The Kids Are Our Climate Scapegoats
We're making young people our emotional loadbearers and it has to stop
Hello friends.
I spent last weekend at the Climate Reality Project’s “Leadership Corps Training” and I have so many feelings about it!
If you’ve never heard of the Climate Reality Project, basically, it’s a wildly, improbably successful PowerPoint presentation. Al Gore, Former Vice President, and he-was-definitively-robbed Presidential candidate, started giving this slideshow of facts about the climate crisis all the way back in 1989, when we called it global warming. In 2006, Laurie David, then-wife of Larry David, developed the slideshow into an Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore took the popularity of that film and started the Climate Reality Project, the core of which is these multiday “trainings.” There’ve been between 50 and 60 of them all over the world. There were 3,000 people at this one, which I hear is the biggest ever.
Most of the weekend was a pretty typical mix of panels and schmoozing, albeit with an unusually big tent: everyone from government wonks to grassroots organizers to entrepreneurs, high school students to retirees, from dozens of countries and at least three Indigenous nations.
But what makes these trainings special is that Gore personally attends each one and gives a two-hour long version of his slideshow, which he updates constantly.
Boy, does this guy love his slideshow.
And you know what? It’s pretty freaking compelling! He delivers the whole thing with just such unabashed geek energy, plus some rumbling fire.
He starts with the impacts, including some devastating videos of floods and fires; goes to the culprits, namely the lying, murderous fossil fuel industry and the politicians who protect and subsidize them; and ends on the solutions.
I was definitely engaged intellectually, but I was also monitoring how it felt to take all this in. Emotionally, it was a dog’s breakfast—that weird jumble of things you pick at from the fridge after a late night out, with some over-the-hill ramen, some pickles, maybe chocolate cake.
“Don’t get too depressed!” Al told us at the beginning. “There’s hopeful stuff coming at the end!” And it’s true. There’s been an incredible amount of progress globally in just the past two years, and the runaway growth of clean energy and electric vehicles is amazing.
But while these trends are great, they’re obviously not enough, nor fast enough. The obstacles on the path to net zero are daunting. The disasters are haunting. The injustices are enraging. And the unprecedented, off-the-charts nature of climate breakdown injects uncertainty and fear on top of grief and despair. Also looming is the uncertainty of what happens in the next Presidential election.
These facts coexist. It’s a complex world. But it’s hard to carry all the feelings mixed up together—especially when coming together in community, with the unspoken social rules by which we alternately celebrate and commiserate.
There’s just this swerve, this empty center, this bright smile with acrid armpits, or hollow in the pit of the stomach that I sense in a lot of climate conversations, that I feel too in myself.
“You get a couple of drinks in any of these people, they will start talking about how badly we’re fucked,” one extremely successful, brilliant and outwardly optimistic attendee told me, when I showed them the climate emotions wheel and told them emotions where my thing. “They’ll tell you their plan to run to Canada and farm or whatever.”
On Sunday, there was a scene that left me uneasy. A group of college students with Sunrise Movement disrupted a conversation between Gore and John Podesta, who is currently senior adviser to President Biden for clean energy innovation and implementation. They stood up with banners, started yelling, then singing, and were quickly marched out of the venue and into the elevators.
https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1779922017094955052
Sunrise and other groups are asking the president to declare a climate emergency, using the federal Emergency Powers Act. This could unlock even more funding for green energy, protection for victims of natural disasters, and maybe more importantly, allow him to halt offshore oil drilling, oil exports, and fossil fuel investment . All of it through executive action, without waiting for Congress.
Outside, on 11th Avenue, Donnel Baird, a Climate Reality Project board member (seen on the right in the photo above), heard them out. It was an unexpectedly emotional scene. Some of the students got choked up. And so did Baird. He seemed torn between supporting them, challenging them and advising them on tactics—asking how many voters they represent in swing states, and whether they could really claim a credible threat to Biden’s reelection.
What the students are asking for seems unrealistic. Politically infeasible. And at the same time, every one of us thousands of people in that auditorium knew, if we were paying attention, that it’s also the bare minimum of what’s necessary. We absolutely need to do everything we can to halt fossil fuel production and now is already late.
What it made me think of is this concept in psychology called the “identified patient.” Basically: One member of a family, often a child or teen, has an obvious mental health problem. It may be severe, an addiction, an eating disorder. But often, in fact, it’s the entire family system that is suffering. There’s intergenerational trauma, maybe abuse. This one person has simply externalized their symptoms and is serving as the scapegoat, the ‘messed-up one,’ taking one for the team, standing in for the group.
Related: I published an article this week about young activists looking for more healing approaches to organizing.
Watching this scene, with the kids marched swiftly out the door for treating an emergency like an emergency, for being rude by saying out loud what everyone already knew, made me feel once again like children are the identified patients of the climate crisis. We’re worried about their mental health? They are not crazy. The world is crazy. They are not wrong. The world is wrong. There’s nothing reasonable about this shit, and there’s nothing reasonable about acting like it’s reasonable.
Darling very lively and well written I like it
Thank you for this, especially the timing. I do not want to go to my local climate strike this afternoon, but I am going anyway. This is not how our young people want to be spending their time, and if we all did more, and our politicians did what's necessary, they wouldn't have to spend their time disrupting and often getting arresting. Thanks again, I wake up Friday mornings ready for your latest and it never disappoints <3