Sense of Urgency About Climate Change Is Declining Among Youth, Poll Finds

They know its urgent, they are just sick of being ignored

What am I supposed to do? Live in a perpetual anxiety attack? Instead I choose to accept I'm one of the last living humans before the atmosphere turns to acid, or skittles, or whatever the fuck.

But hey, line go up.

Tbh I'm just so tired of it, my whole life I've been warned about this constantly, non stop, and nobody with any power does anything effective ever.

I do all my little environmentally friendly things and they're all just routine now. I rarely even bother to read about it anymore because its so depressing and I've been told lie after lie after lie that this policy will help and that regulation will be great and and these new laws will counteract it and then... Nothing, just right back to destroying this pale blue dot

What's the youth supposed to do? They've been mocked and cursed and attacked and arrested for participating in climate action, and the people in charge are continuing on their slow and unsteady curse. We've had many decades of warnings with increasing urgency and nobody cared enough, what's the point of focusing on the youth when they're the least responsible for the state of the world?

There’s a huge difference in how people process/accept/protest when the conversation changes from “if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll kill the earth” to “the earth is already fucked, best of luck.”

There’s a certain point where optimism degrades into hopelessness.

To be clear, this poll is only about American youth. I've not seen anything about the same reduction in urgency in youths from elsewhere in the world.

It's also worth noting that the poll didn't have a particularly large number of participants and that the age range was 18+ which obviously excludes a fair number of American youths younger than 18.

The Monmouth University Poll was conducted by telephone from April 18 to 22, 2024 with 808 adults in the United States.

I'm also just going to leave this here as a counterpoint:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/unprecedented-youth-climate-trial-demands-action-from-32-european-governments/

It's more like there's nothing we can do about it. Violent revolution is the only way, and nobody has the stomach for that

I mean, we keep hearing breathlessly alarmed articles about how "this year is a tipping point!" and "if we don't do X by next year it's all over!" And then those dates pass, and either new dates are announced or they're just forgotten about.

Crying wolf means that when the actual wolf comes nobody pays attention any more.

Makes sense tbh, climate change still isn't really affecting the Western world at all which is what Westerners only care about