America is floundering in an epidemic of anxiety, depression and drug use.
One in six Americans takes some kind of psychiatric drug, mostly antidepressants, a medical study concluded, and some of them (Prozac and Paxil) are linked to acts of violence. A third of high school students cannot shake feelings of sadness or hopelessness, another report found, and nearly 2 0% of teens have contemplated suicide.
Still more frightening, both studies are based on data collected before the COVID pandemic sent college, teenage and younger children into lockdowns, social isolation, minimal physical activity, hours spent playing video games and reading censored and self-selected online media — and rampant depression and “chronic incapacitating mental illness.” Nor is the problem confined to America.
Researchers and psychologists are constantly finding new reasons to explain the growing inability to cope. Their newest “explanation” is — climate change!
“Climate grief” is “real,” they insist, and it’s spreading rapidly among young people. “The future is frightening,” 77% of 10,000 young people aged 16-25 from the USA and other countries told analysts who investigate “climate anxiety.” Large numbers of children are having climate nightmares.
“The climate mental health crisis” already affects people who have “lost everything in worsening climate infernos,” laments a NASA scientist and climate activist fear-monger who’s convinced we face “the end of life on Earth as we know it.”
“I don’t want to be alive anymore. The animals are all going to die, and I don’t want to be here when all the animals are dead,” a four-year-old child wailed.
Parents fantasize about killing their children, over fears of the “climate-ravaged future” they face. Parents and children alike consider suicide. Indeed, there’s a clear link between increased global temperatures and suicide rates, a Stanford economist asserts.
Dr. Thomas Doherty has built an entire psychology practice around climate psychoses, the Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of “climate-aware therapists,” and a “peer support network” offers grief therapy modeled on twelve-step drug addiction programs.
There’s only one real solution to this epidemic, “experts” insist: Governments must act immediately to “fix” the climate, and eliminate “the death knell of climate chaos hanging over people’s heads.”
Fomenting Fear, Grabbing Power
Excuse the bad pun — but this is insane! The hysteria and histrionics have gotten completely out of hand. They have no basis in reality.
We do not have a climate “crisis.” We have a climate fear-mongering and cancel-culture crisis.
The solution to the climate drug and mental health crisis is not to “fix” grotesquely exaggerated climate problems. It is to end the indoctrination and censorship that dominate discussions about climate change, from kindergarten through graduate school, and in almost every realm of science, politics and news.
The supposed climate crisis exists in computer models, headlines and hype about “unprecedented” temperatures, extreme weather, floods and droughts that have scant basis in Real World evidence. Viewpoints, evidence and experts questioning and challenging these claims are banned from classrooms, school curricula, news and social media, and government policy discussions – starting at the top.
The White House “national climate adviser,” for example, works hand-in-glove with Big Tech and news organizations, suppressing facts about climate change reality. Most federal (and many state) government agencies have similar officials and programs. Meta (Facebook), Twitter, YouTube and other Big Tech companies routinely, consistently and happily assist with this deplatforming and censorship.
The so-called Next Generation Science Standards feature climate alarmism as a guiding principle for students K-12, and determine what is being taught in over a third of America’s classrooms.
Meanwhile, as America and Europe are propagandized and prodded to eliminate their fossil fuel use — with enormous costs in jobs, living standards and lives — China, India and 100 other countries are rapidly expanding their oil, gas and coal use, to lift people out of rampant poverty.
Worse, China increasingly dominates raw material and “green tech” supply chains — and gets a free pass on its fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental destruction, and slave and child labor.
All these realities are studiously and systematically ignored and cancelled.
Fortunately, millions of parents are becoming more involved in their children’s homework and school boards. Fight for Schools and other such efforts are working to bring science, honesty and accountability back to education. They recognize that we desperately need diversity of political and scientific thought.
Without it, the United States and Western Civilization will see their liberties and living standards rolled backward by decades.
The shrill, alarmist cries of climate extremists must be confronted and doused with sound reason. This, for the sake of the children and everyone’s peace of mind.
Craig Rucker is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org).
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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