Des Houghton: Net Zero messages causing mental illness in teens

Net Zero alarmism is causing mental illness and destroying the childhoods of our teenagers, writes Des Houghton.

A Exctinction Rebellion protest in Brisbane’s CBD. File picture: Liam Kidston

Is the jump in mental illness among Australian teenagers the fault of climate change alarmists?

Probably.

Cultural Marxists have embedded themselves in our high schools and universities and they are telling wide-eyed youngsters that they have no future.

Global self-destruction is imminent, they are told.

Eco-activist groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Lock the Gate, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth also spread unnecessary fear, in my opinion.

Is it any wonder some children have suicidal thoughts?

The global warming debate has been captured by hot heads. They are scaring the daylights out of young people – and maybe some adults.

Children should be taught not to fear the future but to embrace it, and to do so with hope and optimism.

It is worth reminding them that the world is a better place today than it was 50 years ago. It is a better place than it was 100 and 1000 years ago.

It’s time to tone down the rhetoric and let teenagers get on with enjoying life without being targeted by loony left catastrophists.

The doomsayers have a large cheer squad in the ABC.

I can’t turn on the radio without hearing some academic or activist condemning the mining industry and, ipso facto, capitalism.

I am old enough to remember when a Golden Gaytime was a delicious ice cream.

That means I am old enough to remember the panic caused in the late ’60s and early ’70s with climate scientists warning of a new ice age.

In my first year working in journalism in 1970, we dutifully reported horror stories that air pollution was beginning to obliterate the sun, triggering an ice age that would devastate the planet in the 21st Century.

I have been sceptical of climate scientists ever since. I am not saying they are all crackpots, and I am not denying the importance of addressing some environmental challenges.

However, the doomsayers often get it wrong.

By the 1980s the ice age predictions had been replaced with stories that the North Pole was melting.

Former US vice-president and ‘doom merchant’ Al Gore. Picture: Joseph EID / AFP

Entire nations would be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming was not reversed by 2000, we reported.

When the year 2000 did arrive, there was no water lapping at the door. We didn’t have time to ponder why. We were too busy celebrating the Broncos’ NRL premiership win.

Queenslanders were bursting with pride as the masterful Darren Lockyer from Roma stepped up to receive the Clive Churchill Medal.

(Fatty Vautin in the commentary box with Rabs could hardly contain himself.)

Six years later, merchant of doom Al Gore arrived to tell us the planet had reached the point of no return and that the earth would be ice free by 2014.

Then Greta Thunberg arrived as the climate change poster girl in August 2018, when she stood outside the Swedish Parliament with a sign that read “Skolstrejk för klimatet”, or “school strike for climate”.

In a tweet the same year she said: “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.”

Five years later, she quietly deleted the post.

Greta can spot a trend. She has moved on. Now she wears a keffiyeh in solidarity with Palestine and its terrorist overlords.

Grea Thunberg joins the crew of a ship heading to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid. Picture: Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images

Jordan Peterson says the apocalyptic language surrounding the climate debate has done a disservice to humanity.

The leading psychologist went further, saying Net Zero alarmism was itself a mental illness.

“Climate hysteria, and policies to ‘cure’ it, are the work of a cabal of ill-informed narcissistic worshippers of fear and force,” he wrote in The Telegraph in Britain.

“I have come to conclude, after much detailed consideration (informed by my professional training and experience as researcher and clinician), that the climate doomsayers are possessed by an ideology much more akin to a psychogenic epidemic than they are purveyors of any information remotely scientific.”

A London poll found 70 per cent of people aged 15-25 “experience a feeling of hopelessness”.

Peterson said activists were “acting out the dictates of a set of ideas that are not scientific, but much more something akin to an ideological or even religious movement”.

On Wednesday The Australian reported that the federal government’s spending on climate change and Net Zero policies had reached $9bn a year.

We already know the money spent on decarbonisation will have little effect. So continuing to do so is another form of madness.

IRRITANT OF THE WEEK
Sad-sack anti-Olympic activists who can’t see the woods for the trees.

Originally published as Des Houghton: Net Zero messages causing mental illness in teens