As a followup on Monday's blog post - Australian government debt approaching $A1 trillion –…
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.
Why, why, why?
I’ll likely have my post scrubbed, but here goes.
Because the average person is a moron. And no, I don’t claim to be intelligent, let alone highly intelligent. But just read some of the reasons people give for supporting ON, or for believing conspiracy theories about Covid-19, vaccines, a flat Earth, UFOs and so on.
I’m sure Dunning-Kruger should get a guernsey in there somewhere.
If I’m lucky (or unlucky!), I’ve got another 25 years on this planet. I have three daughters straddling 30, and I can’t say I’m terribly confident that the planet will be in great shape by then.
What I can say is that they’ll probably do a better job than us.
They certainly can’t do worse.
Identity protection and economic dependence explain the anti-environmental position of parts of the right (and of labor on the left).
Identity and economic dependence go hand-in-glove, of course. People think of themselves as “being” their economic role.
Labor (left and right) knows that the industrial civilization on which we all depend, and which defines the working class, is simply impossible without fossil fuel. Only 20% of energy usage is electricity. Construction, mining, materials (steel, plastics), and agriculture (petrochemicals) are simply not possible without fossil fuel. There is no viable replacement for 80% of our energy usage. We can have a society. We cannot have our current industrial society. Besides, even without carbon emissions, the heat from 2.5% annual real growth will overwhelm life within 100 years.)
Labor generally opposes environmental restrictions, even when that labor is part of a broader left-wing party. There are serious rifts on the left between labor and environmentalists (e.g., within Minnesota’s (*a mining state’s*) Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, the state’s version of the Democratic Party).
Cognitive biases like hyperbolic discounting apply to members of both the left and the right, so such biases can’t explain differences between left and right.
Dear JB (at 2026/09/01 at 2:45 am)
You wrote:
The first part of the sentence is correct, but the conclusion doesn’t follow from the first.
The point is that those on the Left do not have the range of views that those on the Right assert about migration, gender, race, government regulation, acceptance of scientific research findings etc. That is why I mentioned the sovereign citizen cohort on the Right. They hold views that those on the Left would never countenance.
And those driving the agenda (recall the quote from Engels and Marx from The German Ideology) know that they can manipulate those views and spin them into a broad resistance to climate policies.
The presence of hyperbolic discounting in all of us is only a necessary condition.
Those on the Left are more likely to be more highly educated and also more accepting of the established ways in which scientific knowledge is developed and recognised. That alone reduces the impact of the irrationality of the discounting.
If those on the Right had more rational temporal discounting awareness, then it would be harder for the elites from the fossil fuel industry to manipulate the other prejudices. There would be a stronger trade-off.
best wishes
bill
Bill, thanks for this piece. In Bflat no doubt?
When in fact ‘we’ need to B#.
Why do so few people give a damn about the destruction of earth and the ongoing extermination crises?
I’m not sure, but I’ve a sneaking feeling it comes from the same place that genocide-denial comes from, and other unaddressed socio-political-economic turmoils.
There’s a long interview with Bill McGuire * – UK geologist and volcanologist by training – who emphasises that there is no plan for the extreme climactic upheaval that is to come.
The interviewer is not a climate denier.
And is of the UK ‘left.’
Yet, there are two aspects of the interview, from the interviewer’s side, which I found disconcerting.
1) A presumption that human life can exist beyond a certain temperature, something Will Steffen addressed many years ago.
McGuire explains bulb temp but the penny does not drop as the interviewer goes on-and-on about people having access to air-conditioners, failing to recognise that the power to run them comes from coal &/or so-called renewables – neither great from the biosphere.
2) The interviewer only discusses climate catastrophes from an anthropocentric perspective. What’s it mean for people and civilisation (western consumer-driven civilisation).
There is no mention by him of the unfolding and worsening extermination crises.
Which brings me back to the ‘same place’ that climate indifference and genocide-denial spring from: the self has been so centralised in this society, via the urge to splurge on mainly waste products, that all notions and concerns of what others (human and nonhuman) may be experiencing is of no consequence for or to many people.
* Elites Have No Plan for Climate Change, Novara Media, August ’26:
https://novaramedia.com/2026/08/25/elites-have-no-plan-for-climate-change/
Why people believe what they believe is relatively simple to understand, even while it reflects upon one of our dangerous human absurdities. Initially an information belief typically requires that the information be introduced to a person from a trusted source which holds views in accord with one’s biases (tribalism). Presentation of information expressed in simple language that appeals to emotion (there is always a well-known solution to every human problem that is neat, plausible and wrong) goes a long way to affording credibility. On top of that, repetition is key to turning information into a truth belief, all without being passed through a filter of critical thought and analysis.
Edward Bernays showed the way with his famous work Propaganda, published in 1928. Another source of understanding can be found in Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality: The Politics of Mass Media from 1986 where emphasis is placed on power and influence in establishing unchallengeable narratives that become implanted in the heads of the masses. It’s not what is true that counts but what you think is true that is the means of control.
This week-end I was discussing with a friend and my take was a bit a kind shortcut to the core if I may say. My view is that low class people have little or low quality mental stimulus, these days even worse with social media contents being fan out into everyone’s throats. I remember that a few years ago on Facebook I started watching short videos of wild life and for a few weeks/months that was the algorithm suggestions until I dodged those suggestions altogether, period after which the algorithm turned to other stuff. This short story is to say that it’s very easy to get trapped into these low stimulus suggestions and spend your mental energy and time on these endless digital contents. Short time left for reading or watching documentary that takes more than 20 minutes straight. So my take during the conversation with that friend was that very few people cultivate or have the mental energy to discuss the tax system, tax bonus for X or Y that could even not need because they are based in some tax haven jurisdiction, the partial privatization of health care or public transportation or even the energy infrastructure. For most of the population (from highly educated, although less, to the uneducated) the easy targets are the one that are adopted with very few questions asked. The immigration, the fat State spending that has to go (the chainsaw circus), the minorities, etc. These all become easy butter to feed into the fan out systems on social media but increasingly accepted on more mainstream media (TVs, journals, etc) with eloquent or loud speaking chaps. When the media channels become overloaded with such crap, there’s no room for more sophisticated but closer to the reality discussions. But look at Germany: well educated population, completely lost in the way the world works, drowned in the “responsible budgets” and “accurate accounts” fantasies, now taking a hit on the car industry and languishing on the essentials for the well being. They know the system isn’t working as expected but AfD is there collecting the votes for an even more irrational view of the world. All it takes is a clown to regurgitate some hysterical narrative where easy targets have a dedicated paragraph, people are drawn into it like a bee to the honeycomb. There’s more discussion around these topics like how the economies are trapped into fossil fuel dependent activities or deliberate obsolescence, etc. but it’s what people are being fed intellectually (or not) that makes the system kind of immutable.
For almost the whole of human existence, survival depended not upon dominating the natural world but upon understanding it. Human communities flourished because they learned to recognise limits, cultivate reciprocity and cooperate within ecological systems far older than themselves. Civilisation brought extraordinary achievements, yet it also encouraged a gradual forgetting: the belief that humanity had become separate from the living world rather than one participant within it. The history that follows may be read as the unfolding consequences of that forgotten relationship.
Every successful civilisation eventually reaches a point where it possesses sufficient power to ignore the ecological relationships that originally sustained it. The measure of its wisdom is whether it chooses to ignore them.
The principal question, for me, is: Can an intelligent species remember that it belongs to a larger living world before its own success persuades it otherwise? Can enough people recognise a failing trajectory, and choose another, before the conditions that sustain civilisation pass irreversible thresholds?
History suggests that civilisations seldom change until circumstances compel them to do so. The question is whether enough people can recognise the necessity for change while choice still remains – and can convince those who don’t to the error of their ways.
Sadly, I fear it is way too late. And as you note, corporate and media interests, make that task so much harder. When the dam finally bursts, it will render the horrific Nepalese tragedy almost inconsequential.
to Fred
the opening few paras of Bernay’s book are quite chilling.
The fact that he was enlisted by the Wilson presidency to persuade a reluctant US public into sending armed forces into the ‘European War’, and succeeded in doing so serves as a reminder of how easily the masses can be manipulated.
At the same time the Wilson admin was doing its darndest to suppress all ‘left-wing’ and anti-war activism, including jailing, censorship, deportations and the occasional murder.
There’s a free PDF version for those wanting more:
https://dn720002.ca.archive.org/0/items/propaganda-edward-l.-bernays/Propaganda%20-%20Edward%20L.%20Bernays.pdf
Perhaps I am naive, but I think of the Right as the politics of ‘what society can do for me’ and the Left a bit more ‘what I can do for society’ ie people who vote left are more community minded and therefore more likely to try and reduce carbon emissions in order to take care of poorer societies and countries as well as (to a lesser extent) the other species with which we share this planet.
@Mark Russell
I agree that human beings have only survived through the testing of boundaries and limits, and the subsequent understanding of such. You are right however that until we are ‘compelled’ to do so, we cannot change because we have not understood that we are at a limit. No amount of ‘theory’ can compensate for the layperson the crystalline certainty of experience.
In many ways this mirrors the way in which markets have bullish and then correct once it is clear that the ripest investment opportunity has concluded, despite the imminent warnings of overvaluation and a crash etc.
Unfortunately as is suggested (and in fact represented by the economics itself) the efficient connivance of the collective human mind to extend this very long bullish period of human development is very much a product of so many small occasions of the ‘temporal myopia’ that Bill has mentioned: at whatever social level, until the real experience of famine, pestilence and death has made itself present, the determination is on average the same of self-preservation via a minimal change to one’s habits of the accumulation of benefits (wealth, comfort, safety, enjoyment etc.).
The outcome is of course inevitably a disaster in the short-term and if anything good comes from it, it will be a very long-term system of belief that inculcates consumptive modesty and limitation. But it will also have to be a society that does away with the permission of psychological exploitation in the (to mention a name also brought up above) Bernaysian manner, where the unconscious and subconscious processes of human desires are made both completely transparent and clear to the individual, and fully opaque to the potential (and expectedly prohibited) manipulator. Only in these ways can the individual be guarded against the self-detriment of their irrationality and the abuse of the capitalist. To achieve this however, one would imagine the formation of quite a new system of belief, in the wake of some utter catastrophe (which we are likely to face in the coming years).
Hi Drew
“But it will also have to be a society that does away with the permission of psychological exploitation in the (to mention a name also brought up above) Bernaysian manner, where the unconscious and subconscious processes of human desires are made both completely transparent and clear to the individual, and fully opaque to the potential (and expectedly prohibited) manipulator. Only in these ways can the individual be guarded against the self-detriment of their irrationality and the abuse of the capitalist. To achieve this however, one would imagine the formation of quite a new system of belief, in the wake of some utter catastrophe (which we are likely to face in the coming years).”
I would suggest that we impose strict conditions for those individuals who have ambition for power – public or private. A graduated 12 month programme with various psychedelics in a controlled format, testing and recording their response to hypothetical problems. To change the way we live, we must first change the way we think. Such a programme would deliver the results you desire, without bloodshed, fear or extinction.
I would object to Engels and Marx , to their faces were they alive. We are only subject to the mental production of the ruling class if we want to be, or raised to be. Anyone raised by good kind parents will have an independent curious somewhat rebellious mind, not completely mentally subjugated. The problem is these people are too few.
I also have the suspicion that decades of neoliberalism has yielded populations which are almost fully atomized, exhausted and fearful — what could be more propitious circumstances for malign actors armed with the tools identified by Bernays?