4 out of 5?
Aaah... isn't that stretching it a bit?
4 out of 5 in a particular demographic..
In a specific confined place in the country.
Let me guess.
You asked in a single street out on Østerbro near Trianglen.
Didn't you? Maybe? 🤓
But okay.
Let's just extrapolate.
It's a number, and numbers can feel heavy, almost irrefutable, when they're pressed down over a headline in the right format with the right colour choice.
BREAKING YELLOW AND BLACK.
Let it stand for a moment, because that's actually the most revealing thing about all of this - that this religion, this all-encompassing existential catastrophe that demands total societal restructuring and begins with sorting plastic in nursery school and ends with people feeling ashamed about flying to Spain, is primarily practised by a cluster of populations in the most comfortable corner of a planet that otherwise keeps running as it always has, completely indifferent to the fact that Denmark has decided to have an uncontrollable anxiety neurosis about it.
China builds a new coal power plant EVERY WEEK. EVERY SINGLE YEAR. And none of the engineers who design them, and none of the workers who build them, and none of the families who in ten years will turn on the lights in the apartments powered by them, think FOR A SINGLE SECOND about what Lotte from Valby thinks about her individual CO2 footprint calculator.
India is on its way to becoming the world's most populous nation and has an energy demand that's growing at a speed that no Northern European wind turbine adventure has the capacity to deliver 0.5% of.
Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia - billions of People who are occupied with living, and who haven't received the memo that you're supposed to organise your inner life around a guilt issued by a span between the Social Liberal Party, the Red-Green Alliance and the Moderates' secret sponsors in order to be allowed to exist.
And then there's us.
Denmark's total CO2 emissions constitute less than ONE TENTH OF ONE PERCENT of global emissions.
If the entire Danish people held their breath at once and never exhaled again, it couldn't be measured in the global figures. If we shut down everything, removed all industry, tore up all motorways and returned to growing grain with horses, the climate models wouldn't blink. We're not in the equation. We've never been in the equation. We're a statistical margin of error with a nearly psychotically strong opinion about ourselves.
And yet.
Yet we arrange everything according to it. Yet the posters hang in the nursery before the child can walk. Yet there are climate narratives in kindergarten, climate consciousness in the meal programme, climate grief served in cartoon format for children who don't know what a continent is yet but can already feel that they're guilty of something, that by their mere existence on this earth they're contributing to something terrible, that the right reaction to being born is regret and conversion and a ritual behavioural change that signals to the social community that you're one of the good ones. And that practice rises all the way up through the age spectrum - more sophisticated at each step, more institutionalised, more legally anchored, more economically sanctioned - and the priesthood grows with it, the chanting climate experts and climate communicators and climate psychologists and climate educators and climate journalists who all live off managing the anxiety and ensuring that it reproduces itself in the next generation, before the small people are old enough to ask whether it even makes sense.
And don't ask them if it makes sense.
Don't ask them if they've read the primary sources, if they understand the forcing mechanisms, if they can explain the feedback loops, if they know what the climate sensitivity parameter is and what uncertainty is associated with it - don't ask them anything at all that requires them to have thought for themselves, because that's exactly what separates a religion from a science - a religion doesn't require you to understand it, it requires you to confess it, and the act of confession is the social glue that holds the entire apparatus together, and it's not a question of evidence but of belonging, of who you are, of which side you're on, and if you're on the wrong side then everyone knows what you are.
Four out of five Danes see climate change as a serious threat.
Of course they do.
They've been f*cking trained - conditioned - to do so since they were two years old, and the training doesn't stop, because there's no longer anywhere it stops.
There's a constant signal being broadcast everywhere, nonstop, from all directions at once - and the particular thing about a signal that comes from all directions is that it ceases to feel like a signal and begins to feel like reality itself, like the air you breathe, like the layer of meaning that lies beneath everything else, so it can never really be seen from outside - because there is no outside.
It's built into the legislation, into the building regulations, into the energy requirements for the house you want to build or buy, into the green loans the bank offers at a lower rate because you choose correctly, into the pension funds that are automatically placed in ESG-approved funds because your pension company has decided to have a climate strategy, into the green label on the food in the supermarket, into the CO2 footprint that's now printed on the packaging, into the corporate culture that has a sustainability policy you sign, into the job posting that mentions that the company is climate-conscious, into the municipal purchasing policies, into the public procurement rules, into the architecture that's rewarded with support and that which isn't, into the car that's taxed and the one that's subsidised, into the floating pressure from insurance companies that begin to factor climate behaviour into premiums, into the media coverage that doesn't ask if the narrative is true but only who opposes it and why - and it all runs on top of each other, layer upon layer, institution upon institution, from nursery school to nursing home - where they're now only allowed 80 grams of meat PER WEEK because of the climate - and at no point in a person's life in Denmark today is there A SINGLE MOMENT of institutional silence, where it's possible to ask the question from scratch without the answer already being given.
It's not conviction.
It's infrastructure.
None of the answer given here in the article is an expression of an opinion.
It's an answer you know you're supposed to give.
Because otherwise...
But they'll probably invent some pills soon that you can take, that can handle both climate scepticism and climate anxiety in the same moment.
Because you don't eat enough pills already to swallow the necessary behavioural regulation the geniuses want!
Good evening, friends ☀️❤️