Living through the Cold War brought us a constant and very close awareness of the potential for a nuclear extinction event so I don’t think it’s climate change. If anything it was scarier then because there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error in a highly complex socio-technical system.

I’m of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a concerted pushback on the part of the “straights” to reassert the primacy of their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success and conventional career paths.