The Real Issue in Climate Change

Nobody talks about it.

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

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Like most countries in the world, Australia has committed to the 2015 Paris Agreement target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, a policy with wide community support. In the election in May this year, the opposition Liberal Party was pummeled in large part because of its climate skepticism/denial. This week, however, and apparently preferring oblivion to mere wilderness, they removed the net zero goal from their policies. We haven’t been told why this is necessary but it seems they think there are more votes on the far right fringes than in the centre. Politically, that won’t fly but, as a matter of statistics, they’re on safe ground: we’re not going to reach net zero anyway, so why go to all the trouble and expense of trying? Even though greenhouse gas emissions in China and India are starting to decline, they’re continuing to rise in the US and Europe, as well as Canada and Australia. People can tut tut and say we all ought to install solar panels, buy an EV and turn off our phone chargers, but those moves are mere window dressing. The biggest single cause of greenhouse gas emissions, and the one nobody wants to talk about, is militarism.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2024, total military budgets amounted to $2.75trillion, or about 2.5% of gross world product (GWP). That’s a lot of money but it’s only part of what is spent on the military. Add to that all the spying agencies, all the research that goes into building bigger and faster weapons, the costs of supporting ever-expanding veteran populations, and all the other money hidden in a myriad clever ways. That probably doubles it to about $5.5trillion, but even that’s only part of the total cost of the war business. We need to include the direct cost of all the deaths and injuries, and the destruction of homes, factories, infrastructure (road and rail, schools, hospitals etc), and agriculture. Finally, there’s the opportunity cost of having huge numbers of perfectly healthy, intelligent and disciplined people who need to be fed, housed, clothed, trained etc, spending their careers blowing things up when they could be working constructively. The grand total is somewhere between $17-19trillion a year, meaning about 15% of GWP. That’s a very great deal of money, and it doesn’t include a cash value on grief.

The important point is that the untold millions of people involved in this industry of death, from presidents and prime ministers down to the lowliest private or cleaner in a factory, couldn’t give a rat’s arse about global warming. They simply don’t care. It’s not that none of them believe it, because obviously some do, it’s that they don’t care. It doesn’t get more than a brief flicker of their attention once or twice a year because they have much more important things to think about, like working out how to destroy anybody who disagrees with them. For them, there is no greater pleasure than roaring around the place in trucks or tanks, ships or jets, or watching the pretty explosions or smoke billowing from burning cities. They truly love the smell of napalm in the morning. Compared with the exquisite delight of fighting today, worrying about floods in slums in Jakarta in 25 years time seems pretty insipid.

Maybe we shouldn’t expect troops or lowly factory workers to look that far ahead but we pay our politicians to think ahead, except they don’t do it. Have the US and Israeli governments given any thought to all the CO₂ that will be released by producing enough concrete to rehouse the 2million survivors of Gaza? We can be sure that thought hasn’t entered their heads. In fact, like all governments, they’re very good at diverting attention away from military greenhouse gas production. It isn’t widely known, for example, that the US military alone consumes 4% of the world’s liquid fuels each year. The costs of producing weapons are hidden in “industry,” of moving armies and navies around the world goes under “transport,” all the research on autonomous vehicles actually comes from military budgets for drones and mechanical dogs, the original internet was funded by DARPA, and so on. Nobody knows how far militarism is pushing us toward climate catastrophe, and that’s exactly how our lords and masters want to keep it. As long as we’re concerned with methane from landfill or light pollution dazzling migrating birds, and we’re not poking around their privates, they’re happy.

At this stage, my view is that we’re going to hell on a hang glider. While governments argue back and forth at their COP conferences, the reality is that, without bringing militarism under control, there is zero chance of preventing climate catastrophe. That doesn’t even start on their nuclear weapons, which are back in the news. Herr Drumpf saw something on TV about Russia successfully testing a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Having heard the words ‘nuclear’ and ‘test’ in the same sentence, he promptly announced that the US would resume nuclear testing because that’s what dementing people do, they misunderstand and react at a reflex level. Fortunately, the people who know about nuclear tests are letting it die quietly but it reminds us that these things haven’t gone away, that idiots have still got the controls. And if climate change doesn’t get us slowly, they’ve got a back-up plan called nuclear winter. Bearing in mind that the people with all the money and the guns are convinced they’re right, and will fight anybody to prove it, it’s definitely not encouraging. So what do they believe? That’s where it gets confusing.

I’ve mentioned before that until the 1930s, the great majority of the educated and wealthy elite in the West firmly believed there is a hierarchy of races, and that the superior races were both entitled and duty-bound to rule the rest. Needless to say, the same educated and wealthy elite firmly believed that the white races were the pinnacle of creation, that males were intended to dominate females, and that they themselves were the crème de la crème and should have all the power. These ideas took a hammering after the horrors of World War II but they definitely haven’t gone away. Most people aren’t quite so open about it now but they still believe in the notion of inherent superiority. It’s no longer overtly racist but comes dressed in soothing, self-justifying language, such as appeals to freedom and democracy, opposing terror and repression, or searching for weapons of mass destruction and such like. The slogans may change but the message remains the same: We want to dominate you. Naturally enough, the people on the receiving end have other ideas. While one group tries to dominate another, there will be no peace and the world will continue on its accelerating slide to climate catastrophe. Which group tries hardest to be dominant? The wealthy, white, Western elite, that’s who.

We see this daily in Trump’s disinhibited threats and rants. If somebody doesn’t do as he says, he immediately says “We’ll put tariffs on you,” followed by escalating threats of violence. Now, for no reason other than he can, he has moved major forces to the Caribbean to threaten Venezuela, as though the world needs another forever war. However, the only difference between Trump and his predecessors is that he says out loud what they mostly kept to themselves. Sometimes, they blurt it out, as former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said: “If we have to use force, it’s because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” When challenged over the deaths of half a million Iraqi children following the American sanctions, she said she believed the price was worth it. This is the attitude driving the political agenda today, more commonly known as Orientalism. The term comes from Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American author and literary critic, who published a major work by the same name in 1978. Stripped of all pretence, this pervasive notion means something like:

Orientals (everybody east of Greece, or maybe even east of the Danube) are inherently lazy, dishonest and aggressive. They are acultural savages with a bloodthirsty religion who can only be tamed with a whip, and who, because of ancient rivalries and hatreds, are incapable of cooperating with each other or with outsiders who try to help. Because of religious repression and the hot climate, they’re sex-mad and therefore even less trustworthy.

Agreed, Edward Said did not put it that way but that’s the attitude driving Albright’s insouciant line about half a million dead children: Hmm, yeah, we can live with that. Also, implied but not stated is the notion that Orientals are only lazy, dishonest, aggressive etc. by comparison with some other group. By default, that’s the wealthy, white, Western elite who rate themselves as diligent, responsible, stable, sophisticated, liberal, progressive, rational/scientific (not swayed by religion) and (ask Mme Albright) far-sighted. Essentially, we whites are the adults while them coloured folks are just children.

Two things flow from this. First is the belief that, given those characteristics, oil is dangerous for Orientals, like letting children loose in a sweet shop or giving eleven year olds fully functioning sexual organs. Inevitably, oil causes massive corruption and instability, inflaming their ancestral tribal hostilities, so it must be controlled by the West for the good order and peace of the world. It’s actually a charitable act by the West but it isn’t easy as Orientals are intensely jealous of the cultured, sophisticated, intellectually advanced West, and they always resist progress. This takes the form of anti-white and antisemitic racism which spills into terrorism and therefore, reluctantly, has to be contained forcibly. After the World Trade Centre attack in 2001, George Bush went to Congress for permission to invade Afghanistan. I’m sure he believed exactly what he told the House:

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber – a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

In fact, they hate being treated as second rate human beings while their national assets are stripped and sold for a pittance so the West can enjoy a high standard of living. Their anticolonial rage is reframed as insane jealousy and blood lust which has to be smashed down time and time again as they don’t learn – “mowing the grass,” as the Israelis put it. Their resistance is not seen as a legitimate response to Western actions: this week, The Economist turned history on its head when it talked about “… America’s engagement in wars and regime change in response to terrorism …” Sorry, America’s wars and coups create the terrorism. There was no terrorism in West Asia until Europeans arrived, they brought it, but these are the entrenched attitudes of the Western narrative known as Orientalism. It is all about domination, the primitive human urge to subjugate anybody within reach just because it feels better. This produces militarism, and militarism is driving the world to thermal destruction – if the nuclear bombs don’t get us first.

We are now entering a vicious circle, a “doom loop,” as they say, where militarism is accelerating climate change, which causes wars over water and resources and produces flows of refugees, all of which have to be resisted by … more militarism. Pace Homer Simpson: militarism it the cause of all the world’s problems but it isn’t the solution. Arnold Toynbee nailed it: “Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.” In fact, militarism makes all the arts of peace impossible. There is no question that civilisation as we know it is heading for the cliff, just because humans in power are addicted to the thrill of domination and always want more, while those underfoothave no choice but to fight for their freedom.

What can we ordinary mortals do about this? First step is to recognise that this is what is going on, to move beyond the infantile notion of “Us rational and caring Westerners trying to control the irrational Orientals,” i.e. the old Good vs Bad notion drummed into us from infancy. This has to be replaced with an unbiased view. How do we get this? Simple. Just reverse the settings and players and see how you would like it. In 1942, as Imperial Japan was sweeping down through SE Asia, Australians got very twitchy about the idea of being colonised by “Asiatics.” They didn’t like that idea one little bit and still don’t: daily, we are fed the notion that we have to arm ourselves against the Chinese threat, discreetly overlooking the fact that we are now a vassal state of the US of A. If we don’t want to be dominated by foreigners, is there any reason why Iranians would? I don’t think so. Second step is to try to impress this on other people, especially those in power. They won’t want to listen, of course, they’re having too much fun to want to change but that’s no reason to give up because until we get sensible people in power, we’re heading for the S-bend at speed. A while ago, a British ambassador reported:

I have the impression that the people directing the policy of this government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fanatics, hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.

No, it wasn’t the country you’re thinking of. It was Sir Horace Rumbold, reporting in June 1933, from Berlin. And look where they took it.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.