By Ned Remington
We live in tumultuous times. In the last decade, our international rules-based order has been pushed to the brink of collapse. Authoritarianism is on the rise across every continent. Threats to the Western world’s liberal democratic values, which once gave birth to the United Nations and the International Declaration of Human Rights, are now undermined by emboldened dictatorships and a corruption of domestic politics. We’ve seen far-right governments elected across Europe, amid war in Eastern Europe. Ethnonationalism fuelling conflict across the Middle East as a new Cold-War sets in, and November could see the return of Donald Trump, now regularly repeating fascist and openly racist rhetoric, to the US Presidency- a deluded extremist at the head of the world’s most powerful government.
So basically, there’s a lot going on at the moment. Too much, in fact, for anyone to take in at once without feeling overwhelmed and hopeless about the state of the world- pessimism about the future is at record highs among Gen Z across the Western nations- and the allegation that we’re ignorant to our greatest crises seems absurd. Every time you turn on the news, it sounds like the world is going to end. Alarmism sells, and media giants feed off our shock and despair- nothing makes you more likely to buy a paper, or visit a news website, or click a link off social media, than fear.
But in reality, a lot of us aren’t nearly scared enough- at least, not about the right things. Don’t get me wrong, there are many atrocities happening across the world that deserve more attention: Genocides in Palestine, Xingjiang, Darfur, wars in Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine, political suppression from Hong Kong to Hungary to Haiti. Climate change is far from the only crisis that evades the glare of proper media scrutiny. But the people who will decide the fate of Western climate policies aren’t most afraid of any of these issues, but are instead distracted by a plethora of moral panics and non-issues. From drag shows and pronouns to bizarre anti-migrant conspiracies, various new front lines in our so-called ‘culture war’ are opening up, eating up the hours on our 24/7 news channels and pushing themselves to the top of news websites and our social media ‘for you’ pages.
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Of course, many young people are able to engage in culture war debates whilst also fighting for climate action, and the rights of those caught up in current global conflicts. But it only takes a glance at the Trump campaign’s social media in the US, or that of the UK’s relatively new Reform Party which came third in the recent UK General Election, to see that distracting voters with implied bigotry, moral debates and indefinable cultural crises is highly effective. Reform won 15% of the vote in the UK, whilst far-right parties with similar messages have seen even greater success in France, Italy and Germany. The Trump campaign has effectively used the same rhetoric to even greater lengths in ‘swing states’, and are now positioned a stones throw from the White House. The often oxymoronic combination of culture wars with the traditional anti-immigrant racism and bigotry has formed a toxic compound which is lethal to western democracy.
Perhaps the most damaging part of this rise in aggressive far-right populism, however, has been the damage it has done to the environmental cause. From the Trump campaign questioning the basics of climate science to Reform UK promising to ditch the UK’s net zero targets if ever elected, we’re seeing major forces in Western politics propose a complete reversal of climate action when its never been more necessary. Meanwhile, niche political drama and immigration dominate news websites, whilst debates around our individual gender, racial or religious identities- highly important discussions but conducted in a counterproductive and self-perpetuating manner- make up entire Twitter feeds. With no space left for proper scientific reporting on the scale of our climate emergency, the anti-intellectual criticisms of the basics of global warming seem rational and even convincing to ordinary members of the electorate. Cue the inevitable cynicism of progressive political parties desperate to push back against the far-right rise, as Kamala Harris pledges to continue fracking to appeal to swing voters in the Mid-West, and UK Labour Party Prime Minister Starmer pledges to ignore ‘finger-wagging’ climate activists.
And so, we end up like this. One billion children at extreme risk of natural disasters as a result of climate change. One to three billion people are likely to be forced to migrate by 2070 due to climate change making their homes unliveable. We’ve been warned by the UN Secretary General, quoting unquestionable climate science, that we are ‘firmly on track for an unliveable world.’ And yet in a Pew Research survey of the importance of 10 issues to US voters in this election, climate change came last.
Despite the rise of authoritarianism across the world, and the huge impact of China in particular on global emissions, the policies of democracies will still determine the fate of humanity and our planet. Democratic governments can and will only take the drastic action necessary to tackle our existential climate emergency if their countries’ populations acknowledge the scale of the crisis- which is where our news organisations are failing us. Our mainstream media companies are complicit in current climate catastrophes, and the ones that will follow. It’s time to change the way we get our news in the western world, and it’s time for honest reporting on the environmental situation. If you’d like to play a small part in this, you’re welcome to get involved with the YouthClimateJournals project and make a difference. You’ve read the story, it’s time to change the narrative.
Ned Remington is the founder of YouthClimateJournals and a Greenpeace activist and organiser. They are 18 years old and from the South West of England.
New Climate Journal 
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