Free Republic

My 5-year-old daughter is now old enough to read a lot of books and magazines aimed at children, and it’s given me a whole new perspective on the discourse wars over how we talk about climate change, conservation, and the future of the planet. As I’ve written about before, climate change is going to be bad, and it will hold back humanity from thriving as much as we should this century. It will likely cause mass migration and displacement and extinctions of many species. What it won’t do, however, is make the Earth unlivable, or even mean that our children...

It would hit Alina Black at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl. Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children. She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws. In the early-morning hours, after nursing the baby, she would slip...

For all the panicked young people out there, climate alarmists say they feel your pain.A conciliatory CNN report this week touches on the issue of so-called “climate anxiety,” which apparently is becoming widespread. The first paragraph of the report introduces a Willamette University student who “woke at 2 a.m. and then cried for two solid hours about the warming ocean.” That student’s climate professor, Wendy Petersen Boring, asserts, “Back in 2007, [climate change] was the mouse in the room; then, it became the elephant in the room. By 2016, those concerns and fears began to flood over.” The report goes...