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.”
After reading Michael Shellenberger’s 2020 book, titled Apocalypse Never, Biggers started to deconstruct her climate ideology.
Biggers said that her current “platform is meant to bring people back to critical thinking,” though she receives two kinds of responses: notes from people that reported experiencing “debilitating anxiety” over climate change and “nasty” messages.
“We are safer than ever,” Biggers told The Lion, noting that modern society and fossil fuels insulate people from extreme weather events. “Why vilify the thing that built our modern society? … You’re basically trying to get rid of the one thing that makes us safe.”
And there’s even evidence that pushes against the narrative that climate change has made weather related disasters more common. For example, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. noted in a July 2025 Substack post that deaths from extreme weather events in the first half of 2025 were likely at a record low compared with any other half-year, citing data from the Aon Global Catastrophe Recap.
Sweetland and Biggers both argued that climate models and projections should not be used to stoke fear, with Sweetland describing them as “glorified guesswork.” Sweetland also pointed to satellite data that shows the Earth has been greening.
While Sweetland had been taught that “ecosystems were collapsing and sea levels would leave entire nations underwater,” she is now “concern[ed] that people are trying to reduce carbon dioxide” that is good for the planet.
Sweetland noted that a “carbon dioxide famine” would result in the death of life forms. She told The Lion she knows how “contentious” it is to question the purported consensus on man-made climate change, but her primary concern lies with energy policies that could deindustrialize modern life.
“Here in the U.K., they’re trying to get to net zero, and we will not be able to produce anything in this country very shortly,” Sweetland said. “We’re becoming an import-dependent economy, and we were once one of the great manufacturers of the world.”
Sweetland noted the U.K.’s rising energy costs in contrast to the U.S. repealing the Endangerment Finding, which could open “a whole new chapter” for energy policy. It demonstrates America is “much more advanced” in its approach to the issue, she said. “We’re on the brink of getting thrown in prison if we disagree with man-made global warming,” Sweetland added of her resident country.
British police made about 12,000 arrests in 2023 over online communications deemed offensive, according to The Times. Though it is not clear if anyone was arrested over social media posts skeptical of climate change, the British government is rushing toward building “renewables” and doubling down on other climate change commitments.
The rich and famous also get involved in pushing such policies, which influences the public.
“Climate activists often use celebrities as their public relations mouthpieces. Then, when those celebrities are exposed for their hypocritical high-CO2 lifestyles, they try to switch to younger people as spokespersons,” James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute, told The Lion.
Celebrities that preach about climate change initiatives while regularly using private jets have garnered much criticism, and one June 2025 report from the International Council on Clean Transportation showed that emissions of private jets outweighed the emissions of all flights departing London’s Heathrow airport in 2023.
Taylor argued that many of the young activists eventually “begin to realize the truth and then flip on the climate activist movement.”
Both Biggers and Sweetland led a panel at The Heartland Institute’s annual conference in early April, where Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin also spoke. Some climate activists disrupted their panel before being swiftly escorted from the venue, The Lion previously reported.
Zeldin and the Trump administration broadly have drawn criticism from Democrats and some media outlets for advancing deregulation, though Biggers argued that energy policies devised to fight climate change tend to be linked to “redistribution of wealth and stopping industry.”
Steve Milloy, senior fellow at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute and former Trump EPA transition team member, told The Lion that “if you control energy use, you control everything.”
“Green is the new red. Environmental activists generally come from the political left and seek to implement the leftist agenda of government control of absolutely everything,” Milloy said. “The environment, especially climate and energy use, is the perfect way of achieving that goal. Environmental activists want to tell you where to live, what to eat, what to drive, what to buy and more. … For every problem, whether real or not, the solution is always more government for them and less freedom and autonomy for you.”
Image credit: World Economic Forum (Flickr)
