In early January, Slate columnist Eric Holthaus tweeted: “I’m starting my 11th year working on climate change, including the last 4 in daily journalism. Today I went to see a counselor about it.” Holthaus announced that he was in “despair” over climate-change inaction: “There are days where I literally can’t work. I’ll read a story & shut down for rest of the day. Not much helps besides exercise & time.” His job, he says, is “chronicling planetary suicide.”
Holthaus’s tweets, and the massive online group-therapy session that followed, would be amusing were they not so pitiful. Here is the emotional toll of buying into one of our most saleable beliefs at present: that the planet faces imminent destruction as a result of anthropogenic climate change, rescue from which is being held up by greedy midwestern oilmen, the political operatives in their pocket, and obnoxious Republican uncles swallowed up in ignorance.
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