Students head back to classrooms this month. Many arrive already convinced their future is hopeless.
In a Lancet Planetary Health study of 10,000 young people across ten countries, 75% said the future is frightening and 56% said they believe humanity is doomed. A 2025 PNAS study found one in five Americans aged 16 to 24 is afraid to have children because of the climate. That gloom has deepened over time. In Yale’s long-running survey, the share of Americans 18 to 34 who say global warming is already harming this country rose from 40% in 2012 to 64% in 2022.
What’s causing such a dramatic shift? It could be what’s missing in the classroom. Teenagers name teachers as their leading source on climate and energy. Seventy-one percent say they learned “a lot” or “some” from a teacher, ahead of parents at 67% and social media at 63%. Yet the median high school science teacher spends one or two hours a year on the subject, and three-quarters of teachers say they have never been trained to teach it.
The teaching gap shows. Nearly three-quarters of teens believe ocean plastic is a major contributor to climate change. (It’s not.) Energy illiteracy is even worse: fewer than a third of high schoolers can name the three sources that generate most American electricity. Energy literacy scores among high school seniors fell between 2017 and 2022.
What fills the gap is the phone. Researchers at the University at Buffalo, writing last fall in Climatic Change, found that heavier social media use correlates with what they call “climate doom,” the belief that warming will collapse social and economic order. When other researchers examined 100 climate videos on TikTok, only eight cited a reputable source.
A video feed full of ignorance and despair doesn’t make a good curriculum.
The consequences aren’t just emotional. They’re economic, too. After fifteen flat years, American electricity demand is climbing again, roughly 2% annually since 2020. Data centers on pace to double their share of peak demand inside two years. We are graduating energy-illiterate students at precisely the moment the country has to build.
For a teenager trying to figure out what to do with his life, that ignorance could be costly. We hear a lot these days about how artificial intelligence is closing the on-ramps into white-collar work. The head of one leading AI lab has warned that the technology could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, concentrated in the fields that used to hire new graduates. But that’s not the whole story. Electricians are growing at three times the rate of the average occupation, with roughly 73,500 openings a year. Nuclear technicians earn a median above $104,000, often without a four-year degree. Applied trades have added 2.5 million jobs since 2019, and the average utility worker is past 50 and nearing retirement.
Students need to know the full picture. That goes for job prospects as well as the climate. Natural gas displacing coal drove the largest share of the decline in American power-sector emissions, according to the Energy Information Administration. Technology companies have committed more than $50 billion to nuclear power, more than in any previous decade. Three Mile Island restarts next year. Most new reactors arrive in the 2030s. For a sixteen-year-old who wants to work in the nuclear industry, that timeline sounds like job security.
Kids deserve to know that their futures are far from hopeless. A little bit of energy education could work like an SSRI for doomsday depression.
Some groups are trying to fill the energy education gap. Generation Atomic runs a nuclear science program for grades 6 through 12. The American Conservation Coalition organizes young people around nuclear power and permitting reform. And Blue Energy Nation’s BENERGY course launches nationally this fall. It features six modules built for homeschool families but easily folded into any science, civics, or economics class. (Its assigned materials include some RealClearEnergy journalism.)
https://videos.sproutvideo.com/embed/489ad8b61f18e6c2c2/6872e096508dbbb1
Blue Energy Nation
A mother in BENERGY’s pilot survey wrote that the course “backs its science with facts! And it’s not doom and gloom.” Another said it “sparked his curiosity in the topic and may have given him some ideas of future career ideas.”
Students shouldn’t be left to form a worldview based on TikTok videos. We should teach them where energy comes from, how it impacts their futures, and what it will need from them. Fear is a lousy career counselor. A generation convinced the future is already finished will not build the grid that future requires.
This article was originally published by RealClearEducation and made available via RealClearWire.
Depressing.
This is what I would expect from a typically British dystopian view…We regularly give ourselves kickings…
But what happened to “the home of the brave and the land of the free..?”
College educations are what happened.
Socialist college education with a high does of DEI and one or more variants of wokeism.
That sums up college education since early 1990s.
One might more accurately describe it as “college indoctrinations are what happened.”
What happened to not being a narcissist?
^^^ THIS ^^^
😉
The Zionist fraternity under the leadership of Mr Allison own Tik Tok from what I understand.
The leader of Israel publicly stated that they were going to target the next generations.
Ozone: fresh invigorating air (British English informal) Ozonebust: anonymous emitter of wind from the anus.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/tiktok-us-venture-oracle
https://youtube.com/shorts/vzfdXnE7kko?si=gadIP9ZOdDQhPE3a
I asked DuckDuckGo “Who owns TikTok?”
I got lots of answers, but mostly they boil down to the facts that
1, Chinese founder Zhoy Yinming holds around 21% of the shares,
2, Chinese company ByteDance holds 19.9% of the shares,
3, most of the rest are held by various entities and
4, 1% is held by the Chinese Government.
Under Chinese law the Government has broad authority to compel data access from domestic companies.
Dingdingdingding!!!!!!!!! We have a winner! Get that man a ceeegar!
No, no, no. Not a cigar. Too much CO2 dontchaknow.
Kewpie doll, pullleeeease.
😉
too much nylon in kewpies.
all that fossil fuel derivative 🙁
Thanks for the thought, 2, but I stopped smoking in April 1977.
Bottle of Smith’s 12 Y O would do, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/tiktok-us-venture-oracle
https://youtube.com/shorts/vzfdXnE7kko?si=gadIP9ZOdDQhPE3a
Take your Jew hate and ram it back up your a$$ where it came from.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/tiktok-us-venture-oracle
https://youtube.com/shorts/vzfdXnE7kko?si=gadIP9ZOdDQhPE3a
We get it, you hate Jews. F*ck off.
Do some research before you spew your bias. I did not mention Jews at all.
Yes, we get it, you hate Jews.
Net-Zero <=> Scarcity !!
By its very definition.
I’m confused by “<=>”. Is that “not equal”? Less than greater than AND equal?
It is the logical bi-conditional operator.
Net Zero leads so Scarcity.
Scarcity leads to Net Zero.
Definitely Net-Zero leads to scarcity.
Maybe I should have made it only uni-directional… =>
.. but scarcity of intelligence by bureaucrats/politicians is what leads to Net-Zero
(not equal to is ≠ )
Sorry for the confusion Jeff..
That symbol, to me, means “implies and is implied by”
Does this qualify as yelling fire in a crowded theater when only a match was lit?
Does it require a lit match?
LOL. With the climate scare, it’s more like someone turned on a flashlight.
Might just be a migraine hallucination. 😉
Scaring children is a form of bullying and abuse.
How odd that so many of the so called liberal caring progressives scare their children.
Definitely child abuse.
Climate scientists are not receiving any research grants for research into the sun’s influence on the climate.
Climate scientists can no longer explain the Earth’s accelerating temperature increase.
Solar radiation has increased again due to changes in the Earth’s orbit.
This winter will be one of the warmest winters on record and no one knows why, because scientists are not allowed to research the sun’s influence on the Earth’s climate.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260801093239.htm
“becomes visible around 2013 to 2015”
Exactly when the absorbed solar radiation made a tilt upwards, providing energy for two major El NIno events.
Neither humans, nor CO2, could have caused this pair of consecutive El Nino events.
The increase in solar radiation I wrote about occurred between 2021-2023.
This increase is not included in your graph. Look at graphs to 2026.
I found a graph to 2024.
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7418/4/3/17
Thanks, Have added your chart to my folder..
I have a similar one but with cloud cover rather than temperature.
Compare the temperature graph above with this graph.
Are there any correlations between the graphs?
I believe that TSI w/m^2 has a greater impact on temperature than standard calculations show.
(There are several different seasonal lags between TSI and global temperature).
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025EA004810
First graph shows a big increase in the UV-b range (iirc).
Again, from memory, isn’t that the range that penetrates into the oceans.
Increasing solar radiation is the reason why the Earth’s temperature is rising.
The solar emissions and orbital mechanics used are based on mean (Tmax+Tmin)/2.
When one accounts for reality, the variance of incident solar energy exceeds all energy imbalance nonsense.
Just as earth, an oblate spheroid, is treated as a perfect sphere.
Just as the distance from sun to earth uses the midpoint of the earth axis for the distance. Granted 4000 miles is not a lot, but it contributes.
Just as the atmosphere extends beyond the surface at the poles relative to the solar wavefront vectors. That is not included even though the atmosphere, reportedly, absorbs 44% of the incoming solar energy.
You are correct. Your link is correct. The complexities and nuances are totally ignored by those promoting their Trans-Reality religion.
Proving their is no scarcity of stupidity flooding out of colleges/universities.
“their” uhhh…
Nice pun, it is actually a spellcheck burp. Stupid smartphone. 😉
Pun intended?
How do we learn?
Repetition strengthens neural pathways.
How do we brainwash? Repetition.
How do we deprogram? Repetition.
What is social media famous for? Repetition.
Read the same thing on your phone hundreds or thousands of times and true of false it becomes your personal truth.
My kids bought into the gloom. I have no grandchildren.
I disagree. The gloom started well before you and I were born, back in the 1800’s. The strangulating idiocy of the “Progressive Movement” from then is manifesting today, but we should not scapegoat the recent generation for what is a predictable outcome of an ideology that is centuries old.
Historically that is correct, but not my point.
My point was not the origin of the progressive movement or socialism or whatever ideology.
The ideology of Wilson and Roosevelt and backwards in time are all real.
The Progressive Movement back then was limited in spread speed and literacy of the population and many were too busy surviving to even get into such a conversaton.
The ideology in present time became truth to so many due to the tsunami level repetition rate of the lies.
Goebbels would have loved social media.
Repetition rate once per day, once per hour?
Now we have tens or more more of repetitions per minute.
The difference? Compare the foot of an exponential curve to the current trend towards infinity.
The foot is 1800.
The acceleration to infinity is today.
“Teenagers name teachers as their leading source on climate and energy.”
And what are the odds of those NOT being science teachers?
People didn’t see it coming but digital learning is being used to indoctrinate children. It’s often subtle, but it’s there. Teachers no longer teach, they rely on laptops, and have no choice in it. Child learning programs are primarily designed around certain social awareness concepts instead of reading, writing, mathematics, art, and history. And it’s easy to do. Kids and elementary teacher today love using laptops. We’re being mushroomed about our education system that is all to easy to manipulate.
Agreed.
Add civics to the list.
I am not sure how phys ed would fit into the digital list, but someone will figure it out.
When curricula are designed and written by leftists and the teachers frequently have had a leftist indoctrination in their training, this type of sentiment can be expected to prevail. In addition when the mainstream media consistently presents one-sided reporting on the environment, it’s no wonder the kids fall for the humanity-is-doomed-rhetoric. So it’s up to parents to demand education departments clarify both sides of the picture on climate, fuel sources, food supplies, population growth, life expectancies, disease control and the like so that the youth get balanced viewpoints on the various topics, not the sky-is-falling refrain that usually dominates news sources.
I can’t say anything appropriate.
For 37 years I taught Economics to secondary pupils aged between 13 and 17. The very first concept I taught them was the concept of scarcity. Scarcity is a situation where there are not enough resources to produce everything that people want. The pupils were taught that scarcity is always with us: we will never have enough resources to produce everything that everybody wants. Hence we have to make economic choices: what to produce, how to produce and for whom to produce.
Later the pupils were taught about demand and supply and how an excess of demand over supply creates a shortage. It was very important for the pupils to understand the difference between scarcity (which can never go away) and a shortage (which can be eliminated either by reducing demand or increasing supply. Both of these effects would be caused by an increase in the price).
So, are we “teaching kids scarcity in an age of abundance”? It doesn’t look like it.
Some commenters complain about politicians who lack STEM quailification. Similarly, one might complain about people who lack economics qualifications talking about “scarcity” and “abundance”.