There’s a difference in how humans respond, to positive news of improvement or meaningful progress and to negative gloomy news. The news of a new bridge being successfully constructed or a rocket landing back on its base after flying through the ionosphere doesn’t need to alarm you. But, anxiety and guilt will surge through your nerves if you read somewhere that after a few decades rising sea levels will engulf coastal cities because of a compounding effect of you streaming your favorite show on your TV while browsing social media simultaneously, and the AC keeping the room cool by pumping heat out into the atmosphere.
The inherent asymmetry in the sensitivity to good and bad news is supposedly an evolutionary failsafe. Because of course, all things aside, the news of impending collective extermination should blow all the sirens in your brain.
The problem with the current climate change debate is a problem with the debate about anything in our time, with the attention scarce audience and attention monetizing business models. It’s devoid of any nuance, there are think tanks, organizations and people that do understand the nooks and crannies of the climate change phenomenon and the ongoing global effort, but the majority of the population is lost in the torrent of polarizing news items meant to grab attention. The users or the audience which has a short attention span plays a role too in shaping the nature of the discourse by failing to understand that searching and consuming the right news is not the challenge anymore, filtering out false, shallow and ideologically stubborn news that feeds the hunger of confirmation bias is.
Greta Thunberg got catapulted into the global spotlight in 2018. The young girl delivered a speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit which was mostly applauded and was widely covered by the media, as it should have been. The speech serves as a quintessential example of what is wrong with the climate movement- in the way, it’s being taken forward and the effect it’s having on people, especially the young population. Greta, in her speech is not acting as a propagator of facts or relevant ideas about what is happening or what can be done about it. She’s amplifying a part of a cultural discourse or advocating a type of response that involves repeatedly generating knee jerk, emotionally outrageous reactions to a very complex problem. She uses phrases like “How dare you!” and “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
The shrill voices and starkly binary language that defines the climate debate is turning a whole generation into cynical and pessimistic angst-ridden people who don’t see any meaning in their lives because they have continuously been fed the idea that they are the ones that will go through cataclysmic climate situations because their elders made bad choices. They don’t see any value in seeking to experience the world like their ancestors did because their minds are occupied with the worry of an impending doom.
Studies have shown that young people feel that they have been abandoned and that they have no agency over the problems of climate decay that are causing stress to them. The American Psychological Association describes this as eco-stress– “the chronic fear of environmental doom.” People are not having babies because they think the world is doomed. School children experience climate-related stress because they are being told since early childhood that the world is going to end because their elders made bad choices. They need to understand other aspects of climate change, and the necessity of making the choices that were made by previous generations.
A reasonable amount of panic is understandable and necessary to wake the whole world up from its ignorant and comfortable slumber, but the current climate discourse ignores the fact that humans have been at odds with disastrous natural forces throughout their existence. We burnt lots of coal because we needed to progress as a civilization, and sustain the pace of scientific, economic and social growth that was needed to keep at bay the varieties of life-threatening accidents that have haunted humanity all throughout history. To sustain a large population that is spread across regions of varying weather conditions we needed lots of energy and resources to barely stay alive, some regions are so frigid that heating was necessary for existence, cities that have been the centers of cultural and financial growth in the modern world (most in the US or Europe) are drowning in snow for almost half the year; travelling on a ship propelled by winds was the only way of travel just 150 years ago, people used to spend a large portion of their lifetimes on ships going to a new country and many died due to seasickness and vitamin deficiency, history is painted with accounts of plagues and riots because there were no food supply or medicine manufacturing industries.
On a large timeline of history, humans have just begun burning fossil fuels on a large scale, air travel didn’t exist 60 years ago, nor did mass-market cars or coal-burning electric plants. Some amount of human-induced climate change was inevitable, just so we could turn into these financially stable and socially evolved globe-trotting beings that have enough resources and aren’t constantly worried about the basic necessities of existence. We can finally afford to think about better and more sustainable ways of living without worrying that we’ll run out of food or freeze to death. Cross country travel has become so safe that more people die in car accidents than in airplane accidents.
The world is a better place than it was 100 years ago. Life expectancy was 22 years in India and the child mortality rate was 50%; life expectancy today is 70 years and the child mortality rate is less than 5%. Sure the air is polluted, water is becoming scarce and most of our cities are ugly utilitarian concrete jungles but we are also more aware, have more resources at hand to slow down the rate of degradation and maybe even reverse it. The alternative was to stay stuck in the grim past where natural disasters and diseases determined the fate of humanity.
Vivek is a writer who writes to explore. His interests include philosopy, psychology, poetry, cinema, mythology and international relations. Above all he’s interested in making sense of complex systems-how they work and influence each other. An alumnus of Calcutta University, he has a bachelor's degree in Physics.
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Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master, it was rightly said. Electronic devices have grown into an inevitable part of our daily lives.
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