Progressives Have Created the Climate Anxiety That Is Breaking Kids’ Brains

T ime magazine has discovered the real cause of the mental-health epidemic of “climate anxiety” that is affecting America’s youth: Republicans.

One would think that the person whom Time trusts to argue that Republicans are to blame for this very real mental-health crisis would be an expert in climatology, atmospheric sciences, or geology. Instead, the author Jerel Ezell, according to his website, is a “social epidemiologist,” visual artist, and professor of “community health sciences” at the University of California, Berkeley, . . . because of course he/him is.

Naturally, he blames “Republican governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, whose state was ravished by both Helene and Milton,” as the real culprit behind “climate anxiety.” He then cites how “DeSantis referenced prior hurricanes in Florida to dispel claims that the state’s hurricanes were amplified by climate change.” However, DeSantis’s rebuttal of environmental doomsaying regarding hurricanes was scientifically sound.

This is the kind of basic, scientifically illiterate mistake one would expect from, say, a visual artist. But Ezell isn’t done.

The GOP’s newest, and perhaps most dangerous, effort has been to weaponize the accelerating prevalence of “climate anxiety” in American youth. Climate anxiety speaks to the dread that people often feel when ruminating on the known and suspected consequences of climate change. It’s especially high among youth — the demographic that will bear the brunt of climate change in the coming years.

The anxiety that Ezell worries about is very real, as 53 percent of middle- and high-school students currently feel “sadness, uneasiness, and helplessness” at the prospect of the long-feared climate apocalypse, and some young people even feel suicidal. What Ezell seems most interested in, however, is blaming Republicans for accurately pointing out that this climate anxiety is unsubstantiated.

As I’ve previously written, environmentalists have a long, Chicken Little–esque track record of failed predictions that goes back half a century.

In 1970, for example, shortly before the first Earth Day, Harvard biologist George Wald warned that civilization would end within 15 to 30 years “unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” In 2018, then-famed teenage activist Greta Thunberg promoted Harvard University professor James Anderson’s warning that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” Most famously, in 2006, environmentalist and former Democratic vice president Al Gore claimed that unless his preferred policy measures were implemented “within the next ten years,” the world would “reach a point of no return.” I recall being shown An Inconvenient Truth more than a dozen times when I was a high-school student. To be told by authority figures that we were ten years away from disaster deeply disturbed me. At the time, Eric Pooley in Time claimed that the former vice president’s environmentalism had “carried Gore to a new state of grace.” When his “point of no return” arrived years ago, in 2016, Gore dismissed it, and Time never reported back on it.

Now, Ezell worries that Republicans are “weaponizing” Kamala Harris’s rambling worries about whether it makes sense for young Americans to “even to think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home, because what will this climate be?” He cites a recent Pew poll showing that “only 12% of Republicans, compared to 59% of Democrats, believe that dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress,” and he explains how “Republicans’ resistance is increasingly evolving into shrewd strategies focused on dismantling climate education and advocacy programs, and even promoting misinformation.”

Maybe, just maybe, Republicans aren’t to blame and “youth climate anxiety” is the result of Democrats’ constantly feeding young people warnings of apocalypse, backed by the authority of “The Science” and the force of nonstop sympathetic media coverage, to guilt young Americans into voting for them. Perhaps being constantly told by their leaders that the world is about to end can be stressful for young people?

Moreover, trust in science has cratered — and justifiably so, because science and the institutions of higher education that produce it have recently become less trustworthy.

In 2015, a Gallup poll found that just 9 percent of Americans had “very little” trust in higher education. Less than a decade later, in 2024, that number had more than tripled to a shocking 30 percent. In 2016, there was no significant partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats, who agreed, at 67 percent and 72 percent, that science had “a mostly positive effect” on society. By October 2023, only 47 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Democrats thought so.

This disastrous politicization of science biases the canon of knowledge. A real debate — like the historic one between “mobilists” and “fixists” in my own field of geology, which led to the theory of plate tectonics — simply couldn’t occur today in major publications because one side wouldn’t permit the other to publish an opposing view. As I’ve noted before, Scientific American’s pretending that political hacks are unbiased scientists isn’t scientific . . . or American.

Jerel Ezell, and Time, may not remember the failed predictions made by environmentalists over the course of the past half century — or they might simply refuse to report that inconvenient truth. The refrain of looming eco-catastrophe is nothing to get depressed over, but most young people unfortunately lack the perspective to know that. And not because of Republicans.