The Weaponization of Youth Climate Anxiety

How the right is using young people's worries about their future to destroy the planet

In the name of “saving the children,” all sorts of wild politics happen, on both the left and the right. I’ll be the first to admit that my mama bear nature makes me a bit irrational when I think about school shootings, and I am guessing “save the children” zealotry is also on turbo-charge among the people who don’t like vaccines, or abortions, or cell phones in schools. Many of the political campaigns of our time—on all sides of the aisle— leverage paternalism about “protecting children” as a justification to prioritize the policy du jour.

This is where facts help counterbalance my threat-response impulses. For example, in terms of sheer probabilities, my kid is far, far, more likely to die in the car ride to school than in a school shooting. The fact that I am more viscerally worried about school shootings has to do with an area of research called “risk perception theory,” and less to do with the actual likelihood of a particular risk turning into a real threat. The classic example is that flying is scarier than driving, but driving is in fact much riskier than flying. What we think of as scary is not always the real monster in the room.

But our visceral response to wanting to protect children often overrides our ability to weigh the cold facts of probabilities and make “rational” decisions about how to parent, educate, and legislate. “Saving the children” pulls on our heartstrings, wallets, and voting habits because of the way culture defines children—they are symbolically overdetermined as “the hope for the future”, national identity, evolutionary strength, legacy, and more.

They’re also vulnerable (arguably, because we make them so by not giving them any power) and don’t have access to all the information, so we believe we have to make their decisions for them. Although we imbue them with heavy symbolism, both cultural and biological, we should be wary of when we weaponize our love of children for political ends. When protecting kids becomes equated with protecting national identity or national security, overriding other people’s rights, destroying the planet on which they live, and bombing other countries, we’re in that territory of weaponizing our affection for children against others— and ironically, against those children themselves.

I care about children, don’t get me wrong. I have two myself, and I am a college professor. I confess that I project a mythological significance onto young people. I, too, want to save the children. This is what motivates me to work on climate change and in the field of education. I am deeply disturbed that young people did not cause the destruction of the planet, yet they will inherit and experience the worst of its effects. This crosses a moral line for me.

So when the people who are benefitting the most from rampant fossil fuel extraction cut climate change research funding, I worry about “the children” who will inherit this worsened planet. But when these same people do so on the express grounds of “saving the children”, I can’t help but take the bait. Even if the right won’t listen to my grievances, I think it’s an opportunity for the left to think in new ways about how they use young people for their ends, how climate change has become an object of discourse beyond anything to do with the actual physics of global warming, and how to strategize around leveraging political emotions for policy change.

Why am I all fired up about this? On April 8, 2025, amidst a series of federal cuts to research funding for health, science, and climate (forms of expertise that, of note, seem really important for saving the children), the U.S. Department of Commerce wrote the following in a Press Release called Ending Cooperative Agreements' Funding to Princeton University:

This cooperative agreement promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as “climate anxiety,” which has increased significantly among America’s youth. Its focus on alarming climate scenarios fosters fear rather than rational, balanced discussion. Additionally, the use of federal funds to support these narratives, including educational initiatives aimed at K-12 students, is misaligned with the administration's priorities. NOAA will no longer fund these initiatives.

Withdrawing NOAA funding from climate research at Princeton may seem like a minor blip on the radar, given all the firehose of announcements since Trump second inauguration. But as we know by now, it was one of a tidal wave of funding cuts, which are ongoing, to eliminate research essential to the public good at universities across the country. This rejection of expertise in the name of “efficiency” or “state’s rights,” is aligned with other actions in that tidal wave. But this was the first time we saw young people’s “climate anxiety” cited as the reason for the cut.

What shall those of us who study the politics of youth climate emotions take from this?

Gaslighting youth and the earth

Youth vulnerability, and specifically the youth mental health crisis, is being weaponized by the right to justify defunding climate research, silencing climate scientists, and erasing climate data. This is the equivalent of saying that if you are a smoker, and you happen to get cancer, there’s no causation there. The problem is your doctor telling you that you have lung cancer, not that you smoked your whole life. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the Department of Commerce is shooting the messenger by defunding scientists.

It’s a classic move. Shooting the messengers—scientists, educators, and climate journalists, in this case— will only make climate anxiety worse among youth, because it signals to young people that there are no responsible adults in charge who care about the things young people themselves care about. Even if youth didn’t care about climate change as much as they do, defunding climate research will at a minimum make actual climate change itself worse, increasing climate anxiety further. This is like shooting your doctor for giving you a terminal diagnosis. The diagnosis doesn’t go away. You very well may need the treatment that the doctor can provide.

This is the epitome of this administration’s favorite rhetorical move of gaslighting. In the past, the right rejected climate anxiety as a form of weakness, calling youth climate activists “snowflakes.” So all of a sudden, the right not only believes that youth are worried about climate change, they care about their mental health? If the right cared about youth mental health, we’d see that priority in their budget lines and rhetoric elsewhere. This flip-flopping on whether youth climate anxiety is a weakness or a cause for concern reveals the right’s use of it as a political weapon, not genuine care for young people.

Similar to how the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is hypocritically using the language of “discrimination” against programs designed to reduce discrimination, and similar to the label “antisemitic” for protected speech about racial injustice, this kind of gaslighting turns the left’s accusations of the right back onto the left. Remember “I’m Putin’s puppet? No, you’re Putin’s puppet. Lock her up!”

It is imperative that we keep bursting this Orwellian bubble, where language is being turned on its head to obfuscate reality. DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs are not discriminating against straight white people. Protests, op-eds, and other forms of speech decrying violence against communities of color in the U.S. and across the globe are not “antisemitic.” Trump is clearly the one who is Putin’s puppet. And climate scientists are not the ones causing climate anxiety in youth.

So let’s focus in on this climate anxiety gaslighting move. The deployment of ‘climate anxiety’ in this context reveals a shift in climate change politics and discourse. It’s no longer just an emotion that needs managing, as the left has mostly treated it, or avoiding, as the right would have it.

The world is the problem, not youth

The fact that it showed up in this message from the Department of Commerce is a testament to how climate anxiety has become much more than an emotion; it is a political phenomenon beyond the confines of mental health, and we should be paying attention to how the right is using it, not the least because we care about the planet we are passing on to our children, or even children’s mental health in the first place.

The weaponization of youth climate anxiety against the planet and against youth deprives “climate anxiety” of its much of its original meaning and value— heretofore, naming the emotion of climate anxiety has helped people to identify a set of emotions they experience in response to news about what’s happening to the climate, and, importantly, to name emotions they have in response to actual experiences of climate change.

So what is “climate anxiety” meaning in this new time of monsters?

For one, the Department of Commerce’s use of the idea of climate anxiety reveals just how uncomfortable people are with children experiencing negative emotions. The culture of toxic positivity stigmatizes anxiety and depression in general, and once again, we see the pathologizing of mental health as a private, shameful affair. Denial, repression, and avoidance are the dominant approaches to mental health “issues” in the first place, and at best, these emotions are to be handled with a therapist on your own time and dime.

If youth mental health were actually a priority, we would see at a minimum, more subsidized, individualized mental health care. As it is, students in colleges often wait months to get support, and if you’re lucky to have mental health covered by insurance, good luck finding someone “in-network.”

But is a therapist even the right solution to address the problem of youth saying that they are afraid of their futures, that they don’t expect to have economic security, that they are traumatized by what their governments are doing to vulnerable people around the world, and that they don’t want to become parents because they don’t want to bring children into this frightening world? What they’re being told diverges from what their senses tell them. And it suggests that they’re the problem, not the world. It’s confusing, belittling, and abusive. It may sound bonkers to suggest, but perhaps a better response would be to assure them we’re doing our best to make the world a place they want to be, and that their futures are worth living for.

The world is the problem, not them.

Young people’s mental health crisis is not a reflection of their lack of grit; it is a reflection of the world they are coming of age in. If we really cared about their mental health, we’d at least try to take their claims seriously. This is how we can work to correct the harms of gaslighting.

We need to shift from “climate change” to “moral injury”

Another way we know that the concept of climate anxiety has lost its original meaning is that the Department of Commerce clearly didn’t even read the research they are ostensibly citing, a Lancet 2021 publication by some of my colleagues (here), which is the article that shined the spotlight on youth climate anxiety in the first place. The article’s conclusion is not that climate change causes youth distress. Rather, it is the lack of government action on climate change that causes the distress. In other words, the article identified the cause as “moral injury,” not “climate change.” This is a crucial distinction, given the weaponization of climate anxiety against climate research. Youth are angry at governments for not doing anything about climate change; in listening to the actual words of young people, the research specifically found that the cause of the anxiety was “institutional betrayal.”

It is astonishing to the point of being almost funny (if it weren’t so devastating) that the Department of Commerce would focus on climate anxiety while ignoring the institutional betrayal part, and then further institutionally betray young people by denying climate change entirely, by undoing back climate policies, and by defunding climate science. Given the weaponization of youth climate anxiety to worsen both climate change and youth mental health, it seems important to shift the tactic to be more about moral injury and institutional betrayal than climate change.

Climate change is a problem, yes, but it’s not an easy villain to hold accountable. Sadly, locating the problem in "climate" has made it possible to blame "nature" (which we can't hold accountable for loss and damages in courts) instead of human actors. That’s one of the reasons it has been so hard to get mobilized to address it. The focus in climate education, journalism, and other messaging should be much more on holding politicians, not climate, accountable. The villain is big oil and politicians cowing to big oil’s money. In order to effectively politicize climate anxiety in actual service of young people, we need to get big oil out of policy-making. An overly narrow focus on only “youth climate anxiety” as an idea runs the risk of distracting us from this culprit, and youth’s actual concern: institutional accountability.

Climate anxiety is feeding eco-fascism

A third thing that the Department of Commerce’s use of “climate anxiety” as a meme reveals is how the right is recycling old tropes of eco-fascism, whereby more morally palatable environmental arguments hide regressive ideas that have really nothing to do with the environment, and are designed entirely to make violence against unwanted communities more politically palatable.

Betsy Hartmann has called this kind of maneuver “the greening of hate”: if we package hate in environmentalist arguments, they are much more accepted by the mainstream. An example of this is Hitler’s concept of “blood and soil,” where Jews, Gypsies, and gay people were deemed not worthy of German resources. Or scientific racism that justified forced sterilization of immigrants on the grounds that they exploit American resources.

Big environmental emotions can motivate effective and just conservation policies, but they can also lead to mass shootings, as evidenced by the El Paso and Buffalo shootings of communities of color because of “climate migration,” the “Great Replacement Theory,” and other eco-fascist myths. For awhile, the left could pretend that these eco-fascist ideas were held by a minority in the far right, but they are becoming much more mainstream.

Just because the current Republican party refuses to name climate change or fund climate science, and denies climate change as a “hoax,” doesn’t mean that they aren’t motivated by big climate emotions. Two recent pieces detail the way that climate worries underpin the policies, behavior, and rhetoric of the right wing, even if “climate change” itself is rejected— Anna Branten’s piece on “The New Climate Feudalism” and Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s “The Rise of End-Times Fascism,” here.

The gist is that the far right and those in power are very aware of climate dangers. While some of them are embracing it as an excuse to profit from it and protect themselves (take, for example, Elon Musk’s desire to colonize Mars as an alternative to Earth), while others are seeing it as evidence of the rapture to come. Even as they disavow “climate change,” anxiety about the immigration and conflict that climate change will cause fuels their anti-immigrationism, pronatalism, and other reawakening fascist -isms. In times of uncertainty, anti-intellectualism, and the privatization of media, it is easy to harness big environmental emotions for harm, violence, and division.

We know that the far right is obsessed with what “children” mean in all of this because they are overdetermining children as the solution to all of the problems. Only in the context of a salient Great Replacement Theory can the “race suicide” pronatalism of Theodore Roosevelt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Margaret Sanger make such a comeback can J.D. Vance’s comment that “childless cat ladies” don’t have a stake in the nation’s future resonates. What’s new isn’t the hatred toward “others”; it is the “effective accelerationist” approach to bringing about the apocalypse faster, so the wealthy can have what’s left all to themselves.

As long as youth continue to get most of their information about climate change from social media (as opposed to schools and parents), and as long as we fail to educate youth on the relationship between media literacy and their mental health, the right will be able to make these spurious arguments about how “these narratives” aren’t “in alignment with” their goals.

So there is a warning here for climate advocates: we must take seriously the mediated ways young people absorb information about climate change, not so they might worry less (as the Department of Commerce purports to want), but because young people are agents in building their futures, and their orientation toward that task determines whether their rise to it or are seduced by fascist “solutions.”

It is certainly true that scientists, journalists, and educators who draw attention to climate change can cause anxiety. After all, haven’t we been waiting for people to feel more anxious— more anything— about climate change, so we can do something about it?

But those of us studying climate stories have seen that the anxiety sometimes undermines climate action, so it also weirdly rings true to me when I read in the press release that climate change “narratives” are not good for people’s wellbeing. I myself have written at length about that very point— the doom-and-gloom of educators and scientists can depress our audiences (including youth) and undermine climate action. The authors of the Department of Commerce press release have successfully exploited a defining tension of the climate movement around whether doom-and-gloom is good for climate action or not.

But here’s the nuance, and of course, any world dominated by 160-word character limits cannot be about nuance, so forgive me while I expand the expected attentional bandwidth for a moment: the fact that climate change is happening is separate from the stories we tell about it. Some stories we tell about it motivate people to do something about it. Some stories undermine people’s capacity to do something about it. We should pick the stories that motivate people. Doom-and-gloom has been called out for being demotivating for some people. And this is where the Department of Commerce has taken up the mantle of saving the children from those climate storytellers.

Given what I know about the problems with apocalyptic climate narratives, the authors of the press release are (dare I say it) correct on this one small point. The left is also rife with debate about whether we should focus on problematic narratives, as opposed to attacking climate change or the scientists themselves.

But again, allow me to get bogged down in some nuance. Because we can never directly experience or touch climate change (it happens over too long a period of time to detect it physically), we can only perceive its effects (such as rising sea levels, increased heat, or a hurricane). Therefore, we always already rely on narratives to tell us what these challenges are caused by. And here we go: whoever owns the narrative, owns the solutions.

In other words, when it comes to convincing people that their suffering is caused by climate change, narratives that connect the dots and translate the science are necessary. And sometimes they are complex. And it is really hard to explain how climate change connects to a thing people are experiencing, much less determine “attribution”— the metric that scientists use to determine how much of a given disaster was caused by climate change.

With all of this nuance and mushiness, connecting the dots between their experiences of reality and the phenomenon of climate change itself is the only way people can come to believe they are experiencing climate change: “Here I am experiencing an event, and because of what I know about climate science, I can assume this event is at least partially caused by climate change. Therefore, I am suffering from climate change, and therefore I can worry about climate change.” This kind of dot-connecting is storytelling’s bread and butter. And climate needs a lot of it, because we can’t experience it directly. Even if we did, a convincing story could make us deny it, anyway (remember when people dying of COVID didn’t believe they were dying of COVID?), so it’s just too easy to dismiss it as “just a story,” a myth.

But, here is where we get in our own pickle: while we rely on narrative to help us understand how climate change affects our lives, climate change waits for no narrative. That is, getting rid of all narratives about climate change won’t get rid of climate change, because we still live in a world dictated by the laws of physics and biology. No amount of narrative-craft can change that. We need to push back against the cynical relativism of the right that would throw all narratives out with the bathwater, while pretending only they purvey the unadorned truth.

Yes, we should be very careful about our narratives of climate change, not because they cause anxiety, but because we want people to be motivated to do something about it that doesn’t cause further harm.

I have personally received no small amount of trolling and pushback about my research on youth climate anxiety. People have stopped saying I’m crazy to care about these “snowflake” kids, who they think liberals like me have brainwashed to be overly sensitive and weak. Now, they say “yes, we care about young people so much, like you. But the solution is to stop telling them about climate change, which isn’t something to worry about.”

The right’s disingenuous justification to defund climate research on the grounds of youth climate anxiety reflects how little it respects youth, and how much it will just grab onto whatever the shiny object of discourse in the room is, and run with it, especially if they can “own the libs” while they’re at it, like they’re doing here. While claiming moral righteousness about children, the right leans hard into paternalism and fails to honor the actual claims of young people. This just reinforces the idea that youth are naive, voiceless, passive non-agents that we should protect from scary information.

We need to give young people their voice and treat them as agents in their own lives, we need to be responsible adults in the room creating a stable future for them (which includes protecting the planet) so they aren’t traumatized by the “adverse childhood experience” (ACE) of such an unstable world, and we need to shift the blame in the narratives from climate change to big oil so big oil can’t dodge responsibility (by blaming the messenger, much less “nature” itself) so easily.

Young people are a pawn, even casualties, in political battles that ultimately have nothing to do with their actual thoughts or interests, much less climate change. Make no mistake, they only adhere to one force: keeping money flowing from customers consuming fossil fuels into the pockets of these politicians’ biggest funders—big oil. If we’re not careful, climate change will become even more a justification for authoritarianism than it already has, Trojan-horsed in as “saving the children.”

Climate anxiety is a political object of discourse, not just a feeling

As a result of hearing this paradoxical response to climate advocates’ efforts to prevent youth distress, I have come to the conclusion that we can no longer treat climate anxiety as just an emotion, or it’s no longer what we think an emotion is—a feeling about information we take in about the world around us. To put it another way, climate anxiety has become less a feeling in response to climate change and more a political object of discourse that we can study to learn about all kinds of things, from sexuality and gender to democracy and citizenship. Climate anxiety has gone way beyond being just about climate change.

That climate anxiety could be leveraged by the right to knee-cap climate research is a testament to the mimetic nature of the emotion. It is now doing its own political and cultural work, and we need to get more critical about how youth emotions—and climate emotions—might be leveraged for destructive, xenophobic, and fascist political projects. Like how in the name of equality, we’re already going backward on actual equality. And how, in the name of antisemitism, antisemites are taking over our country. And how, in the name of concern about youth, we’re losing our ability to create a world where they might thrive.

Which grievance of the left’s will be co-opted next in service of hypocritical, ironic, and pathological destruction?