I heard something recently that I thought was a bit strange. Children, some at least, aeem to be suffering from something referred to as eco-anxiety What’s this all about? It seems that all the doomsayers of climate change have affected youth around the world. It actually doesn;t surpriose me that young people, constantly hearing that the world as we know it is going to end soon – from politicians and climate activists – may be concerned. After all, these are adults (mostly) that they’ve been told they should trust.

Of course, none of the doomsayers actually know anything specific. Think about all of the predictions for the last twenty or do years from some of these same people that have yet to come to fruition? The polar bears are going extinct: actually the opposite is occurring. All the glaciers would be melted by 2013 (or was it 2016?). Nope, not yet and it’s almost 2020. Just recently, a major cable network CNN, spent seven hours of programming discussing with Democrat candidates for president the coming climate crisis. Seriously, this is what they’re going to run on in the next year?  A Pew Research poll taken in January of this year places Climate Change next to the bottom of priorities of most people. So why do we see the media keep banging that particular drum?

A new term for me is Climate Justice. I had no idea what that referred to when I first read or heard it but it seems, if I have it correct here, to have more to do with social justice issues that are affected by climate change(?). Yes, Climate change is now a social justice issue concerning race, gender, LGBTQ, and of course, the inevitable, anti-capitalism. So it seems, at least for some, that protesting or being a climate activist is nothing more than another way to persue social issues.

I’m all for doing what we can to protect the environment and to lessen the chances of a rising global temperature by the year 2100 (most of us will all be dead by then) but I believe we have to have a certain amount of equanimity in doing so and not allow some countries to skip their obligations while others take on  the burden.

We should be looking at an aggressive plan to build nuclear plants, of course, if we had started that program 20 years ago, we might have nearly half (or more!) of our electricity provided that way. The issue with this, even though a lot of people believe this is a way to go, is the ol’ NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) issue. People favor this approach, as long as none of these plants are near them.Solar and Wind will only get us so far as with solar, it would take thousands of acres of panels to provide a modicum of electricity for a small city (like where I live – about 50K people). And wind is too inconsistent to provide a regular source.

We can and should be attempting to use whatever we can to keep our carbon footprint as low as possible. No matter how much we do though, there’s always going to be variations in climate over time (climate is NOT weather) as every climatologist on the planet will tell us. Instead of having to go to therapy over eco-anixiety, maybe we should begin doing what we can, now.