The media frames the climate crisis as if there were no solutions or action to be taken. //

• Yes, the climate news is bad, but there's action to be taken.
  Our hopelessness comes from a media system that doesn't place the blame on corporations to protect their bottom line.
  We have to change our media diet if we want to feel less hopeless about climate change.
  P.E. Moskowitz is an author, runs Mental Hellth, a newsletter about capitalism and psychology, and is a contributing opinion writer for Insider. //

The climate crisis news is constant: Wildfires start earlier and earlier in the year in California, extreme weather floods places not built to handle extreme weather, the Arctic is melting, and the world keeps getting hotter — all with no sign of stopping. And now the UN has said we can't avoid many of the worst impacts of global warming, no matter how hard we try.

Given the overwhelming negativity, it makes sense that people are either in denial about the magnitude of the problem, or end up feeling hopeless, defeated, and without recourse. The media spent the last few decades simply convincing people the issue was real. But that war has been won: Only 10% percent of Americans don't believe in the climate crisis at this point.

Now, we face a new problem: None of us know what to do.

While a large majority of Americans agree we need to act on the climate crisis, no one seems to know exactly what we should do, except push our government to do more. 40% of people who believe in climate change feel "helpless" about it.

But this helplessness is not an inevitable result of the severity of the crisis — severe as it may be. Instead, it's a conditioned response to a world in which the most powerful politicians and corporations want to cast the issue as too difficult and overly complex. To protect their bottom line, those in power want to obfuscate what should be an obvious truth: We can only stop global warming if we end fossil fuel extraction. And we can only do that through direct action, protest, and political revolt.