Europe is beginning to turn against the prophets of climate alarmism

Levels of eco-anxiety are rising among the young, but the planet’s future is brighter than many think

Europe is beginning to turn against the prophets of climate alarmism

Levels of eco-anxiety are rising among the young, but the planet’s future is brighter than many think

FRASER NELSON18 May 2023 • 9:00pm

For children it would mean avoiding school, where much of this is now built into the curriculum. It would also mean avoiding television or radio news, seldom short of climate gloom. This week, for example, the BBC announced that the planet is “predicted to pass the 1.5 degree global warming threshold in the next few years,” a tipping point after which terrible effects become irreversible. This was followed up by a guest saying how global warming would be worse for Europe than Bangladesh. But the balancing good news – of which there is plenty – was never mentioned.

We’re now familiar with the lack of scrutiny or perspective when the subject is discussed. Some newspapers tell writers to avoid neutral phrases like “climate change” and instead say “emergency”, “crisis” or “breakdown”. Politicians have tended to compete with each other to see who can ring the alarm the loudest. Ed Miliband wanted to decarbonise electricity by 2030; Theresa May made Britain one of the few countries in the world with a legal target to hit net zero by 2050. But just how much would this cost? No one was really told.

Now, the bill is beginning to land – and reality beginning to bite. Dutch farmers recently drove tractors into The Hague to protest against its green diktats. In Germany, where the war in Ukraine has brought a new energy realpolitik, wind turbines are being dismantled to make way for an expanded coal mine. Sweden’s 27-year-old environment minister has been quietly diluting the green laws she inherited. Emmanuel Macron – famously chastened by the gilets jaunes – last week called on the EU to stop its barrage of green legislation, saying that enough is enough. We might just have passed Peak Green.

Sadiq Khan is running into trouble with his Ulez zone, similar to those in Bristol and Oxford, because it’s hard for him to deny that the air is cleaner than any time in living memory. I turned 50 last weekend. In my lifetime, nitrogen oxides levels have fallen by 78 per cent, PM10 levels by 75 per cent, PM2.5 by 81 per cent and sulphur dioxide by 98 per cent. If the Mayor of London regards this as a crisis, I’m not quite sure what word he’d use to describe the last couple of centuries.

There has never been a better time to be young, be old or to bring children into the world. But successive opinion polls show that eco-anxiety is all too real: we’ve somehow managed to rear a generation who are anxious and alarmed about a future where they can expect to live a longer, healthier life than any generation that has come before them.

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As with the Project Fear advertising during Covid, we need to ask if there are side effects to the one-sided barrage of negativity or how it must feel to be a sixth-former subjected to years of classroom alarmism. Even the brightest minds can be affected by this. I was at an Oxford seminar earlier this month where a student said she had decided not to have children so as to not burden the planet. A logical conclusion (not having a child easily outweighs all other carbon-saving lifestyle changes) but a rather depressing one.

The case for optimism is not just based on the pace of progress and the certainty of more innovation to come but on the basic economics of it. Reports envisaging high sea levels for Bangladesh also assume the country will end up as rich as the Netherlands is today, therefore able to build more flood defences. This is its best hope. Getting richer needs more people, so humans remain more of a solution than a problem. This is why climate-related deaths have fallen by about 90 per cent over the course of the last century: wealthier countries can better prepare for natural disasters.

In my climate therapy session, one attendee used a rather rebellious word to describe his feelings about the future: “optimistic”. It’s a very defensible position, with an ever-mounting base of evidence to support it. As the dark-green agenda fades over Europe, the case for rational eco-optimism is waiting to be made.