Nate Myers
Nate Myers is Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow’s collegian national field coordinator.
With climate anxiety now affecting an estimated half of young people worldwide, COP30 arrived in Belém, Brazil, promising to “elevate youth voices.” What I witnessed instead, by attending some of the side events, was a well-funded pipeline of fear, guilt, and political indoctrination aimed squarely at children and teenagers who have been convinced the world is ending.
Over several days, I sat through hours of youth-led and youth-themed panels – panels that were supposedly about empowering the next generation but in reality offered little more than emotionally charged rhetoric, self-congratulatory monologues, and wild ideological claims completely detached from scientific or historical context.
By the end, one thing was very clear: The kids are not alright, and the adults running these sessions know exactly what they’re doing.
Inside the COP30 Youth-Centric Panels:
One of the first sessions I attended was titled “A Legacy for Children and Youth in Climate Policies.” The premise sounded harmless enough – encouraging young people to engage in politics and science. But the execution was anything but.
Representatives from Our Kids Climate, ChildFund Alliance, Child Rights International Network, and Plant-for-the-Planet took turns celebrating how many children their organizations have managed to bring into the movement and how there’s always more work to be done to make the conversation “more inclusive” to “marginalized groups.” What they didn’t talk about were scientific principles, energy systems, or practical solutions.
Instead, panelists repeated the talking point that “children are the most affected by climate change” – a phrase that now functions as a moral shield to deflect scrutiny.
The adults paneling the discussion pontificated endlessly about “youth inclusion in climate justice,” never once explaining what “climate justice” actually means or how any of their lofty goals would be achieved. Their message was simple: get more children involved as early as possible.
The moderator even closed with an open call to bring more kids to future COPs. She wasn’t subtle about it. The aim is to expose children to the climate-justice worldview before they have the emotional maturity, economic literacy, or scientific grounding to question it – or even properly understand the conversation.
Youth-Led Climate Forum
The flagship youth session at COP30, the “Youth-Led Climate Forum,” made the earlier panels look calm by comparison. Held over the course of the week in four separate installments that felt more like struggle sessions than intellectual debate and conversation, students repeated sweeping, dramatic lines like:
“We’re just trying to save the world,” followed by, “It’s our responsibility to fix this.”
Someone has convinced these kids that the world is ending – and that they are personally responsible for preventing it. That kind of psychological burden would crush an adult, let alone a teenager.
One young woman even described how her entry into the movement began after watching the apocalyptic thriller 2012. Sometime later, she experienced a perfectly normal flood – an event that has occurred throughout human history – and interpreted it as confirmation that the “climate crisis” was accelerating.
It was the perfect microcosm of what’s happening to young people worldwide: propaganda scares them into believing natural disasters are unprecedented, and any routine weather event becomes proof that doom is approaching.
A representative from World Youth for Climate Justice took it a step further, declaring:
“Countries authorizing new oil leases should be held criminally responsible.”
The entire forum was drenched in ideological buzzwords. “Solidarity” and “intersectional” were used dozens of times. References to indigenous communities, women, and LGBTQ groups were thrown around like confetti, to the point of unintended comedy.
Yet amid all the emotional rhetoric, no one offered scientific nuance, historical context, or even a basic acknowledgment of natural climate cycles. In fact, no one cited or discussed a single statistic, figure, or model.
It was all emotion, no wisdom. All fear, no facts. And these are the voices COP30 proudly elevates as the “leaders of tomorrow” – leading us to what, I wonder?
And Then Came the Demands…
To top it all off, the Child Rights International Network (CRIN) proudly released a global letter of demands allegedly “developed by young people at COP30.” They issued these demands to every nation on Earth.
Among the most extreme:
- End all fossil fuel leasing and extraction.
- Replace global energy systems with “justice-based alternatives.”
- Mandate climate reparations across nations and generations.
- Create youth committees with power to oversee national climate policy.
The adults behind these groups know exactly what they’re doing. No child wrote this without intense indoctrination and adult influence. The youth participants are being used – emotionally and politically – to advance an agenda they don’t fully understand.
After countless hours of youth programming at COP30, the conclusion was unavoidable:
These are scared children seeking comfort and direction – yet they’re being fed panic, ideology, and guilt. The same groups that claim to “empower” young people are the ones frightening them into the movement in the first place. That’s not stewardship. That’s emotional exploitation.
This article was originally published by CFACT.
