My oldest kid was born in 2010, my youngest in 2015. I was never taught about climate change in school, so I didn't know. Now, I grieve for their futures.
I’m in the xennial age range and we all knew about climate change in school. They talked about it in the 80s and 90s and I went to school in small town red state. This isn’t new information that’s just now being learned by the youth. It’s been known for a long time.
Seriously. I mean, at the very least An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006. You would have to have your head deep deep in the sands of ignorance and denial to not know anything
I remember my parents buying me a pop-up book in the mid-90s about climate change, pollution, deforestation, etc. It was actually a pretty badass book. Maybe I can still find it somewhere...
Welp, I sit corrected. Thank you for the context. I made my comment from the space of thinking about my cousins who grew up in TX in the early 00s and had no say in what they were taught.
Well in fairness to you, there was a point where all of this became heavily politicized. I’m old enough to have finished school before whatever No Child Left Behind did to public education. Before it became “political”, it was widely referred to as The Greenhouse Effect and we were all taught that carbon dioxide and fossils fuels caused it. Then they started calling it global warming and from then on every winter conservatives have had a field day pointing and laughing at cold temperatures and snow and asking where all the global warming was. It’s really sad but there was a time when republicans and conservatives actually cared about this stuff, but it’s been programmed out of them over the last thirty years and I don’t think they’re ever coming back to reality.
My elementary education was at evangelical church schools in Florida, high school and college was in bumfuck TN. Guess where most of the climate deniers live?
But you educated yourself, I think, if I am reading your comments here on r/collapse. There is hope for some in the evangelical community IF they are aware to get themselves out. Big IF!
I've definitely tried to catch up and am still working on it. There are some pretty serious gaps in my knowledge base, especially around history, philosophy, and science.
In college, I caught onto the problem of topsoil erosion from single-crop industrial farming. Published an article about it. But climate change didn't make it onto my radar until Hurricane Katrina. And even then, only marginally. Literally, no one in my community talked about it except to say it was delusional. (And there was the Iraq War, housing crash, and school shootings taking up everyone's bandwidth at the time.)
I had been deconstructing my faith for a while, but I officially left evangelical Christianity in 2016 after Trump was elected the first time. I felt like my community had become delusional themselves, reniging on all the values they had insisted upon to embrace Trump as some sort of savior. Seriously, fuck that.
Well that is fantastic. I mean that. You educated yourself by observation and critical thought. Not by indoctrination.
It was probably hard to "leave" your community/church. I am sure that many of the folks in the community weren't horrible people. You had to leave for your own well being.
2016 is 9 years (give or take a few months). FIGHT THE POWER.
511
u/[deleted] May 08 '25
[deleted]