Students take part in a “youth strike to act on climate change” demonstration in Nice, France, March 15, 2019. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters)

Count on the New York Times’ opinion pages to promote American decline and ongoing victimhood. In Sunday’s example, a global warming hysteric named Carey Buckley wrings her hands out of a deep sense of “climate crisis grief.”

She has it really bad! She “feels complicit by merely existing.” When Buckley sees a new baby, she doesn’t light up with joy but “flashes to the approximately 15 tons of carbon emissions the average American emits each year.” She hates humanity “for being the species taking all the others down.”

Gosh. One would think that Buckley would become a climate monastic. But no. It’s mostly tepid symbolism. From, “Apocalypse Got You Down?”

As much as I want to chain myself to an old-growth tree, my job at The Times precludes me from going all in as an activist. So I donate to environmental and humane causes, eat vegan, compost, take public transport, carry around bamboo utensils, post alarming articles on Facebook, buy second hand and stock up on offsets — all decisions I have the luxury to make. And yet none of it has been balm.

Oh, and, she flew to Alaska to go kayaking:

Finally this fall, after a kayaking trip to Alaska prompted by a desire to see glaciers while they still exist — and being greeted by wildfires — I resolved to seek answers.

These people have no sense of irony. Global warming hysteric guru Greta Thunberg is currently cruising back to Europe on a modern catamaran made out of petroleum products and powered by diesel engines.

Buckley decides her only hope is to learn how to live with herself and the rest of us. She goes into deep research and reaches a life-changing conclusion:

Embrace the pain, but don’t stop there…The key is to channel it, through everyday actions or joining wider movements, and also to figure out a way to face it without being controlled by it, because operating out of fear, anger and blame burns us out. That is where the spiritual component comes in — to find a way to move to a place not of tacit acceptance, but of fierce, roaring compassion.

Not just compassion, but “fierce compassion.” Have you noticed that people of this ilk really like the word, “fierce?”

Buckley attends a seminar on how to cope where the facilitator advises being grateful for what each participant has now:

“I’m grateful about being alive in this time because,” I said haltingly to my partner, a man who worked in corporate disaster preparedness, “people are more aware than ever about what we have wrought? Because this is the logical conclusion to what the industrial revolution set in motion?” “Wow,” the disaster preparedness guy replied.

Yeah, I know what he means.


I’m sorry, I can’t take any of this seriously. Climate prophets of doom like Buckley, Thunberg — who is having an excellent adventure any teenager would envy — and the multi-housed Al Gore sure don’t give me any sense that we really face apocalypse. This is not how people act who actually believe collapse is nigh.


It’s kind of sad. The more I see of the “climate crisis” movement, the more it seems to be a home for people desperately searching for meaning who feel very guilty because they have it so good.

Whatever gets you through the night, I guess. But if we ever let the Buckley types take over and cause real decline, we will all experience true climate change grief.