LOS ANGELES — When he was 6 years old, Sim Bilal began to have nightmares of floods pouring through his South Los Angeles home.
The bad dreams started when he first watched Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," a seminal documentary about human-driven global warming, with his parents. For years, he struggled with severe anxiety over the fate of the planet. For a time, he would return from school and lie in bed, feeling powerless over the growing climate crisis.
"I'm not a very emotional person, but this is such a huge existential issue," said Bilal, 20. "It's really debilitating."
