Companies selling consumer products - the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you might as well drink a White Claw, buy a Prada bag, and eat a Popeye's chicken sandwich. Damn the future, spend now.

Politicians - if you can pump up a crisis, and present yourself as the solution to that crisis, gold and power flows into your hands.

Ok, I can maybe give you consumer products, but you could equally argue that they benefit as much from happy complacency as from despair.

Have any politicians in the West in the last three decades run successfully on a hard-environmentalism and anti-poverty campaign?

The crisis that's been political gold recently has been human migration, but it doesn't seem to me that the voters animated by that issue are feeling anxious and despondent. (Maybe they are, it's a little hard for me to relate to that mindset) They seem absolutely furious and enjoying their revanchist political power.

Journalists and politicians of course. Journalists because that kind of stuff drives eyeballs which result in ad clicks and subscriptions if they have a paywall and thus money. Politicians because it grabs people's attentions which hopefully then results in them getting voted into office.