Doom Sells

How I spent six years trapped in the cult of climate alarmism

Tree ridge in flames during the 2018 Woolsey Fire, California, US.

It happened out of nowhere.

One day, I woke up, clocked into my job, and thought, “I don’t hear a lot about climate change anymore.” By that point there was only the distant childhood memory of a trailer for An Inconvenient Truth showing a floating, context-less image of a starving polar bear in the Arctic. I wondered about it all day, and when my shift ended, I punched the words into Google. This decision—my decision to just look something up—would shape the contours of my life for the next six years. Sometimes I wonder, if it hadn’t been climate change, would it have been something else? Or, if I hadn’t proactively looked for it, would doom-laden headlines have found me eventually?

I believed every word of every news story. And then, at some point, even the most serious reports didn’t seem to take climate change seriously enough. Eventually, I joined an online community of climate alarmists I met through the notorious subreddit /r/collapse. Every day, I hungrily sought information that would confirm my belief that the world as it had been promised to me no longer existed.

It’s hard to convey how overpowering that initial dive into the climate change media ecosystem felt. Some of the first articles I read announced that scientists were poised to “issue their starkest warning yet about the mounting dangers.” The more I read, the worse it got. Thousands-year-old methane stores were being released into the atmosphere, which would cause “catastrophic runaway warming.” It was the first time I understood that life was fragile, and not just my life, but all human life. It was fragile, and nobody cared that it was fragile. I didn’t know how to react to this information, so I read more doom headlines.

Seeing life’s transience was paralayzing. Once aware of it, I couldn’t justify living my short life on its own terms. I remember thinking of a friend, a 27-year-old Wiccan priestess: “She has maybe 10 years of happy adulthood left, and she’s wasting it on a fake religion?” I didn’t have any better answers, though. No transcendent meaning to guide me, not even any practical advice to offer. Everything melted away into an all-encompassing obsession with the Great Ending.

I think it would be easy to hear this story and say it was indicative of some mental illness: generously, an emergent anxiety disorder that went undetected until early adulthood. That may be true in my case. However, I am hardly alone. A survey of 20,000 people from 27 countries showed that a fifth of people under 35 believed it is “too late to fix climate change.” Speaking to ABC 7 News in the Bay Area in 2021, Oakland psychologist Noah Oderberg said that he was “seeing more and more people bringing up the subject of global warming in therapy, citing feelings of sadness and despair […] 50% said they were planning to have fewer children, and one of the reasons stated was their fear around climate change.” (Oderberg’s California residency isn’t lost on me, but still, those numbers are too significant to write off completely.)

While not everyone is like me—the poster child of someone who probably does have a genuine need for a Xanax prescription—climate alarmism and the doom accompanying it is nonetheless ubiquitous. It paints a veneer of fatalism across everyday life, even if not everyone is a wholesale believer or a card-carrying fatalist. When discussing my concerns about being prescribed steroids to treat a persistent seasonal allergy, a friend quipped, “We’ll all be dead soon because of the climate anyway; just take the allergy meds and enjoy your life.” It’s the kind of joke that only works because it relates a piece of commonplace wisdom. You could append that sentiment to almost any statement these days—the world will end because of climate change, anyway—with only the delivery to indicate whether it was meant in jest or as a somber statement of planetary climate justice. 

A new breed of influencer has emerged, the self-proclaimed climate expert, whose social cache is based on validating the horrifying yet intoxicating suspicion that it’ll all be over soon. These people dispense their doom porn under the auspices of being “experts,” which means, as we all know, that they have “the science” as well as the misinformation police on their side. They are professors, but professors of volcanology or computer science. Maybe they’re famous scientists—household names. Or they’re entrepreneurs, esteemed authors, or Nobel Prize winners. Whoever they are, they seem trustworthy, and the media validates that by quoting them with reckless abandon even when they’re weaponizing information or just flat-out wrong. Beneath the veneer of being sober experts, these doomsayers sow distrust in the very institutions that carry their message, radicalizing readers to think the mainstream media isn’t extreme enough, and however bad things appear in the news, the reality is worse.

Unlike opportunists that crop up on the Right, who also spread manipulative and hard-to-dispute misinformation, there are very few attempts to police these figures on the Left. No one to interrogate the basis of these people’s expertise. Author Roy Scranton is free to write and publish whatever he likes, but it would be nice if someone asked, “What gives him the authority to build a career around climate doom as an associate professor of English and fiction writer?” I seem to remember people asking what gave Joe Rogan the authority to question the official COVID-19 narrative to an audience of millions as a comedian-cum-podcaster.

The odd op-ed says, “Hey now, it’s not too late,” like this one from The New York Times, and there’s been a recent explosion of trend pieces about young people “standing up to climate doom,” like this series from the BBC. However, there is still no meaningful, directed pushback at the people spreading these narratives in the first place. Headlines like “Climate Endgame: Risk of Human Extinction ‘Dangerously Underexplored’” remain commonplace—if you think I’m exaggerating, just type climate into Google News. So much for the preoccupation with social media manipulation, right? When it’s climate doom, “it takes all types.”

What remains most disturbing to me is that alarmism doesn’t galvanize change.

Fatalism forecloses upon meaningful conversations about organizing to promote sustainable agriculture or nuclear energy, replacing substantive politics with a theater of fear. Merely repeating, “We should have done something in 1975,” isn’t the same as doing something in the present moment. And given that most of the worst predictions haven’t come to pass, climate skeptics now have more leverage to write the whole thing off as a conspiracy to build ugly, brutalist apartment complexes and instate draconian policy measures.

Why is this even a partisan issue? The Right should be conscious of the environment, including the climate: Belief in climate change doesn’t mean belief in climate alarmism. There is a possible world where solutions to very real, tangible environmental degradation aren’t a sinister marriage between suicidal degrowth strategies and the subjugation of ordinary people. 

A friend I admire once told me that the only way to do that is to focus on solutions instead of problems. People do show interest in those, she tells me. She may be right. , Maybe that’s all we—from idealistic homesteaders to the new wave of nuclear advocates—can do.