Climate Change™ is the 21st century moral panic. Moral panics don’t just have believers, but fanatical True Believers™ driven by a religious zealotry that can lead to bizarre behavior.

Moral panics and mass hysteria have a long history

The Salem Witch Trials of the late 1600’s are a widely known example of a moral panic. In an atmosphere of mistrust, personal conflicts, and a strict-code of conduct, the charge of witchcraft, sustained by little more than gossip, rumor and not a few personal vendettas (and reinforced by “media” such as author Cotton Mather), resulted in the executions of 20 people.

An echo of the witch trials occurred in the 1980’s in the McMartin Preschool debacle where even the most outlandish of accusations …

One child told a defense attorney that Chuck Norris – a popular action star at the time – had been present at the Satanic rituals, while other children claimed they jumped out of a plane and even traveled to space in a hot air balloon. Other claims included digging up dead bodies, secret tunnels underneath the school, flying witches, and being locked in refrigerators.

… were accepted at face value. This was magnified from Oprah Winfrey to alleged mainstream journalists reinforcing the panic rather than questioning it.

Sometimes moral panic can lead to self-destructive behaviors. The Heaven’s Gate Millenarian cult, believing the Hale-Bopp Comet signaled the end of the world, committed mass suicide.

Mother Gaia: All will love her and despair

As membership in Christian and Jewish religions declines, the rise of paganism has moved into the vacuum. Along with this new worship of Mother Gaia is the concurrent misanthropic demonstrations that sustain the believers in Climate Change™ and provide a platform for politicians to grab power and administrators to punish heretics. This reinforces the panic that having children today condemns them to a future of misery.

If it weren’t for climate change, Allison Guy said, she would go off birth control tomorrow.

But scientists’ projections, if rapid action isn’t taken, are not “congruent with a stable society,” said Ms. Guy, 32, who works at a marine conservation nonprofit in Washington. “I don’t want to give birth to a kid wondering if it’s going to live in some kind of ‘Mad Max’ dystopia.”

And if we are not to be persuaded by the sorrowful pledges of the nokidniks, we can gape in awe at this celebration of sterility by Wes Siler. Here’s a young man who, along with his [fiance? wife?] Virginia, decide to not to have kids. He cites Climate Change™ with examples including the Paradise Fire and polar bears (and, OMG TRUMP!) as leading him to vasectomy.

If I gave up my 15 mpg pickup truck—basically the mascot for climate inaction—and rode my bicycle everywhere, I’d save the planet 2.4 tons of carbon emissions a year. That’d be a massive sacrifice, but it’s nowhere near the carbon emissions I’ll save by skipping becoming a daddy, which comes in at around 58 tons annually, per kid. Any other action we could take, even all the actions we could ever possibly add up together, pale in comparison.

That’s because there are simply too many humans on this planet.

Uh, did Wes really put keeping his truck ahead of a child? Because his examples are on par with secret tunnels under the McMartin Preschool. Polar bears are thriving and the Paradise fire was caused by a combination of malfeasance in maintenance by California regulated-utility PG&E and ecofascist policies that have turned CA forests into tinderboxes. Wes is the “lifestyle columnist” writing about outdoor adventure and is totally incurious to those facts?

So, we’re not having kids. I found a colleague’s brother here in Bozeman who performs vasectomies and made an appointment. I was afraid of getting my scrotum operated on, but the procedure ended up being quicker and less invasive than most dental appointments. I took off my pants, laid on a bed, received a local anesthetic, chatted with the doctor while he made a few incisions, then got a ride home. Once the anesthetic wore off, it felt like someone had kicked me in the balls pretty good, a feeling that dissipated over the next seven days. I took a Valium before the surgery and a few handfuls of ibuprofen afterward but otherwise didn’t need painkillers or even an ice pack. The worst part was taking a week off from the gym; I’d been making good progress.

Cool. Wes first likes his truck more than his own child. Then is more annoyed he missed a week at the gym than he has been permanently sterilized.

Hmmmm… Gaia worship with a large side order of nihilism. Way to go, Wes.

To have children, or not, really is a personal decision. However, Wes has made his public so I’m tossing my two cents in. He’s a male who got to 38 years old without ever seriously considering marriage and children. In order to maintain a lifestyle of outdoor adventure-travel that kids would definitely crimp, he wanders into a religion that will not only support his terminal Millennial Peter Pan-ism, but celebrate his waxing about conspiracies and physical sacrifice. AOC would certainly be proud. It would be useless on my part, here and now, to point out that being an effective parent is a lesson in being a full adult and that the child you don’t have may mean that the adult who may have made a huge contribution to the world doesn’t exist. So, instead, I will say to Wes about his public virtue-signaling:

Dude, the planet doesn’t care about your balls.

featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock, standard license