Back in 2019, I caught an essay by a British journalist named Annie Lord entitled “I Tried to Be Completely Sustainable for a Week.” Her logic for this experiment was “If climate change responsibility is going to be foisted onto individuals rather than governments, I thought I should see how doable it is.”
I am always grateful when climate activists actually try living by the standards they demand the rest of us embrace, so I read her piece with interest.
She was, in a word, miserable.
“It’s lunchtime and I’m frying potatoes over a burning bin,” she begins. “My bones ache from walking everywhere, my hair is greasy enough to line a cake tin, and I smell like someone who spent the whole of Boomtown eating Pot Noodles in a sleeping bag by the campfire. I’m cold because the heating has been off for days and icy wind rattles through my house’s single-pane Victorian windows. I want warm car rides, true crime documentaries and beef burger juice rolling down my chin. I am so tired. … Forgoing electricity and heating in the middle of winter might sound extreme, but it seems a fairly logical step when you consider how f****d the planet is.”
Ms. Lord noted that since “governments refuse to do anything meaningful, the impetus remains on the individual.” For that week, she foraged, planted seeds, dumpster dived and used discarded newspapers for toilet paper. She also ate purely vegan (keeping in mind her experiment took place in winter, when local produce was limited) and purchased her food at what sounded like the British version of a food coop where everything was “organic and locally sourced, meaning as few chemicals and air miles as possible.”
Did I mention she was absolutely miserable?
Because her kitchen had a gas range (ooh, bad!), she opted to barbecue her veggies over an open fire in her tiny urban backyard, using wood waste for fuel and confining the flames to a metal waste basket.
Another bad! She learned “burning wood is actually less sustainable than burning gas; it releases more CO2 while producing less heat. So: don’t do that! Don’t try to make things better and make them markedly worse!”
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The essay went into all the usual pretzel-twists it takes for someone abruptly trying to embrace a zero-waste lifestyle. Rather than using tap water, she scoops up pond water and filters it. She shadows an experienced forager and gathers edible plants and wild mushrooms. The resulting meals are edible but hardly palatable, so she turns to dumpster diving to round out her diet.
With every adjustment, she agonized over the carbon footprint, the ecological impact, and the effects on the planet. On and on it went. These are the mind games climate-change activists play at every waking moment. No wonder they’re literally driving themselves insane. It’s no wonder fragile people are so terrified by the impact of their own existence that they’re falling into the abyss of mental illness.
In the end, this writer found herself desperately swiping her roommate’s breakfast sausages to get a shot of protein, then conceded defeat: “[U]ntil I have more time or money, the other sustainable practices are going to have to go in the metaphorical and literal dustbin – the place reserved for my microbead-laden exfoliator.”
After this experiment, Lord once again heaped the responsibility for climate change back on the corporations and presumably celebrated by taking a hot shower and turning the heat back on in her apartment.
This one-week experiment illustrated the bridge between climate-change hysteria and the growing rates of depression and despair. Younger people are literally being trained into mental illness by propaganda.
In a piece called “Climate Hysteria Is Traumatizing Our Kids,” columnist Stephen Moore laments the indoctrination taking place in America’s schools. “[S]caring the bejesus out of our kids to score political points is a reprehensible practice,” he writes. “Our school kids are being terrorized with misinformation. This, in turn, is leading to all sorts of maladies, including a rise in teen depression, suicide, lower productivity and drug addiction.”
He points out the new syndrome called “eco-anxiety” among people who take for granted the highest standard of living the planet has ever known. Even the lower-income people in America have cleaner water, more abundant food, better medical care, and superior sanitation than kings and queens of former centuries.
Yet all the activists want to do is complain about these standards … until, as Ms. Lord gallantly tried, they attempt to live without them. Then suddenly climate change is the fault of corporations. No one wants to sacrifice his or her own level of comfort to save the planet, especially those who have actually tried it and discovered it’s a misery.
But meanwhile children in first-world nations all over the planet are being told their very existence is dooming the planet, leading to a level of psychological trauma of epic proportions. In short, these climate-change activists are driving themselves – or worse, driving children – into anguish and hopelessness. “Many kids today are terrified their lives will never really come to fruition; that it’ll all be over by the time they’re old enough to enjoy it,” observes columnist Derek Hunter. “They’re being robbed of their childhoods in front of the whole world, being exploited as emotional blackmail to pressure their parents to accept the will of the left.”
As a side note, if religious parents trained their children to similar levels of terror, they would be prosecuted for child cruelty. Read that again: If conservatives or religious parents inflicted this kind of deliberate trauma on their children, the kids would be yanked by Child Protective Services for abuse. Yet it’s inflicted on school children daily.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this growing psychoses is just random but unfortunate chance. In fact, this despair is deliberately being cultivated – starting in kindergarten and going all the way through college, as well as saturating every news source with impending doom over a problem even the activists admit is too large to solve an at individual level.
But that won’t keep them from supporting government programs forcing people to sacrifice their standards of living. What they won’t admit is if every policy they advocate is implemented, people will be living in absolute poverty and misery. No one will have “warm car rides, true crime documentaries and beef burger juice rolling down my chin,” as Lord lamented.
As always, the issue isn’t the issue. The issue is control.
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