There’s no question that the rate of climate anxiety is growing—how could it not be, on a world where fires and floods are increasingly commonplace? And once your house has flooded—well, the next rainstorm, or even the next forecast, is going to bring back too many memories.

But I’ve found that a fair number of people, especially younger ones, are feeling really desperate anxiety even before they’ve had a traumatic experience, to the point where, for instance, they don’t want to have children of their own. My guess is that this has as much to do with the sense that they’ve been abandoned by the leading institutions—political and economic—of our societies, who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the scale of this emergency or break old practices.

I’ve been thinking all week at my anger at America’s big banks, the companies that represent the capital in capitalism—as I explained last week, they’ve now backed away even from their very scant climate commitments, fearful it might cost them a bit at the margins. And this week the Biden administration let it be known it was going to relax the timetable for getting rid of internal combustion engines, because of combined pressure from the auto companies and the auto workers union.

I remember debating a wind power opponent at Dartmouth years ago; when he was done making his case that no one should have to look at these “monstrosities,” the first question from a student was: “Could you please explain how you managed to get your head so far up your butt?”

I have no more sympathy for the car companies than the banks—they’ve opposed every regulation anyone has ever proposed, at least as far back as seat belts. And I have lots of sympathy for the UAW—they deserved and needed a new contract, which is why many of us tried to play at least a tiny part in helping their successful fall strike. They fret that moving too fast could cost jobs, which is a real worry. But moving too slow has a huge cost too, on a planet that has just come through its hottest year in the last 125,000: Passenger vehicles contribute almost a third of America’s carbon emissions. In a world that understood the climate crisis as an emergency, UAW president Shawn Fain, and the car company CEOs, and the Biden administration would be out on the stump together, doing everything they could to get people to buy EVs.

No need to single out the UAW, especially since they’re doing their best to undercut the Trump campaign (he’d love to make electric cars, which he insists grind to a halt after 15 minutes of driving, a centerpiece of his campaign). After all, we could say the same thing about all those universities that have fought fossil fuel divestment because it’s easier just to keep investing as you have in the past, or those insurance companies that continue to........

© Common Dreams