Add Inflation to Reasons to Worry About Climate Change
Young people care more about affording food and rent than fighting climate change, a new survey says. The two problems are closely connected.
Global warming and accelerating prices are increasingly, inextricably linked.
Photographer: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
A big frustration of writing about climate change is that it’s wildly difficult to get people to care about the subject unless they happen to be, say, unexpectedly choking on wildfire smoke hundreds of miles from the nearest wildfire or escaping a flooded basement after a random rainstorm turns biblical.
The sense of failing to convey to your stovetop mates that you are all boiling alive was hammered home this week by a new survey showing young people — humanity’s hope for the future, supposedly — care more about inflation than they do about climate change. This in the middle of what will probably be the hottest year in human history, wracked with deadly floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires.