Do the climate change sermons of Greta Thunberg fill you with anxiety and dread? If so, then that’s the point. Thunberg and the modern eco-cultists all sing from the same hymn sheet, and fear is their most effective tactic.

In a speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, the 16-year-old Thunberg delivered a breathless sermon, chastising the adults in the room for stealing her “dreams” and her “childhood” by failing to take aggressive enough action against climate change.

“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” she thundered, voice on the edge of tears.

Since she shot to fame after organizing school walkouts in her native Sweden last year, Thunberg has been on a whirlwind tour of the world’s corridors of power. Appearing at economic forums, houses of parliament and most recently on Capitol Hill, the content of Thunberg’s speeches are always the same: what we’re doing for the planet isn’t good enough, and the end is nigh.

“I want you to act as if the house is on fire,” she told the world’s economic movers and shakers at Davos in January, asking them to “feel the fear I feel every day.”

“We probably don’t even have a future anymore,” she told British lawmakers in April. And so on at every appearance, her portents of doom dutifully reported by the world’s media.

Thunberg’s emotional, fear-driven rhetoric has been criticized by climate scientists, politicians [including Putin], and conservative pundits. While Thunberg told Congress last week to “listen to the scientists,” even the scientists of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stepped on the brakes, with one saying that the temperature rises predicted by Thunberg are simply “not going to feel like Armageddon to the vast majority of today’s striking teenagers.”

But the fearmongering is deliberate. If Thunberg is a preacher, then her bible may be a 2016 paper by climate activist and The Climate Mobilization founder Margaret Klein Salamon entitled ‘Leading the Public Into Emergency Mode: Introducing the Climate Emergency Movement.’

In a revised version, published this May, Salamon notes with pride that the paper’s language has been “adopted by several new climate groups - Extinction Rebellion, School Strikers, Sunrise Movement, and more.”

“Imagine there is a fire in your house,” the paper opens (sound familiar?). From there, Salamon argues that only fear and stress can motivate us to solve our planet’s problems. “The goal of the climate movement must be to lead the public out of ‘normal’ mode and into emergency mode,” she continues, believing that only when we’re pumped full of fear can we act decisively.

But not everyone reacts to fear with resolve and determination. Salamon acknowledges this, pointing out that helplessness, panic, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder are all common responses to an emergency. Just as some individuals will rise to the occasion, others will remain trapped in “anxiety,” “worry,” and “apathy.”

— Crazy Bat Lady