Climate “anxiety” is a Thing and I don’t give a @&%#!

(Insert your favourite 4-letter word)

There are actually hundreds of journal articles and references on climate anxiety; there is even an anxiety journal: Journal of Anxiety Disorders! All this is great for funding of studies and adding to researcher’s CVs. It isn’t good enough, that your work or study is so important that others must grow your food for you (at low prices!). Now, apparently, there must be another whole set of people along the sidelines to provide for your mental health support? Grow up. It's the Hard Knock Life (Annie, 1977, 1983). Get a life. We’ve got work to do.

The Globe and Mail (April 8, 2023) has an article by John Rapley titled “We need a new climate-focused Marshall Plan for cleantech in poorer countries.” This is a correct vision for an appropriate level of world-wide action in the realm of mitigation and adaptation. “Developing” countries have from their beginning, been locked into the status-quo energy provision system, and are expected to somehow fund the leap from carbon-based energy to a new energy structure, in spite of being locked in to massive international debt due to ongoing economic colonialism.

And in an article in Fortune titled “The world needs a Marshall Plan to fight climate change - and politicians are failing to show ambition. Business can’t afford to wait,” Paul Polman writes “There’s no need to feel hopeless–but we must recognize that our politics is failing to deliver vital climate action. We must find other ways to close the ambition gap, get the money moving, get business driving urgent coalitions, and make sure young people are firmly in the driving seat. Then, it will be up to politics to catch up.”

Another, in South China Morning Post, an article by Anthony Rowley titled “Climate change: A Marshall Plan is needed to curb emissions and avert disaster,” says that:

“Climate change should figure as large as the US$15 billion Marshall Plan enacted by the US to help rebuild a war-shattered Europe. But there is no such plan, only a naïve reliance on private-sector initiatives. It cannot be left to markets to decide how trillions in savings should be deployed against climate change.”

That sounds like a “pull out all the stops” action plan is needed, and as the first article above points out:

“So globally, yes, we’re still losing the battle against climate change. If we with the means are really to do good, we’ll have to stump up the cash for the global energy revolution. Now that Western governments are coalescing around the agenda of transforming their economies, they need to look to the future, with a plan to decarbonize the world economy. That will take ambition on a scale we haven’t seen in decades. …few developing countries have the deep pools of capital available to build a whole new infrastructure. And their consumers, billions of whom struggle just to put food on the table, scarcely have the deep pockets to absorb the costs of policies that will raise the cost of energy.”

Yet woke players in the world of climate commentary claim that “climate anxiety” is a big Thing that needs to be acted upon, perhaps the biggest threat from climate change, disruption of human mental health. They would claim that articles such as the three above (and my substack posts), do little more than stoke more fear in readers, leading to yet more “climate anxiety.” To alleviate their anxiety, the little rich kids are told to try to find little ways in their lives where they can reduce their environmental footprint*. This is starting to feel like the “sad little rich-nation darlings” might have to face a reduction of their life style of wasteful consumption.

This is very reminiscent of a widely quoted article in Scientific American titled “Climate Anxiety Is an Overwhelmingly White Phenomenon,” by Sarah Jaquette Ray (March 21, 2021). And apparently, if you are opposed to the over-valuation of anxiety as a climate issue, that’s because you are White. Period. Yes, as she says “Put another way, is climate anxiety just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or get ‘back to normal,’ to the comforts of their privilege?” Exactly - the “getting back to ‘normal’.” And she asks, “How can we make sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?” That’s what my post on oxygen pricing was about; how this rather massive flow of funds can contribute to climate justice, since the rich North has caused most of the problem while the global South reels in most of the damage and effects of the New Colonialism and the new rape of the planet to replace all the rich people’s cars with EVs, then all their houses, then all their commercial buildings, with, of course nary a though to reducing their total energy consumption. Heaven forbid!

Yes, the rich nations, even those who just appear rich by way of racking up massive debt, need to pull back and truly reduce their total energy usage. That means living a simpler life and setting Limits to their foolish notions of “Progress.” And what should come first - paying down their national debt incurred by living beyond their means, or paying down their debt to the global South caused by their CO2 emissions? Besides that, these “rich” nations are technically bankrupt, financially and morally.

* “So while citizen participation in mitigation and institutional adaptation efforts is critical, in the specific context of reducing personal climate anxiety, an arguably more effective recommendation is to plan and undertake personal- and/or household-level climate-risk-reduction-framed climate adaptation20. It is this self-perception of control over one’s own situation that anxiety research highlights as a particularly influential lever when it comes to personal anxiety management.” - Quote from:

Fyke, J., Weaver, A. Reducing personal climate risk to reduce personal climate anxiety. Nature Climate Change. 13, 209–210 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01617-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01617-4

Well, cry me a river. That’s your effort - try to reduce your pathetic anxiety? Fiddle while Rome burns? Get over it! Try explaining the pains of your climate anxiety to someone in a refugee camp. So you face yet another existential threat, for climate, on top of nuclear threat, on top of financial issues and many others. Tough! Every animal, every species, every living organism faces existential threats by the minute! All of humanity needs to download a new operating system (OS) for their brain. This entire world-wide social structure was built on the presumption of never-ending cheap fuel-supplied energy. But every action, especially large-scale action, has unintended consequences. The consequences of massive burning of fossil fuels are much worse than so-called climate change.

In the above-mentioned SA article, Sarah Jaquette Ray writes:

“Oppressed and marginalized people have developed traditions of resilience out of necessity. Black, feminist and Indigenous leaders have painstakingly cultivated resilience over the long arc of the fight for justice. They know that protecting joy and hope is the ultimate resistance to domination. Persistence is nonnegotiable when your mental, physical and reproductive health are on the line.”

Yes, resilience to face another day - such as under the threat of nuclear weapons, saying that any day the sun rises is a good day (as opposed to nuclear winter). What exactly counts as a good day during the ongoing burning of fuels for energy? The coming climate catastrophe far surpasses the devastation or duration of a nuclear winter. So resilience: yes, hope: no - hope that all the CO2 is swept up and disappears, yet go right on burning?

Governments are manufacturing Hope - promoting “offsets” for your travel flights (enabling the Economy to continue); attending one climate conference after another (making it look like something is being done), planning space flights to the Moon and Mars (to make it look like everything is back to Normal), all cleverly designed to take your mind off the real issues. What is your resistance to that domination? Do we really have to hope that this rogue species is brought under Nature’s command, since we can’t seem to end our war against Nature? Oops, that’s existential threat again!

All these circumstances that Sarah Jaquette Ray mentions - resilience, fight for justice, resistance to domination; these are all related to social dominance and oppression events in human history. While these are true grievances, they pale in comparison to the destruction to this planet and all other living beings caused by our devotion to city life entirely enabled by profligate use of fossil energy. This will turn out to be the worst planetary disaster in 55 million years. And we are supposed to be concerned about the mental health of the humans, the destroyers? I’m supposed to care?

Quoting from “The psychology of climate anxiety” by Joseph Dodds in BJPsych Bulletin, Aug 2021:

“Since the 1990s, ecopsychology has emerged as a particular response within psychology to environmental problems, emphasising a holistic approach 45, 46, 47, 48, suggesting that our modern lives are so disconnected from nature that we do not care enough to want to protect it, and fail to realise that we are threatened by damage to the natural world. Ecopsychology views disconnection from nature as also central to the current mental health epidemic 18, 49. Reconnecting to nature is seen as a requirement for mental health that also provides the emotional link that will drive us to act (out of love, not just fear). Ecopsychologists emphasise that the anxiety, guilt, grief and anger we feel concerning collapsing ecosystems, our ‘pain for the World’, are appropriate and, although difficult, provides the starting point for action and a renewed relation to Earth 50.“

“…Climate change is another order of complexity beyond COVID-19, but important lessons can be learned. COVID-19 forces us to recognise that the ‘split’ between ourselves and nature is not real, and shows that our social systems are all too fragile in the face of environmental danger. On the other hand, ecopsychology tends to downplay that nature does at times try to kill us, and is not only a beneficial force that nurtures. … Ultimately, the results need to be measured in reduced carbon dioxide emissions rather than necessarily reduced expressions of fear.”