Stop scaring kids
Last week's cover story, about the need for Nova Scotia to get off fossil fuels, opens with a scene of Halifax students protesting human-caused climate change, joining students from all over the world in the May 3 protest ("A just transition," by Laura Cutmore). Many of those who ditched classes did so because adults, who should know better, have driven them into a state of climate anxiety and in some cases abject terror. Environmental die-ins, in which young people lie around train stations and shopping centres pretending to have died from climate change, have become common.
Adults, some teachers, are responsible for promoting this millennial doomsday climate cult. They have crammed politically correct "social justice" and climate pieties into the all-too-receptive brains of elementary and high school kids. This is coercive and psychologically damaging at its very heart. The message is the climate boogeyman is coming to get you.
If you don't believe this, just YouTube 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the poster girl for the school strikes. The economic, social and media global elites have hijacked this brainwashed kid. The billionaires at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland trot her onstage to lecture us on our "over consumption." But normal people have no trouble recognizing that the manipulation of this girl is a sinister form of child abuse.
No amount of garbage-washing and sorting, composting, recycling, using LEDs and driving fuel-efficient cars will be enough for the elites. The climate change elite hates humanity. To them, even the carbon dioxide we exhale is poison. They tell us meat equals heat and that we shouldn't drive or fly lest we destroy Mother Earth. Ironically, it's perfectly all right for environmental grievance hustlers like Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio to fly private jets while lecturing us on our destructive habits.
You can't really blame the kids who walked out of school. They have been force-fed a steady diet of alarmism that is becoming ever more obsessed with doomsday prophecies. On the first Earth Day in 1970, for example, Paul Ehrlich confidently predicted that "100-200 million people would be starving to death in the next 10 years." In that same period Kenneth Watt warned of a pending ice age that would arrive in the year 2000. Life magazine reported that "by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one-half." Ecologist Kenneth Watt predicted that by the year 2000 there would be no more crude oil. In 2006, the Washington Post stated that Al Gore "believes humanity may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan."
The sky is always falling. Our hope lies with the rebellious kids who have somehow acquired the skills to analyze and to think critically. They're the ones who have avoided the indoctrination and when they sauntered out behind the cultists on Friday, they went fishing, enjoyed the sunshine and hung out with their friends. They know that the climate has been changing for thousands of years. They know that there have been ice ages and warming periods as long as there has been history, but these kids don't virtue signal. Deep down they reject the cult and refuse to be patsies for scared and elitist adults. For these young counter-culture rebels, the world is a truly wondrous place, the future is bright and the sky is most certainly not falling. —Peter Martyn, Tatamagouche