They preached doom, now they preach calm: Ex-climate activists say stop the fear
By Audrey Streb
Former climate activists told The Lion that although they used to be manipulated by alarmist media narratives and driven by anxiety, they now offer a different message to the world: don’t be afraid.
Lucy Biggers, a former climate activist who now directs social media for The Free Press, told The Lion she was searching for meaning in the climate movement. For years she warned the world of the “existential threat” of climate change, protesting pipelines, pushing the Green New Deal and interviewing prominent green activists and political figures such as Greta Thunberg and Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Anika Sweetland, a former energy policy advisor to the Australian government and now a member of the CO2 Coalition, explained to The Lion that analyzing raw satellite data relieved years of her anxiety. Now based in the United Kingdom, Sweetland said that she was the first to graduate from a program devoted to climate change studies at the University of Western Australia, which she described as “alarming, disturbing” and painting a “very bleak outlook.”
Nearly 70% of young adults ages 18-25 in the U.S. “worry a great deal” or a “fair amount” about global warming, according to a December 2024 Gallup poll. So-called “climate anxiety” is also haunting even very young children, Time Magazine reported in April 2025.
“You come across it in children as young as 3,” Elizabeth Haase, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, told Time. “You find them on TikTok, sobbing about losing their teddy bears or sobbing that animals they loved got killed” due to the effects of climate change.
Biggers and Sweetland now say that young people should not be paralyzed by such fears.
Sweetland told The Lion she got involved in the climate activism movement because she was concerned about the media reports and what she was taught in school. Then, she realized the same media once ran headlines about a coming ice age before pivoting to doomsday global warming angles.
“I believe that it was an intentionally misleading story which created a lot of fear in the population,” Sweetland said.
Biggers once worked for NowThis, which she has described as a “left-wing millennial news company.” While in the climate movement, Biggers said she “got caught up in the ideology [and] this black-and-white thinking that fossil fuel companies are evil and capitalism is evil.”
“I got so much validation and identified so much with being part of that group,” Biggers recalled, adding that while she wanted to help people, her activism came from a “mystical and emotional” rather than a “rational” place. She once believed eliminating fossil fuels would usher in a “utopia” and “atonement,” with the movement taking on a religious character for her.
But the COVID-19 pandemic helped open her eyes. During the lockdowns, Biggers saw that carbon emissions fell only slightly despite what she described as “hellish” trade-offs.
“Our freedoms were limited,” she recalled. “I started to wonder what net zero would require of us.”
