“Our earth is warming up, and our oceans are rising,” Billie Eilish warns as clips of floods and crumbling glaciers flash on screen. “Extreme weather is wrecking millions of lives.”
Over the weekend, the singer appeared in a video with Woody Harrelson to urge viewers to do something about climate change. The one-minute clip, called “Our House Is On Fire,” in reference to a speech by Greta Thunberg, has already been viewed more than 3.5 million times.
After participating in some fear-of-Armageddon propaganda, Harrelson proclaims: “We are in a climate emergency.” Eilish concludes, “We cannot let his happen on our watch.”
Ever since her first studio album debuted atop the charts this year, the 17-year-old has poised herself to become the voice of her generation. Who better to sing about loneliness and anxiety than Generation Z?
It would make sense, then, that Eilish’s newest target would be an issue that has wreaked havoc on the mental health of young people: climate change.
One recent poll found that 67% of Gen Z voters think it’s at least somewhat likely that the earth will become uninhabitable in the next decade or so. Granted, the Gen Z subsample is very small, but when the demographic includes voters under the age of 34, still more than half of them agree. For perspective, only 29% of all people overall believe that climate change means they won’t have to save up for retirement, and just 12% of senior citizens buy into this level of climate change hysteria.
It’s clear that her generation is worried, but with her efforts in climate advocacy, Eilish has fallen victim to Greta Thunberg syndrome. Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist, has become a household name for staging student walkouts and lecturing world leaders. She’s young and passionate, but she’s not targeting the right audience with the right message.
Thunberg and Eilish follow a similar trajectory: A young person hears doomsday predictions about climate change and begins lobbying her fellow youth to join her in protest. The only problem is that their solutions are misguided.
Instead of targeting, say, China, which is the world’s largest producer of carbon emissions and still growing, Eilish has a message for her fans: We should be “doing what we can to live in a greener lifestyle, like cutting out meat or dairy in your diet and reducing plastic use.”
Reducing plastic use is always a good idea and an attainable goal. Aside from that, this mandate smacks of the classist message in The Economist, which recently tweeted, “More poor people are eating meat around the world. That means they will live longer, healthier lives, but it is bad news for the environment.” But access to meat for the world’s poor is not the problem.
In order to back up her activism, Eilish told Jimmy Fallon over the weekend that for her upcoming world tour, she’s partnering with Reverb, a company “that specializes in the best and most healthy and green ways to do everything.”
“We’re trying to be as green as possible,” she explained. It’s a noble goal, but the solutions, again, seem a bit lacking. The first effort she mentions, “no plastic straws allowed,” is an often flimsy way to help the environment. Banning plastic straws, which both Seattle and Washington, D.C., have done, sounds great as a virtue signal, but it won’t do much as nearly all of the world’s plastic pollution comes from China and southeast Asia. Moreover, alternatives to plastic, such as paper straws, can have difficulty decomposing and also become significant pollutants.
Eilish’s biggest problem, however, is not that she’s bringing more paper straws to a concert near you. It’s that she’s bought into climate hysteria, and she’ll be sharing it with impressionable young fans who literally believe that the world is about to end.
Eilish also tells students to join protests such as Fridays for Future, which encourages children to walk out of class to protest climate change. At her concerts, she’ll have “a ‘Billie Eilish Eco-Village,’ a place where fans can learn more about climate change and becoming more environmentally conscious,” according to The Independent.
It’s a publicity stunt to spread awareness, as well as an alarming signal for fans. They may buy tickets to hear Eilish perform Bad Guy, but they’ll also learn that we’re in a #climatecrisis.
When Thunberg collaborated with The 1975 for a song about climate change, that was enough of a sign that the music industry was crumbling beneath activism. Now Eilish seems poised to make climate issues part of her brand, and as climate hysteria amplifies, her younger fans are the ones who will be listening most closely.
