Back when I were a kid people were afraid of nuclear winter, or getting fried by UV radiation because of aerosols, or 10 billion people in 2010. The sense of impending doom is hardly a new thing.
I personally experience this existential dread and anger from not being able to force any action on the scale we need on climate change. Kind of feel silly that I've never really put together that people in your generation felt similarly about an impending nuclear winter, population growth starvation etc.
Sadly a lot of that generation are the least likely to want dramatic efforts to fight climate change/most skeptical. Some points almost 2X less likely to want immediate action.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/05/26/gen-z-millenn...
Personally, it seems like what changed was somewhere around Gen-X we lost faith in our ability to change anything. That feeling of helplessness seems to have deepened from Gen-X to Gen-Z. Oddly, my generation-Alpha nieces and nephew's still seem optimistic. Is is just youth? or will things start to turn around...
Only time will tell....
Hell I work in politics myself with decent access to politicians and help raise money. Nope. Doesn't matter in terms of power I have basically none besides perhaps getting more money spent on climate issue ads.
I think the only way to get drastic action is if a large % of voting population demands it. Sadly the defeatist attitude reinforces the powerless cycle by not voting and not participating, because they think it doesn't matter. So therefore it doesn't.
Yeah - its the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's maddening that so many people are upset with how things are going, but refuse to vote..I don't care how or who you vote for...just vote! Nothing will change until people get off the sofas.
I am certainly glad we don't live under that kind of fear, even if we have something else to replace it.
Not just the generation you refer to (pre-boomers who would have some memory of WW2), but also boomers and us Xers also were also quite aware that nuclear war was a real possibility.
Doom and gloom bombardment is everywhere, at least to some extent. Its covid, economy, ecology, politics, global politics, wars and so on. Then you go to some other place and magic happens - people are still cheerful, live like covid isnt a thing bombarding us from every direction constantly.
I am in paragliding course in south Spain now, and I can tell you. I've teleported into another dimension for 2 weeks. Regardless of all the cold hard facts, I like it very much, a breath of the age gone. Recharging batteries that badly needed it.
At the end its childishly stupid to not see forest for the trees, and living in semi-bearable misery over things one cannot change. I for a change have faith in mankind resilience and technologies future will bring, ie for cleaning up the mess we all do right now, by using devices to type/read this for example. Because we think its our right to have them, buy often almost same ones and brag on anonymous forums like this one about how much power one wields and how smooth animations are.
When The Day After came out, it was a huge deal. It literally had such a strong impact it directly affected the US' nuclear deterrent policy. When the Wind Blows and Threads, both British productions, also accurately reflected the ennui of the time.
Heck, you had a pop single hit #1, and the entire subject was accidental Armageddon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Reception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Wind_Blows_(1986_film...
Global warming was there, but seemed much less likely to cause the apocalypse compared to nuclear war.
Climate change is being taught as an existential threat that will certainly destroy your future if action is not taken.
This is taught and messaged to young elementary school children. My friends third graders class recently held climate policy protests with picket signs and everything.
This is a level of pervasive fear is higher than I remember with nuclear winter/UV/ or the fear of the day when I was growing up
Nuclear war: scary, but nothing you can actually do anything about. So you have, in a way, permission to forget about it.
Climate change: everyone is told all the time that they have a personal responsibility to save the planet, even though there's actually not much they can do either. But people aren't giving themselves permission to forget about it, and people who point out that there's not much the average person can do are demonized.
I do agree that climate doomerism is a major impediment to progress of all kinds, partly because it redirects a lot of mental energy down rabbit holes that don't actually make people's lives better, only different or less worse (e.g. renewable power doesn't directly improve anyone's lives, and may make it worse if it reduces grid stability, so it doesn't feel like "progress" in the way that 60s sci-fi authors thought of it).
There are several things that individuals can do to reduce their carbon impact, but they are extremely inconvenient. Coupled with an inability to forget, this leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance.
See the case of the UK. It makes up 1% or less of global carbon emissions. It doesn't matter how much the average Brit does to reduce their personal carbon impact, it will all amount to nothing. Therefore, they should stop worrying and forget about it - but "society" (really, the media/public sector classes) won't let them.
I think this is a bad take, and at the center of the climate discussion.
If the UK's 1% is irrelevant, than each other 1% that add up to 100 are also irrelevant. This is obviously not true, 1% is not 0%.
There is a meaningful difference between being unable to solve a problem by yourself and being irrelevant. The fact that I can not do something alone, does not mean that it can not be done.
This is a classic prisoners' dilemma. You can never reach 100% without each 1% contributing. If they all do, it adds up, if they don't, it won't.
You can make a different arguments that the world could reduce carbon emissions 99% without UK cooperating, or that the UK shouldn't go first, or that it isn't worth trying the whole effort is likely to fail, but these are all a different points than the UK is irrelevant.
1) Global reductions are doomed to failure, so the UK should not do their part.
2) It is more effective to continue to emit carbon emissions to encourage china and India to implement reductions
3) The UK has already done its part: it's well ahead of other countries in terms of carbon reduction. So now it can stop creating new problems by trying to reduce it further.
4) There is no such thing as a country "doing its part" because that's false collectivism: tens of millions of people that happen to inhabit the same island don't all have some sort of shared responsibility to the "world" regardless of what globalists might want.
5) The whole thing is irrelevant anyway because the problem is way over-hyped, current mitigation measures are plenty sufficient and China/India will naturally de-carbonize as they get richer anyway.
etc etc. Many of these positions are more future-positive than the one the media force feeds us all the time, of course.