Why do we support political inaction that undermines our well-being?

I have been very sad in the last week or so as the news of the environmental devastation and its impact on human life in Nepal has steadily infiltrated our attention. The causes of that disaster are many but overwhelmingly point to the impact of climate change on the Himalayan permafrost and glacial lakes, which, in turn, is undermining the water and food security of mostly materially poor communities. But there is also the impact of inequality which sees the least advantaged members of those communities with inadequate housing and clustered, instead, in flimsy huts and dwellings along river banks that make them the most vulnerable when these disasters occur. Over the weekend, a major political event occurred in the state of Western Australia, where the far Right loony party, One Nation scored a significant political victory in the by election and signalled that both major parties (Liberal and Labour) are now in danger of being swept away by this far Right push, which is mimicking the trends across the globe. The relevance of between the two seemingly disparate events is that the One Nation leadership spoke at a rally yesterday (August 30, 2026) in Victoria and promised that if elected to federal government at the next election they will ramp up investment in coal power and abandon renewable energy and carbon emissions targets and expand mining (Source). I have been researching why the Right is leading the charge on climate denialism and why low income people are being increasingly attracted to their ideas that run counter to the well established scientific evidence and empirical realities that unfold on a regular basis that support the contentions of the scientists. The story that unfolds also bears on why mainstream macroeconomic fictions continue to dominate our thinking about policy despite the massive harm their implementation does to the well-being of societies. This is an on-going theme that I am working on.

On July 18, 64AD, the – Great Fire of Rome – started near Circus Maximus and raged for a further nine days and destroyed about 75 per cent of the city’s infrastructure.

It began the purge of Christians, who were blamed by the Emperor but some evidence suggests that Nero, himself, engaged a gang to set fire to the city to clear space for a new palace.

The reality was that the city’s population had expanded beyond the capacity of the space to safely accommodate such a density.

The legend is that Nero watched the fire while playing a – Lyre – which spawned the expression that Nero played the – fiddle while Rome burns

I haven’t done any research on the veracity of what happened in Rome in 64AD but the modern meaning of the expression – “to enjoy yourself or continue working as normal and not give any attention to something important and unpleasant that is happening that you should be taking action to prevent” – is clearly applicable to the way our political class is responding to the climate emergency.

But what interests me is why?

Why is the Right, in particular, leading the charge against climate action?

The answer is not so simple and goes beyond the claim that they are just ignorant.

The Right, of course, is not a single entity.

There are many components and segmenting them is one way to find out what is driving the political narrative that comes out of the far Right politicians.

On one level, it is the familiar tale of the myopia of Capitalism – vested interests being protected now without reference to tomorrow.

There was an interesting study published in Volume 49, Issue 3 of the American Sociological Association’s journal – Footnotes.

The article – The Structure and Culture of Climate Change Denial – appeared in the special 2021 edition dedicated to “Why the Environment Needs a Course Correction Now”.

The academic author, Jeremiah Bohr studies climate change denial and the machinations of Donald Trump’s political team in garnering support.

Of interest is the way, this cohort “strategically adapt” to the mounting evidence.

It is no longer a simple denial of the climate changes.

New narratives evolve, such as:

“climate change is happening but humans are not driving it,” and “climate change is happening but it is nothing to worry about.”

Importantly, the political narratives are never really about building an alternative “fact-based objections to mainstream scientific consensus”.

They just concentrate on coordinating political messaging aims at denigrating attacks on “fossil fuel-based economic growth strategies”.

The author concludes that:

… the tactics used to frame scientists as corrupt, activists as antiprogress, corporations as “woke,” or journalists as liars, represent a crucial element of the contemporary climate change denial movement.

There are layers of the populace that must coordinate to further this strategy.

And the driving force, which should come as no surprise, are the capital elites that seek in whatever way they can to maintain their hegemony in the system.

Those who have studied the writing of Karl Marx will immediately know that he wrote extensively about the way that capital manipulates what he called the ‘economic base’ to condition what he called the ‘social, legal, and political superstructure’.

It was Antonio Gramsci who coined the term ‘hegemony’ but it was the foundational work of Marx that provided the substance to the terminology.

In the 1845 book – German Ideology – Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx wrote:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

The evidence is clear – large capital interests have pursued private gain and promoted it as a societal good.

Any fallout from that pursuit is pushed back onto society.

Jeremiah Blor wrote (cited above):

To do this successfully, industry actors coordinate public relations campaigns and prop up their own set of experts to deny their industries have contributed to harming public health.

He rehearses the influence that the tobacco industry has had on delaying health legislation regarding the damages of smoking and considers the fossil-fuel industry to be pursuing similar strategies.

And:

A mixture of corporations in the fossil fuel industry (e.g., ExxonMobil), trade associations (e.g., National Association of Manufacturers), conservative philanthropists (e.g., The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation), and conservative think tanks make up the coalition of organized climate change denial.

The corporations feed the think tanks (funding) which reciprocate with a constant stream of press releases, confected ‘research papers’, newsletters, social media output and large events.

There is a proliferation of such think tanks and their emergence (mostly) can be traced back to the strategies laid out in the 1971 pro-capital, Powell Manifesto.

I analysed the so-called Memorandum in this post –
The right-wing counter attack – 1971 (March 24, 2016).

And, if you search my blog you will find several applications of the Manifesto to higher education in particular.

See also the Al Jazeera article – A corporate blueprint to dominate democracy

The fossil fuel lobby also captures the political class who are convinced that continuing provision of what they constantly call ‘cheap energy’ is essential for their political survival.

It is no surprise that voting patterns in legislatures closely follow the funding that political machines receive from the corporate lobbyists.

Green activism is traditionally funded – on a shoestring – while the climate denialists are extremely well funded by the corporations with vested interests.

One Nation in Australia is heavily funded by Gina Rinehart and her mining wealth.

Some years ago I read an article published by Greenpeace (I was doing modelling work for them around then) – Exposing the dirty money behind fake climate science (March 30, 2010) – which documented the funding role that the Koch Brothers played in promoting climate denialism.

A systematic network of “thinktanks and activist groups” were liberally funded to develop an anti-climate change narrative.

None of this is surprising and there is so much scholarly work that has been done to trace these funding linkages and the motivations.

The question that attracted my interest is why people who are seemingly most damaged by the increasing sequence of climate-related disasters appear to be among the most vehement supporters of the climate denial narratives.

One answer would explore the ideological dimensions that focus on anti-government suspicions and international conspiracies (elite cabals seeking to dominate us).

This trend intersects with historically ancient human prejudices such as anti-Semitism (the Jews run these secret cabals stuff).

Remember back to when the vaccines for Covid first came out we were confronted with claims that there were micro chips floating around in the liquid that were to be used by government to control us.

In Australia, there has been the documented rise of so-called sovereign citizens, who use “pseudolegal” arguments to argue that they are being oppressed by authoritarian governments.

The Judicial Commission of New South Wales published an information sheet – Sovereign citizens: ideology, impacts and judicial responses – which documents this rise.

These type of movements are global now and share common elements such as being anti-immigration, which intersects with long-standing racist tendencies within humanity.

Spurious claims are constantly being made about foreigners stealing our jobs, our houses, etc.

The whole attack on ‘wokeism’ is based in this sort of suspicion about the academy, government, and established knowledge.

Importantly, these citizen-based movements are easily coopted by the fossil fuel industry who only have to run the narrative about ‘big government’ seeking to ‘undermine our livelihoods’ with ‘zero emissions legislation’ for the co-option to be complete and street marches resources with hoards of chanting people not realising how they are being used.

A constellation of ‘hates’ and ‘suspicions’ are harnessed and young men in particular march around in black balaclavas demonstrating allegiance to the ideas of Adolf Hitler with some shouting about climate denial thrown in for good measure.

But there is still more I think.

So I started to explore the concept of ‘temporal myopia’ which is a human condition that militates against effective long-term planning (Source – ignore the reference to government debt!)

Humans have “a strong built-in bias towards immediate gratification”, which maybe an evolutionary trait that goes back to when survival was difficult.

But now for most people:

… the biggest threats to human beings arise from the lack of long-term thinking. Yet, as a consequence of our evolutionarily inherited present bias, we tend to make temporally myopic decisions that influence not only our health and finances, but also encourage us to elect officials who promise short-term “solutions” aimed at exploiting our shortsightedness rather than actually solving problems.

And with a bevy of well-funded organisations constantly telling us that our ‘short-term’ is about to be devastated by woke government legislation, it is easy to see how the elites commandeer an ‘army’ of activists and voters to act against their own self-interest and oppose any climate mitigation even when glaciers are melting and killing thousands.

There is a growing body of academic research that documents the way we irrationally discount the future when making decisions in relation to climate change.

The idea of future discounting has been well-studied by behavioural economists especially in relation to decision-making with respect to health and finances.

Now the ideas are being applied to climate change resistance.

Temporal myopia is linked to ‘Present bias’, which is “cognitive tendency that is well-documented, makes people like immediate
rewards more than larger future benefits, although long-term losses result” (a quote from the next cited article).

The study (May 2025) – Present Bias vs. Future Gains: Temporal Discounting in Climate Decision-Making – by a researcher at the University of Łódź, found that:

People do frequently discount future outcomes at such irrational rates. When one applies it toward climate change, this bias manifests in delaying investments in renewable energy, barely adopting energy-efficient technologies, and inadequately supporting policies with long-term environmental benefits.

The “irrational discounting” is known as “hyperbolic discounting” and basically means that when making choices now about things that will have long-term consequences we exaggerate the ‘smallness’ of the future events and increase the importance of what we get (or lose) now – “immediate costs appear more important than delayed benefits”.

The UK Guardian article (November 10, 2024) – Your brain on climate change: why the threat produces apathy, not action – provided a layperson’s summary of this phenomenon.

In spite of the overwhelming scientific evidence of an impending climate catastrophe, people still behave irrationally in a temporal way.

Any event that is uncertain and slow moving in its consequences is not really capable of being properly evaluated by our brains.

Conclusion

There is obviously a lot more to this enquiry.

But it helps to explain why voters in Western Australia were happy to overturn the establishment politics and vote for a party that promises short-term gratification in the most amorphous way – ‘getting the woke out of the system’ type promises, while the Himalayan tragedy is another example of a climate degradation that is closing in on all of us and will devastate our well-being and social stability.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2026 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.