{"id":413928,"date":"2025-11-19T16:57:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T15:57:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=413928"},"modified":"2025-11-19T16:57:27","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T15:57:27","slug":"the-kids-are-not-alright-cop30s-youth-led-climate-crisis-struggle-sesh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=413928","title":{"rendered":"The kids are not alright: COP30\u2019s youth-led \u201cclimate crisis\u201d struggle \u201csesh\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From CFACT<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Nate Myers<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With climate anxiety now affecting an estimated half of young people worldwide, COP30 arrived in Bel\u00e9m, Brazil, promising to \u201celevate youth voices.\u201d What I witnessed instead, by attending some of the side events, was a well-funded pipeline of fear, guilt, and political indoctrination aimed squarely at children and teenagers who have been convinced the world is ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over several days, I sat through hours of youth-led and youth-themed panels \u2014 panels that were supposedly about empowering the next generation but in reality offered little more than emotionally charged rhetoric, self-congratulatory monologues, and wild ideological claims completely detached from scientific or historical context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end, one thing was very clear: The kids are not alright, and the adults running these sessions know exactly what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside the COP30 Youth-Centric Panels:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the first sessions I attended was titled \u201c<\/em>A Legacy for Children and Youth in Climate Policies.\u201d<\/em> The premise sounded harmless enough \u2014 encouraging young people to engage in politics and science. But the execution was anything but.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Representatives from Our Kids Climate, ChildFund Alliance, Child Rights International Network, and Plant-for-the-Planet took turns celebrating how many children their organizations have managed to bring into the movement and how there\u2019s always more work to be done to make the conversation \u201cmore inclusive\u201d to \u201cmarginalized groups.\u201d What they didn\u2019t talk about were scientific principles, energy systems, or practical solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, panelists repeated the talking point that \u201cchildren are the most affected by climate change\u201d \u2014 a phrase that now functions as a moral shield to deflect scrutiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The adults paneling the discussion pontificated endlessly about \u201cyouth inclusion in climate justice,\u201d never once explaining what \u201cclimate justice\u201d actually means or how any of their lofty goals would be achieved. Their message was simple: get more children involved as early as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The moderator even closed with an open call to bring more kids to future COPs. She wasn\u2019t subtle about it. The aim is to expose children to the climate-justice worldview before they have the emotional maturity, economic literacy, or scientific grounding to question it \u2014 or even properly understand the conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Youth-Led Climate Forum<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The flagship youth session at COP30, the \u201cYouth-Led Climate Forum,\u201d made the earlier panels look calm by comparison. Held over the course of the week in four separate installments that felt more like struggle sessions than intellectual debate and conversation, students repeated sweeping, dramatic lines like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just trying to save the world,<\/em>\u201d followed by, \u201cIt\u2019s our responsibility to fix this<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Someone has convinced these kids that the world is ending \u2014 and that they are personally responsible for preventing it. That kind of psychological burden would crush an adult, let alone a teenager.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One young woman even described how her entry into the movement began after watching the apocalyptic thriller \u201c2012.\u201d Sometime later, she experienced a perfectly normal flood \u2014 an event that has occurred throughout human history \u2014 and interpreted it as confirmation that the \u201cclimate crisis\u201d was accelerating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was the perfect microcosm of what\u2019s happening to young people worldwide: propaganda scares them into believing natural disasters are unprecedented, and any routine weather event becomes proof that doom is approaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A representative from World Youth for Climate Justice took it a step further, declaring:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCountries authorizing new oil leases should be held criminally responsible<\/em>.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The entire forum was drenched in ideological buzzwords. \u201cSolidarity\u201d and \u201cintersectional\u201d were used dozens of times. References to Indigenous communities, women, and LGBTQ groups were thrown around like confetti, to the point of unintended comedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet amid all the emotional rhetoric, no one offered scientific nuance, historical context, or even a basic acknowledgment of natural climate cycles. In fact, no one cited or discussed a single statistic, figure, or model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was all emotion, no wisdom. All fear, no facts. And these are the voices COP30 proudly elevates as the \u201cleaders of tomorrow\u201d \u2014 leading us to what, I wonder?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Then Came the Demands\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To top it all off, the Child Rights International Network (CRIN) proudly released a global letter of demands allegedly \u201cdeveloped by young people at COP30.\u201d They issued these demands to every nation on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the most extreme:<\/p>\n\n\n\n