred miles from where they're grown. But the reason is not enough truckers after the pandemic.
      • deleted 5y ago
• jimmaswell 5y ago
  For whatever value of "young person" I am in my mid 20s: Climate change is going on and will have some unfortunate consequences, but the world is not ending and there's hope for advances in carbon capture etc. Civilization will march on and find a way. The state and federal government, for all the ways they've failed in protecting my rights, let me bootstrap my career with student aid, being the first of my family to go to college and now having a great career in software. A loud segment of my peers will rant about how America has no social mobility and the boomers ruined everything. In the anecdotal cases of people I know, it seems the ones who applied themselves to any degree are doing pretty well for themselves (owning businesses without a degree etc), and mostly people who just want to smoke weed and do nothing all day will be the ones saying they should get UBI and the boomers are evil and everything is collapsing. I acknowledge we have some serious issues with healthcare costs and some other things but I've just never related to my doom and gloom peers.
  • rdedev 5y ago
    While "no" social mobility is a bit extreme, social mobility has drastically reduced in america. Here is a pretty famous paper showing so: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19843 https://www.nber.org/papers/w19843 Personal responsibility can only take you so far if getting hold or keeping hold of such opportunities are hard in the first place
    • jimmaswell 5y ago
      I read the abstract and skipped around some but I couldn't find it referencing a change in mobility over time. I did notice it says some areas have high mobility still: > The U.S. is better described as a collection of societies, some of which are “lands of opportunity” with high rates of mobility across generations, and others in which few children escape poverty. I see in some charts online that social mobility has allegedly declined steadily since the boomer generation, but of course they're a special case directly following the great depression into an unprecedented economic expansion. Social mobility can't go upwards in real terms forever - if your grandparents were poor, your parents were middle class factory workers, and now you're an office worker - does your child really need to be a doctor or a ceo? So I think the better question might be, is our current level of social mobility acceptable, and did it go down because people are ok just staying in a relatively decent spot (not becoming a lawyer and just being an office worker like your dad) or because opportunity has actually gone down.
• mountainb 5y ago
  Why don't people watch that Al Gore documentary anymore?
• Aunche 5y ago
  No problem has ever been solved by worrying about what you can't control. Just a couple centuries ago, the average life expectancy was less than 40. If people spent all their time worrying about whether they or their children would die, nobody would get anything done. The amount that you actually care about climate change is a function of how much you're willing to do about it, not how guilty you feel about it or how worried about it.
• whymauri 5y ago
  I am Gen-Z and I'm pretty sure I won't have children. They cannot grow up in a Hell we created and that they never asked to exist in. It's something I think about very often.
  • plandis 5y ago
    What hell do you see? The world is unequivocally getting better in terms of health, food supplies, education, economics, etc. I’d recommend reading Factfulness if you want data based evidence for what I’m saying.
    • whymauri 5y ago
      There's going to be global famines within my lifetime and a refugee crisis measurable in the hundreds of millions of people. I would say the death toll is unfathomable, but the IPCC makes it very clear that countries worth of people will die. The Hell I see is the Hell the science has determined is all-but certain: the next 80 years will be a series of tragic trending videos, distant, until it directly affects _you_.
      • sien 5y ago
        Can you please point out where in the IPCC report it makes it very clear that countries worth of people will die?
      • plandis 5y ago
        I distinctly remember hearing how southern Florida would be underwater by now in class in the 90s. People have been making arguments for decades about climate change and while I generally believe the trends, I don’t think it’s as clear cut as saying a country of people will die within the next 80 years. Prior climate change predictions have not been accurate enough to inspire much confidence, TBH.
    • orwin 5y ago
      Ok, if we remove China, and you could be born anywhere on earth in the early 70s, randomly amongst the newborn, or today (again, randomly). Would you choose today?
• aaron695 5y ago
  How did we get so much mental illness in society? They are the richest, most privileged humans ever. There are serious issues, like a future without jobs when General AI and automation hits. But global warming is laughable. It's worrying about the devil because you masterbate. Is this the result of a heavily medicated society?
• birksherty 5y ago
  Data conclusively indicates real-world climate change is tracking the IPCC's worst case scenario. https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU
• peterthehacker 5y ago
  Do governments have the technologies to become carbon neutral? From my maybe uniformed perspective it seems like we’re still several scientific breakthroughs away from alternative energies and sustainable technologies being competitive and cost effective.
• 8bitsrule 5y ago
  Sep 13 2021 article from the Guardian - Title: "Rain fell on Greenland’s ice sheet for the first time ever known. Alarms should ring". [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/13/greenland-ice-sheet-melting-fridtjof-nansen https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/13/greenl...] Quote: "To save the Greenland ice sheet – and Florida – will require a Nansen-esque transformation on steroids, something inspired by, but much larger than, President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. To begin, we need to elect representatives who respect science, and accept the magnitude of what we’re up against. If they do not, they must be defeated. It’s time to put our planet first."
• badmadrad 5y ago
  climate change has become a loaded ambiguous term. most people are running with worse apocalyptic notions of it because it suits whatever agenda. there have been various climate related predictions that have turned out to be hyperbolic and easy to adapt around for all species involved. humans have had to adapt to the changing planet for 10 thousands years. this will never stop no matter how much regulation or how much authoritarian governance returns us to some type of bronze age indigenous state. and the reality is countries like china aren't playing ball with these demonstrations of subservience to the progressive ideals. they will continue to innovate and build while we deconstruct ourselves over something we have no control over.
• Proven 5y ago
  1) They tend to be anxious about everything. 2) Governments doesn't exist to serve anyone particular group. Those concerned about climate change can put their money where their mouth is. 3) Given how economically ignorant and left-leaning (most) young Westerners are, I say governments are not ignoring them enough.
• throwaway5752 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/1438148663860076546 https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/1438148663860076546 "Given the importance of these future projections, one might expect the brain to possess accurate, unbiased foresight. Humans, however, exhibit a pervasive and surprising bias: when it comes to predicting what will happen to us tomorrow, next week, or fifty years from now, we overestimate the likelihood of positive events, and underestimate the likelihood of negative events. For example, we underrate our chances of getting divorced, being in a car accident, or suffering from cancer. We also expect to live longer than objective measures would warrant, overestimate our success in the job market, and believe that our children will be especially talented. This phenomenon is known as the optimism bias, and it is one of the most consistent, prevalent, and robust biases documented in psychology and behavioral economics."