Comment: Stifling climate anxiety only ignores the problem

By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion

If you were on a cruise ship and learned it was sinking, your emotional response would probably be anxiety. The best way to relieve that anxiety would be to acknowledge the danger and proceed to the nearest lifeboat. The worst response would be to plug your ears, go “La, la, la, I can’t hear you” over the captain’s warnings and head to the lido deck for a dip in the pool.

This may seem obvious. But the Trump administration’s approach to relieving anxiety about the increasingly chaotic climate appears to be of the “La, la, la, I can’t hear you” variety. It will only make our climate problem, and the anxiety it engenders, much worse.

The Commerce Department recently ended a partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Princeton University called the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System. It was doing critical work to help scientists around the world understand how all the different parts of our wildly complex environment interact. Still, killing the program and two others saved the U.S. government a whopping “nearly $4 million,” so: Tough luck, science.

But the Commerce Department’s primary stated rationale for ending the cooperative was that it “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”

You could interpret this as a rare and welcome interest in children’s welfare from an administration that has cut off funding for pediatric health research and childhood vaccines; fired everyone in the Health and Human Services office that helps keep electricity on for poor kids; reportedly plans to kill funding for Environmental Protection Agency research into how toxic chemicals affect children; and intends to end Head Start preschools, to name just a few affronts.

It’s probably not that, though. A professed concern about children’s climate anxiety has been on the rise in recent years to justify curbing climate discussions, as Jerel Ezell, a University of California at Berkeley health expert has noted. Last August, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas sent a letter to NOAA excoriating the agency for “producing faux-educational materials that fuel climate alarmism,” citing “a dramatic increase in what the American Psychological Association dubs ‘eco-anxiety,’ i.e., a ‘chronic fear of environmental doom.’”

It’s part of a new breed of climate denialism. No longer do most opponents of climate action simply deny that the environment is changing. Rather, they argue climate change isn’t that bad, and doing anything to curb the fossil-fuel use behind that change will be too expensive, too disruptive, or too anxiety-inducing to be worth the trouble.

Climate anxiety and eco-anxiety are real, of course. A 2021 survey reported in Lancet Planetary Health, of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 in 10 different countries, found that 84 percent were at least somewhat worried about climate change, while 59 percent were very or extremely worried about it. A 2023 survey of US 16-to-25-year-olds, also reported in Lancet Planetary Health, found similar results, with 85 percent being somewhat worried and 58 percent being very or extremely worried.

But NOAA educational materials aren’t causing this anxiety. The climate itself is doing more than enough of that. Nearly a quarter of a billion children in 85 countries had their education interrupted by climate-related natural disasters last year, according to Unicef. Heat waves were the biggest culprits, but floods, cyclones and other storms also contributed. Such disasters are increasing in frequency and severity as the environment grows more chaotic, meaning more children are directly impacted, or at least they see the consequences in social and other media. Being afraid of climate change and natural disasters isn’t a pathology like being afraid of chemtrails or talking to girls. It’s an adaptive response to real dangers.

Still, it is true that some of what children hear is not only the denialist misinformation that prevails on the internet’s most popular platforms but doomerism promulgated carelessly by people who should know better. It’s easy enough to find on social media, which rewards hyperbole with clicks and likes. Not far on the Reddit spectrum from the group r/climate, a relatively sober clearinghouse of climate information, is r/collapse, in which every twitch of the environment is a harbinger of imminent Armageddon. The r/climate subreddit has 250,000 members. The r/collapse subreddit has 527,000. Maybe you see the problem.

But this is all the more reason that climate science should be taught in classrooms by trained professionals. They can balance the bad-enough news on climate — human activities are causing the planet to heat up, and without efforts to change those activities and curb that heating, the consequences will grow much worse — with the good news that there are many ways they can make the future better.

“Science teachers have long recognized that, in order to teach effectively, you have to pay attention to students’ emotions,” Glenn Branch, deputy director of the nonprofit National Center for Science Education, told me. “That doesn’t mean mechanically avoiding anything that will trigger them. It means adopting strategies to avoid problems.”

Some of those strategies include holding climate classes outside, where students can feel more at ease and connected to nature. They include teaching kids about all the miraculous technology, from solar panels to carbon-capture strategies, that will help humanity both mitigate and adapt to global heating. And they include getting students personally involved in climate action, giving them a sense of agency that will alleviate feelings of helplessness and doom. As many of us have learned in therapy, simply talking about problems and anxieties helps, while suppressing them makes them worse.

“How many of your problems went away when you ignored them?” asked Gale Sinatra, an education and psychology professor at the University of Southern California. “It isn’t the case that ignoring stress and anxiety helps it go away. You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that.”

Sinatra warned that, to be most effective, teachers need their own education in both climate science and managing students’ emotions around it. Unfortunately, surveys have shown that most teachers feel they lack sufficient training in these subjects. Any government truly worried about climate anxiety would prioritize that over trying to censor these subjects.

In that 2023 survey of young Americans, huge majorities said the U.S. government was “failing young Americans” and “betraying future generations” on climate; and that was before Donald Trump resumed office and started laying waste to climate science and action. A majority also said they were hesitant to have children because of climate anxiety. The Trump administration is reportedly looking for ways to persuade more Americans to procreate.

Gaslighting them about climate will only discourage them further.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.