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A number of recent polls have suggested that younger generations – including teenagers – are showing some signs of climate fatigue.
New data collected across 33 countries by Ipsos and published on Earth Day found evidence of what they describe as rising apathy and fatalism among the young (especially men):
Millennial and Generation Z men feel more apathetic and fatalistic about climate change compared with older generations and with women. Three in ten say it’s already “too late” to tackle climate change. Similar proportions of young males agree there’s no point changing their own behaviour to tackle climate
change because it won’t make any difference anyway (Gen Z men, 32%; Millennial men 31%) .
Ipsos report considerable variation across different countries – a full 67% of Indian respondents felt it was already too late to do anything about climate change, whereas most in most other countries the level of agreement with this sentiment was between 20-30%.
But the age-based differences are clear across the large, international sample as a whole, and in the UK
And they underscore the importance of communication and engagement strategies that (whilst not shying away from the stark realities of climate change) do not stoke a sense of fatalism and erode any sense of agency among the public.
Using an AI-supported analysis of climate change content on Youtube (going back to 2018), a report from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate makes a distinction between ‘old denial’ narratives (e.g. that global temperatures aren’t increasing), and ‘new denial’ narratives (e.g. that rising global temperatures can in fact be beneficial). Whilst ‘old denial’ narratives are now less common, ‘new denial’ narratives have increased and now constitute 70% of climate denial content on Youtube in 2023.
Strikingly, in a nationally representative survey of young people in the UK, 31% of respondents aged 13-17 agreed that ‘Climate change and its effects are being purposefully over-exaggerated’, rising to 37% among teenagers who were heavy users of social media.
This stands in contrast with Climate Barometer tracker data, where the claim that climate change is exaggerated was unpopular among young people aged 18-24 (a slightly older age group), perhaps indicating a pivot between earlier and later teenage years on susceptibility to this form of ‘new denial’ narrative. Alternatively, it may be a cohort effect that hasn’t been obvious because the majority of polling focuses on those aged 18 and over.
Content which is critical of clean energy solutions, seeking to discredit them or draw attention to the financial costs of green policies, was included in the ‘new denial’ category. An analysis of newspaper editorials in 2023 by Carbon Brief found a record number of UK newspaper editorials opposing climate action (almost exclusively from right-leaning titles) utilising very similar arguments.
