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British children have been so propagandized about the supposedly imminent climate apocalypse that nearly a fifth of them are losing sleep and having nightmares about it, according to a survey conducted by the BBC’s Newsround, a television news program for children.
The survey of 2,000 eight- to 16-year-olds found that close to three-fourths (73 percent) of Her Majesty’s young subjects are worried about the current state of the Earth, with 22 percent of them saying they are very worried.
They aren’t solely concerned about the planet’s current condition, either. “When asked about their futures, almost three in five (58%) children said they’re worried about the impact that climate change will have on their lives,” wrote Newsround.
Indeed, nearly one in five kids is so anxious about the planet’s future that it’s affecting his psychological and emotional well-being. Nineteen percent of those surveyed said they’d had a bad dream about climate change, while 17 percent said their concerns have affected their sleeping and eating habits.
None of this should come as a shock to regular readers of The New American, which has been documenting this phenomenon — and its pernicious causes — for years. In 2012, we reported that the United Nations, the locus of much of the global-warming hysteria, was working to turn the world’s children into “climate change agents.” More recently, we informed readers of a Canadian school presentation that implied that the planet has only eight years left, which resulted in panic among the small children who were subjected to it, some of whom began wailing, “I don’t wanna die!” Then there was the song taught to German schoolchildren that called their grandmothers “environmental pig[s]” for eating meat and driving gasoline-powered cars. And there is Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who angrily lectures us all on how we “have stolen [her] dreams and [her] childhood” by failing to adopt international socialism rapidly enough to avert impending doom.
Is it any wonder, then, that children are so terrified of what the future holds that they can’t eat or sleep?
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Many of these kids believe, as children often do, that they have the solution to this alleged problem and that adults ought to do as they say. Among those surveyed by Newsround, 59 percent “don’t think their voices are being heard on climate change,” 64 percent “don’t believe people in power are listening to them enough when they do talk about it,” and 41 percent “don’t trust adults to tackle the challenges that climate change presents.”
“Young people are clearly worried about climate change and their futures as this survey reveals,” child psychologist Emma Citron told Newsround. “Public figures like David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg have helped young people to voice their worries and we have to make sure that we as adults listen to them and empower them by giving talks at school and in their communities to help them become involved in positive change.”
Citron isn’t alone is voicing such sentiments. Last September, climate psychologist (yes, there is such a thing) Caroline Hickman of the University of Bath issued a press release warning about rising “eco-anxiety” among the young.
“In my experience children bear the emotional burden of climate change much more courageously than adults, but we owe it to them to share it,” she said. “We all need to do more to listen to young people when they talk about climate change. Through their experiences we’ll all learn more about how we should take responsibility for the mess, apologize and start to act.”
The notion that children can tell adults how to solve the “climate crisis” is absurd on its face. After all, because of their relative lack of knowledge, experience, and maturity, kids aren’t generally accepted as experts in other matters of public policy. In fact, should a minor take a public stand against a politically favored cause — abortion, for example — he will be either ignored or smeared.
Kids aren’t experts when it comes to the environment, either, but they are useful pawns in the game of global governance. Adults’ willingness to inflict psychological and emotional damage on children to achieve their ends just proves that all their rhetoric about saving the planet for future generations is hot air.
Image: AndreyPopov via iStock / Getty Images Plus
Michael Tennant is a freelance writer and regular contributor to The New American.
