Iain Macwhirter: Yes, the children are frightened. But action is happening

It was an odd aside, presumably directed more at Trumpian nationalists at home than independence supporters in Scotland. In fact, many small countries in Europe, like Denmark, Norway, even Scotland, have rather good records on cooperation and progress to net zero. Nations are inescapable realities and, following the pandemic, borders are back. But that doesn’t mean that national communities are not protective of their unique environments. They are.

Nationalism aside, Mr Obama hit all the right notes. Genuflecting to the young as is de rigeur at these events, while pointedly criticising the self-defeating campaigns of Extinction Rebellion and its motorway-blocking offshoot Insulate Britain – or “insult Britain” as it’s been called.

Mr Obama said that climate activists had to realise their job is to persuade “the guy who has to drive to his factory job every single day, can’t afford a Tesla, and might not be able to pay the rent or feed his family”. The non-Tesla demographic need reassurance that combating climate change is compatible with a decent standard of living.

Indeed, young activists, and many retired ones, need to be persuaded that family life is still viable in the Age of Transition. Many green opinion formers are suggesting that it isn’t. The writer Tim Woodman told BBC Scotland’s The Nine this week that having a child is “the greatest act of climate destruction” and that he’s staying child-free. That’s because every human consumes resources and releases many tons of CO2. Other “generation doomers” are saying that it’s unfair on children to bring them into this maelstrom of misery.

A character in Sally Rooney’s new novel calls this “mutilating my real life in a gesture of submission to an imagined future”. Anyway, the baby-banners needn’t worry, because countries like Scotland have already stopped having them – or at any rate in sufficient number to replace the dead. Only mass immigration has prevented our national population declining into a geriatric twilight.

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However, while babies don’t cause climate change, families arguably do. As anyone who has had one knows.

It is very difficult to maintain environmental virtue thereafter. Modern families generate demand for stuff almost from the moment you get your baby box. It becomes a question of divided loyalties: the planet or your own, and your own always come first.

Which is why many environmentally-minded folk cease proselytising quite so hard once a pram appears in their hallway. Modern family life requires cars, houses, gadgets of all kinds. Try doing the school run without transport. Then try navigating all the extracurricular activities that young people require using bus timetables. It’s not easy when your daughter phones home late at night, distraught over some real or imagined crisis, to toss away the car keys and walk to the rescue.

As more children arrive, you find you need a bigger house, bigger car, bigger heating bills – and a bigger salary to pay for it all. Holidays become a necessity, along with iPads, trainers and mobile phones, without which your offspring would feel excluded from teenage society. Yes, even Greta Thunberg’s.

Barack Obama delivering his address at GOP26 on Monday

Then there’s the psychological impact of climate propaganda. This is now having a serious impact on the mental health of children. Psychologists call it “eco-anxiety”. A study by Bath University in September found that 60% of young people are worried or extremely worried about climate change and 40% say they’re thinking of not having children because of it.

Young people have so many pressures – sexual identity, body image, the demands of school and/or work. On top of that they are being told that the world may, quite literally, come to an end in the next few decades.

We naturally feel protective of children. I sense there is a growing backlash against the purveyors of climate catastrophism. And not just from parents. Many feminists were appalled by the recent “advice to young people” from Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, who said that, in the near future, gangs of feral youths will be roaming a land devastated by climate change. “They will see your mother, your sister, your girlfriend,” he said, “and they will gang-rape her on the kitchen table.”

Mr Hallam is at the extreme end of apocalyptic environmental forecasting, but a lot of climate literature these days reads like the Book of Revelation. We are told of cities and even countries being drowned as seas rise. Food becoming scarce in the searing heat. Mr Obama remarked that his own children were having to cope with frightening images of “a world ravaged by extreme weather, climate migration and conflict”.

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Now of course, climate change is a serious issue, like war, and it’s natural for people to worry. But just as in a war, nihilistic despair and misanthropy help no one. Eventually people become desensitised, numbed – as my generation did when living under the threat of nuclear annihilation. We still are at risk from atomic war today, not least because many nuclear arms limitation treaties have lapsed. But it just isn’t on the disaster radar any more.

Mr Obama has been criticised for having a “corporate” approach to climate renewal, and for betting the future on technology. But he is right to temper dire warnings with constructive proposals for saving the planet. They do exist and are mostly within reach. There is progress at COP26. The International Energy Agency says that if countries keep their word, runaway global warming can be contained.

Climate action is of course happening too slowly, too incrementally. But as Mr Obama said quoting Shakespeare: "What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"

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