[edgyquant]

It isn’t just children, I’ve heard plenty of adults say they believe the world will be basically destroyed in 30 years and have heard countless others say they aren’t having children because climate change will be so bad they don’t want to subject them to the hellish conditions expected.

[remarkEon]

I've met people like that as well, but what's interesting about them is that what they say and do is more akin to cult-like behavior than a sincerely considered belief. If they actually believed that the world was going to end in 30 years (or whatever it is this week) they'd quit their tech job and learn how to hunt, do subsistence farming, and go off the grid. None of them - in my experience - do any of this, and merely get irrationally upset and worried about something they themselves have zero control over rather than prepare for said event they think is inevitable.

[floor2]

Hi, I'm a real person who probably is a rough approximate of the imaginary strawman you're talking about in this post.

I'm not going off to become a subsistence farmer today... because that has literally nothing to do with being concerned about increasingly severe wildfires, more destructive hurricanes, more severe droughts or floods or loss of viability of farmland over the coming years and decades.

The climate crisis doesn't mean we're going to wake up tomorrow in some post-apocalyptic fantasy you're imagining where people will be hunting deer with bows & arrows. It means a lot of different bad things will continuously happen- the border & immigration crisis will get worse as Central American farms struggle under worse weather, wildfires will mean more evacuations and worse air quality, 'natural disasters' of hurricanes or blizzards or flash floods that would happen once-per-century will happen once-per-decade.

The rational thing to do isn't to go LARP as a post-doomsday survivor in the woods, the rational thing to do is to vote for policies to reduce carbon emissions, invest in renewable energy and try to educate the scientifically illiterate about the dangers of inaction.

[HamburgerEmoji]

Do you ever write in order to learn, or to test your ideas? I do this sometimes. The idea is to assign yourself a project, e.g., to write a blog report demonstrating that hurricanes are becoming more destructive. I think you might find it surprising if you did that and relied on the rawest, most objectively true data you can find, rather than articles by the BBC.

[schoen]

There's a ton of space between "the world will be basically destroyed" and "conditions will be pretty bad for many people in the next few generations", but that space is kind of hard for many of us to imagine or talk about.

[t0bia_s]

Where are you from?

[edgyquant]

I’m from Southern Illinois, but I live in Seattle

[jokethrowaway]

not the parent, but I've heard similar justifications in London

[t0bia_s]

Ah yes. Sounds like Western "problem". Glorification of death in wealthy civilization is beginning of their end. Immigration proofs that.