A decade ago surveys showed that Millennials were less concerned about environmental claims than Baby Boomers or Generation X. The reason was speculated to be environmental fatigue. Millennials saw that government recycling was only making China rich and Americans pay higher taxes, that being miserable at home while Al Gore got rich selling carbon credits made no sense, and assurances that weather were not climate during a snowstorm but were climate during a heatwave made little sense.

Not now, say media teachers in academia. They found that seeing frightening news about climate change day after day makes people more willing to take action to address it. In “Fanning the flames or burning out? Testing competing hypotheses about repeated exposure to threatening climate change messages”, they exposed students to three days of negative news stories about climate change. A follow-up consisted of participants reading negative news headlines about climate change in the form of Twitter posts for seven consecutive days.

Over time, those who repeatedly saw climate change headlines started to feel like they could do more to affect change and that the topic of climate change was important.


Writing about science generates around $25 million per year in revenue. Writing that science is killing us generates $3 billion per year. But selling solar energy to replace 0.1% of conventional energy has led to $4 trillion in revenue. Doomsday is not where the money is, selling totems to prevent doomsday is.

“You would think that as people are repeatedly exposed to threatening climate news devoid of solutions content that their efficacy beliefs will decrease over time,” said Christofer Skurka, PhD, lead author and an assistant professor of media studies at Penn State. “We saw the opposite pattern in our second study. People’s efficacy beliefs increased over time. In other words, the more exposure people had to these threatening news stories each day, they were increasingly likely to think that they can make a difference in addressing climate change.”

One reason may be that as the public copes with unpleasant feelings about the enormous threat climate change presents, they may convince themselves that they have control over the situation, which translates into greater efficacy beliefs that their actions will make a difference. The obvious confounder is that these were Penn State students doing experiments for Penn State teachers.

As most know, fear can be motivating. An old corporate media truism is that 'if it bleeds, it leads' and culture has not advanced beyond 'fear sells' so apocalyptic narratives about bees and global warming have led to big business for pesticides like copper sulfate and energy alternatives like solar panels.