CLIMATE HYSTERIA

From Chapter 1:
Once a week in a conference room in Salt Lake City, in the American state of Utah, a dozen people gather for a session of climate change grief counselling. Convened by a Laura Schmidt, a full-time activist with a masters in environmental humanities, the sessions permit the participants to vent over all the things not being done about climate change, and how the participants themselves are doing things that contribute to a problem (such as drive cars to the meetings, we suppose) that they imagine will affect their loved ones. One tale to emerge from these fraught sessions is that of a woman who, when confronted by piles of merchandise in a store produced and packaged in all sorts of energy-intensive ways, had to retreat to her car to recover for a time before she could face shopping again. Ms Schmidt, who organised additional sessions following the election of Donald Trump as American president (Trump easily won Utah, a traditionally Republican state), has developed a ten-step coping program loosely based on the Alcoholics Anonymous program to cope with this sort of stress.