Climate Inaction Is a Betrayal of the Young, and They Feel It

There’s no question that the rate of climate anxiety is growing—how could it not be, on a world where fires and floods are increasingly commonplace? And once your house has flooded—well, the next rainstorm, or even the next forecast, is going to bring back too many memories.

But I’ve found that a fair number of people, especially younger ones, are feeling really desperate anxiety even before they’ve had a traumatic experience, to the point where, for instance, they don’t want to have children of their own. My guess is that this has as much to do with the sense that they’ve been abandoned by the leading institutions—political and economic—of our societies, who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the scale of this emergency or break old practices.

I’ve been thinking all week at my anger at America’s big banks, the companies that represent the capital in capitalism—as I explained last week, they’ve now backed away even from their very scant climate commitments, fearful it might cost them a bit at the margins. And this week the Biden administration let it be known it was going to relax the timetable for getting rid of internal combustion engines, because of combined pressure from the auto companies and the auto workers union.

I remember debating a wind power opponent at Dartmouth years ago; when he was done making his case that no one should have to look at these “monstrosities,” the first question from a student was: “Could you please explain how you managed to get your head so far up your butt?”

I have no more sympathy for the car companies than the banks—they’ve opposed every regulation anyone has ever proposed, at least as far back as seat belts. And I have lots of sympathy for the UAW—they deserved and needed a new contract, which is why many of us tried to play at least a tiny part in helping their successful fall strike. They fret that moving too fast could cost jobs, which is a real worry. But moving too slow has a huge cost too, on a planet that has just come through its hottest year in the last 125,000: Passenger vehicles contribute almost a third of America’s carbon emissions. In a world that understood the climate crisis as an emergency, UAW president Shawn Fain, and the car company CEOs, and the Biden administration would be out on the stump together, doing everything they could to get people to buy EVs.

No need to single out the UAW, especially since they’re doing their best to undercut the Trump campaign (he’d love to make electric cars, which he insists grind to a halt after 15 minutes of driving, a centerpiece of his campaign). After all, we could say the same thing about all those universities that have fought fossil fuel divestment because it’s easier just to keep investing as you have in the past, or those insurance companies that continue to underwrite new pipelines even as their data show the inexorable rise in climate damage, or those longtime residents of cities and suburbs who oppose denser housing in their communities even though it’s clearly a key part of both cutting emissions and letting the next generation have an affordable place to live. If you’re a young person you could look at them all and think: They don’t want even relatively small changes, and in the process they’re guaranteeing that absolutely everything will change for us.

I think older people underestimate how often their resistance to change is read as disregard for the future. I remember debating a wind power opponent at Dartmouth years ago; when he was done making his case that no one should have to look at these “monstrosities,” the first question from a student was: “Could you please explain how you managed to get your head so far up your butt?” There are occasions when I despair that the motto of my beloved Vermont, oldest state in the union, should be “change anything you want once I’m dead.”

A global study in The Lancet a couple of years ago attempted to quantify this sense of what the authors called “betrayal.” The researchers found deep-seated climate anxiety around the planet. Read the findings just to let them sink in:

A large proportion of children and young people around the world report emotional distress and a wide range of painful, complex emotions (sad, afraid, angry, powerless, helpless, guilty, ashamed, despair, hurt, grief, and depressed). Similarly, large numbers report experiencing some functional impact and have pessimistic beliefs about the future (people have failed to care for the planet; the future is frightening; humanity is doomed; they won’t have access to the same opportunities their parents had; things they value will be destroyed; security is threatened; and they are hesitant to have children). These results reinforce findings of earlier empirical research and expand on previous findings by showing the extensive, global nature of this distress, as well as its impact on functioning. Climate distress is clearly evident both in countries that are already experiencing extensive physical impacts of climate change, such as the Philippines, a nation that is highly vulnerable to coastal flooding and typhoons. It is also evident in countries where the direct impacts are still less severe, such as the U.K., where populations are relatively protected from extreme weather events.

And they also found that that feeling of abandonment was a huge part of the problem:

Distress appears to be greater when young people believe that government response is inadequate, which leads us to argue that the failure of governments to adequately reduce, prevent, or mitigate climate change is contributing to psychological distress, moral injury, and injustice.

Such high levels of distress, functional impact, and feelings of betrayal will negatively affect the mental health of children and young people. Climate anxiety might not constitute a mental illness, but the realities of climate change alongside governmental failures to act are chronic, long-term, and potentially inescapable stressors. These factors are likely to increase the risk of developing mental health problems, particularly in more vulnerable individuals such as children and young people, who often face multiple life stressors without having the power to reduce, prevent, or avoid such stressors.

Humans are remarkable creatures. Though we can, uniquely, worry about the future, we can also, uniquely, feel the kind of solidarity and support that lets us carry on even amidst great travail. But isolation, lack of connection—they crack us.

Our institutions—from the White House to the university president, from the bank CEO to the labor leader, from the newspaper editor to the religious leader—need to be willing to show some ability to change in the face of an emergency. We’re not even talking huge sacrifice—the difference between making EVs and making old-school SUVs, or investing in a fossil-free index fund, or ending loans to oil companies, is not existential to any of the parties involved. They are small hits indeed compared with the hits that are headed our way if the planet keeps heating. And the willingness to change would not only help us weather this crisis physically—it would also help us weather it emotionally.

We only get one life. The thought that young people are having to live theirs under this shadow—damaged by the climate crisis even before its fully hit them—should give all of us real pause. There’s a generational theft underway: of water and ice and coral, but also of security and ease.