You'll Never Guess Who Wants You to Be Anxious About Climate Change | Opinion

We are in the midst of an ongoing mental health crisis throughout the United States. In the wake of the wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada and enveloping an enormous section of the country in frightening haze and smog for days, a critical aspect of this crisis has been brought to the forefront: eco-anxiety.

Concern about the environment, and especially the climate crisis, is a major source of mental health struggles for many. Survivors of record-setting hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts often experience long-term trauma, and more broadly, over 60 percent of Americans have said they have felt concerned or anxious about the ever-intensifying threat of climate change. In the U.S. Northeast, this feeling was amplified by the wildfire smoke, which sent people to the hospital with respiratory problems, closed schools and businesses, and caused major disruption to travel and daily life.

We both support the recently-introduced bipartisan Community Mental Wellness & Resilience Act—a legislative effort to address the mental health impacts of weather—and climate-related disasters in the communities that bear the brunt of them. But while bills like this are an important step in the right direction, they are only one part of the solution, for two reasons.

First, the baseline condition for difficult climate emotions is the reality of climate change and its inequitable impacts. If a cancer patient is suffering anxiety because of their condition, you don't just treat their psychological distress. You address their cancer too. In this case, that starts with quickly and directly eliminating fossil fuel combustion, the principal cause of the emissions that cause climate change. There is currently no government action directed at this goal. Consequently, emissions are higher than ever.

Second, in a particularly cruel twist of the knife, the healthy and realistic response of eco-anxiety has been intensified and made into an occasion for stigma and shame by a piece of cartoon-villain misdirection from those with the lion's share of the blame for climate change: the fossil fuel industry.

We have bought into the fossil fuel PR trick of the individual carbon footprint, brought to us by BP flacks in 2004. Far from taking any responsibility for the enormous damage they've caused, Big Oil has convinced us that our individual consumption causes climate change, rather than their own exploitation of fossil fuels. With astonishing success, the industry has succeeded in channeling our escalating distress and our yearning for solutions into a narrative that blames and thereby silences us.

But even as intensifying catastrophes lead more and more people to see that the problem goes well beyond what we do, or don't, buy in aisle five of the supermarket, we live with a stomach-churning sense of complicity and cognitive dissonance. Feeling both that it is our fault and that our actions are too miniscule to matter, most of us stay silent on climate.

Because of this silence, we feel outnumbered and alone. Even privately, most of us don't discuss climate with family or friends. As a 2022 study demonstrates, Americans occupy a dangerous "false social reality," consistently and dramatically underestimating support for meaningful climate action and assuming their neighbors, friends, and colleagues don't care.

But we do care. Thanks to longitudinal research, we know there's an astounding level of public support for bold, transformational climate action across the U.S. As of last year, 66 percent of Americans support the policies represented in the Green New Deal, accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy with a focus on justice. Sixty-nine percent favor federal financial support for the Black, brown, and working-class white communities that have been treated as sacrifice zones for fossil fuel exploitation.

We should of course urge our representatives to get behind bills that support the mental wellness of people impacted by environmental disasters. Such disasters often compound injustices that communities have already experienced through environmental racism and inequity. These harms must be addressed. But to create lasting change, we need to reject the framing of the individual carbon footprint. Climate change is a social problem that can only be addressed collectively and systemically, by ending the fossil fuel economy at its root. This starts with what most of us want: a fast, sweeping transition away from burning fossil fuels, which intensifies social inequalities, wrecks human health, and directly causes the ecological crisis from which we also suffer emotionally.

And second, we must voice our distress and break our silence. As both of us have seen in our areas of climate work (at the Climate Museum and in clinical psychotherapy), we all feel relieved and readier to act when we realize we are not alone and not to blame. And when we feel more empowered, we speak up and demand change. Imagine what could happen if the climate silence were broken and the support for transformational action that is felt privately by a U.S. supermajority were expressed publicly across our culture in day-to-day life and in the civic sphere. Would the Biden administration have approved the Willow Pipeline? Would Joe Manchin be pertinent? The entire range of what's politically imaginable would shift dramatically in a positive—in fact, necessary—direction.

Beyond that, sustained and at the right scale, breaking the climate silence will set in motion a cultural shift that supports the policy changes we need and deserve—those that will stabilize the climate, address the injustices embedded in the climate crisis, and alleviate eco-anxiety at its source.

Miranda Massie is the director of the Climate Museum and a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications. Rebecca Weston is the co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, which is one of more than 130 organizations formally supporting the adoption of the Community Mental Wellness & Resilience Act.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.