Climate Anxiety: The Luxury Panic of the Campus Elite, By Chris Knight (Florida)

Halloween is over, but the real horror show is just getting started on America's college campuses, where the monster under the bed isn't a ghost, it's a thermostat. Kamala Harris spilled the beans in a recent interview: her goddaughter, a junior at a top university, is paralysed by climate anxiety. She's not alone. Surveys show seventy percent of Gen Z students feel it, and one in five says it's severe enough to wreck their sleep, tank their grades, and send them running to therapy. All because the planet is supposedly on a countdown to collapse.

But here's the plot twist: this isn't a global epidemic. It's a first-world, white-liberal luxury disorder, a social contagion that vanishes the moment you leave the ivory tower and land in Lagos, Mumbai, or a Kenyan village. In the developing world, people aren't doom-scrolling NASA graphs. They're too busy surviving actual threats: malaria, drought, war, hunger. Climate change? It's item forty-seven on the worry list, right after "will the bus show up today?" Climate anxiety is the ultimate flex of privilege: worrying about a problem eighty years away when others can't plan for next week.

For thirty years, universities have been cathedral-building around climate doom. Professors preach apocalyptic sermons from lecture halls. Administrators mandate "sustainability" courses like medieval indulgences. Student groups stage die-ins and glue themselves to sidewalks. Therapists now offer "eco-counselling" (yes, that's a real degree). The message is relentless: You are personally responsible for the end of the world. No wonder white liberal students, raised on participation trophies and moral superiority, internalise this guilt like a second religion.

Anthony Sadar, a forty-year veteran of atmospheric modelings, drops a truth bomb in his Washington Times piece: climate models show a common warming bias and misrepresent fundamental feedback processes, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's July 2025 report. Translation: the sky-is-falling predictions are overcooked. Hurricane frequency has been flat or declining since 1850. Wildfire acreage is down ninety percent in the U.S. since the 1930s. Polar bear populations are up four hundred percent since the 1960s. Sea level rise has been a steady two to three millimetres a year for a century, no acceleration. Even Bill Gates, the guy who wants to dim the sun with chalk dust, now says it won't be the end of civilisation. But try telling that to a twenty-year-old sobbing over a melted glacier TikTok.

The pattern is crystal clear. Climate anxiety scales with wealth, whiteness, and Wi-Fi access. Seventy percent of U.S. college students report it, but fewer than five percent of Nigerian farmers do. Indian urban youth clock in at about fifteen percent, Scandinavian teens at sixty. Sub-Saharan mothers? Near zero. They're too busy walking ten miles for water and laughing at the idea of "climate therapy."

Universities now offer "Climate Grief Circles" (group therapy for planetary mourning), "Eco-Anxiety Workshops" (mindfulness for melting ice caps), and "Sustainability Sabbaticals" (paid leave to process the apocalypse). One Ivy League school even has a "Climate Emotions Hotline," because nothing says "I'm saving the world" like crying to a stranger at 2 a.m. about coral bleaching.

The panic isn't about science; it's about social status. Climate anxiety is the new secular sacrament: I suffer, therefore I am virtuous. It's why you'll never hear a working-class Black student at a community college talk about "intergenerational climate trauma." They're too busy paying rent. Say this out loud on campus, though, and you're cancelled faster than a coal plant.

The antidote is simple. Teach actual science, not activist fan fiction. Show students the DOE report. Graph the ninety-seven percent decline in climate-related deaths since 1920. Let them meet farmers in Bangladesh adapting with floating gardens. Redirect the energy: plant urban trees, build micro-grids in Puerto Rico, fund clean cookstoves in Ethiopia. Normalise uncertainty, the atmosphere is complex, models are tools, not oracles. As Sadar says, no one knows the end of the climate story.

Climate anxiety isn't a symptom of a dying planet. It's a symptom of a culture so safe, so rich, so detached from survival that it has to invent existential threats to feel alive. In the third world, they don't have time for eco-therapy. They're too busy adapting, innovating, and thriving, without the luxury of despair.

So, to the anxious undergrad clutching her reusable straw: go outside. Touch grass. The planet's been through worse, and it's still here.