OPINION: Stop scaring the kids

Canadians aged 35 and younger made up the largest voting bloc in the federal election. That’s alarming for someone like me who has been convinced for some time that the voting age should be raised to at least 25. (There are a lot of people who shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but that’s for another day.)

As it is, too many young people don’t have enough life experience and have been propagandized by a school system that indulges self-centredness. They need a period of re-education in the most obvious of life lessons: By paying their own way and having children of their own.

While this offers young people their greatest hope of growing up, many of them aren’t up for the challenge.

If you listen to the left-wing mainstream news media, you might actually think that it is the children who know best and that those of us who were dutifully changing their diapers 15 years ago need to listen to them. News reports gushed over a 16-year-old Swedish girl who lectured the United Nations on climate change. “We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth — how dare you!” she sniped angrily.

To quote York University psychology professor Jordan Peterson: “You don’t know anything. Five years ago, you were 11.”

A fearful 18-year-old London, Ont., teenager recently launched a website in which she pledges to be childless until the government satisfies her demands on climate change. The website states: “I pledge not to have children until I am sure my government will ensure a safe future for them.”
So far, more than 5,200 young people have clicked the “Take the Pledge” button, which should be renamed “it’s all about me.”

In almost every survey that I have seen on people’s list of their top worries, climate change ranks dead last or close to it. Climate change, however, is the biggest concern among young people, many of whom are convinced that the world will end if we don’t take drastic measures now. Those drastic measures are a socialist’s dream: Charge a heavy carbon tax, restrict economic progress and we have a roadmap to wealth redistribution.

We have entered a new phase with climate change. It’s called hysteria. We can’t blame the children. Their parents and teachers are scaring them with horror stories that haven’t happened. We can also blame the teenage addiction to social media. Google, Facebook and YouTube are making extraordinary efforts to suppress right-leaning news of all kinds. Freedom of speech is under threat. Perhaps the most important legal action underway in the Western world today is the lawsuit against Google’s suppression of information.

Go online and see how hard it is to find stories that reject manmade global warming as a crisis even when newsworthy events occur. Lost amid the coverage of the Swedish teen activist at the U.N. Global Climate Summit were the 500 international scientists, engineers and other stakeholders with a very different message: “There is no climate emergency.”

Signed by professionals from 23 countries, the European Climate Declaration, spearheaded by the Amsterdam-based Climate Intelligence Foundation, criticized UN climate models, saying that it is “cruel as well as imprudent to advocate the squandering of trillions of dollars on the basis of results from such immature models.”

The group doesn’t deny warming but warns that “warming is far lower than predicted.”

Judging by their actions, I think most people believe that this is true. If we really faced impending doom, why does Canada’s carbon tax exempt the largest emitters? We talk tough about carbon and equate it with pollution but at the same time we know that we can’t live without it. Essential to plant photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is the basis of all life on earth, providing the very food we eat. The Green Party is the champion of saving the world from the “climate crisis,” but it didn’t come close to winning the election and no one ever thought it had a chance. Of all the Canadian-made solutions to manmade global warming, there isn’t a climate model in the world that suggests Canada can have a significant effect on world temperature. While Canada barely contributes to the world’s carbon dioxide, China is the biggest offender, but the climate alarmists are silent on that. And what’s up with all of these wealthy climate alarmists who own ocean-front properties and tell us that the sea level is going to rise three feet? Why aren’t they selling now before the water starts to rise and their properties become worthless?

It’s telling that rather than have a robust debate on climate change and manmade global warming, the skeptics are labelled “deniers” and shut out of debate as if they were lepers. But the debate is far from over and young people should know that.

Climate change is not an existential threat. But scaring children and teenagers into thinking otherwise is, as many people have said, child abuse.