Why is the Financial Times Encouraging Parents to Make Their Children Anxious About Climate Change?

How far the pink paper has fallen

On Monday, the Financial Times published a book review by Pilita Clark — the paper’s Associate Editor who writes on “corporate life and climate change” — that opened with the following lament:

The UK is a G7 country with a famed civil service that has been delivering world-leading climate change policies for the best part of 20 years. So how could it be so bad at dealing with the floods, heatwaves and fires wreaking so much damage on its people and economy?

The four books under her approving gaze carried titles freighted with millennial dread. Reviewing them cursorily but approvingly, Clark concluded that “the state of the climate is disturbing for any parent today” and that “adults have much to learn from children, not least their moral clarity about a climate problem that will be the defining challenge of their lives”. The salmon-pink newspaper, it seems, has extended its remit from capital markets and corporate earnings to the moral instruction of British parents.

One might be forgiven for reading this as satire. It is not. It is, rather, a characteristic specimen of what has become the dominant mode of climate journalism in the mainstream Western press: a seamless fusion of advocacy, emotional appeal and selective empiricism in which no counterevidence need intrude and no sceptical voice need apply. Like the BBC, which long ago decided that ‘balance’ on climate was a form of irresponsibility, the FT operates on the settled premise that the science is closed, the catastrophe is imminent and the only honourable response is alarm. What the FT’s Pilita Clark offers her readers is not objective journalism but liturgy.