Katharine Hayhoe, a professor of atmospheric science and political science at Texas Tech University has done a lot of work on the psychology of strongly held opinions about climate change. She is particularly concerned about her own community, evangelical Christians, many of whom seem irrevocably tied to Donald Trump and his anti-climate change stance.
A study from the University of Bath in September of 2021, on the subject to of youth anxiety about climate change, found that 59% of youth are very or extremely worried about climate change. This covered 16 to 25 year-olds. 75% of them said that the future is frightening. 56% are so filled with despair and fear that they think humanity is doomed.
Climate scientists have been trying to warn people for decades that climate change was an important issue that must be addressed with real purpose. Since 1965 they starting warning American presidents. Lyndon Johnson was the first American president who was warned in 1965, now more than 59 years ago. We should all think about how much progress we could have made on this subject had their warnings been seriously heeded for over 50 years. We would no longer have a problem! We would be there. We could probably have kept climate change down to a very manageable level. Sadly, that advice was not heeded. All of this is partly the responsibility to businesses, such as the energy sector, invested heavily in spreading false news about the climate crisis. The paid experts to deceive us.
The group of society that has changed the most in their thinking about climate change, according to Hayhoe, is young people and according to Hayhoe they have wielded a lot of political force. They have used that power at the local level and the national scale and even at the international scale. In fact, they have been immensely effective at the international level.
According to Joan Baez, the antidote to anxiety is action. If you actually get to work to solve the problem your anxiety will be most effectively dissolved. The antidote to despair is action.
As well, consider what another youthful activist, Greta Thunberg said, “Don’t look for hope; act! And when you act, hope is everywhere.”
Christiana Figueres who led the climate change talks for the UN at the Paris climate talks, probably has more reason to be frustrated than anyone else in the world. After all, how would you deal with every country, even ones like Canada (LOL), constantly breaking their promises? Frustration would be baked in. Yet she wrote a unreasonably hopeful book called The Future we Choose.
She wrote about what the world would look like in 2030 if we actually took the actions we should take. The air would be clean. Electricity would be affordable. Our cities would be walkable. She concluded her book like this: “The lesson we learned was that we were only as doomed as we believed ourselves to be.” Action is what gets us there. How do we act? We recognize that we all have a voice.