Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The latest fantasy figure for international climate aid is $300 billion a year, to be paid by a diminishing band of Net Zero fanatical countries (looking at you Europe). But at least, come 2050, when the world is awash with green riches with energy too cheap to meter, it will all be worthwhile, and the scam – pardon – worthwhile investment can stop. If only. Look no further than the three countries that on many counts have already hit Net Zero, namely Suriname, Panama and Bhutan, for guidance on future investment demands.
The latest fantasy figure for international climate aid is $300 billion a year, to be paid by a diminishing band of Net Zero fanatical countries (looking at you Europe). But at least, come 2050, when the world is awash with green riches with energy too cheap to meter, it will all be worthwhile, and the scam – pardon – worthwhile investment can stop. If only. Look no further than the three countries that on many counts have already hit Net Zero, namely Suriname, Panama and Bhutan, for guidance on future investment demands. All three countries are heavily forested and all demand billions of dollars to keep these ‘carbon’ sinks in place. Sustainability is the name of the game, or to put it another way: ‘Nice little forest we got here. Shame if anything happened to it.’
Suriname is a small South American country with a population of just 640,000 and an annual GDP of $4.5 billion. In its latest UN Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) it asks for $4.5 billion to be paid over the next decade to reaffirm its commitment to remaining carbon negative through “forest preservation”. Money is also sought from many other international sources, and the country is a leading light in the cash for ‘climate justice’ shake down. Panama is also keen on maintaining its carbon neutrality status, but, needless to say, such virtue does not come cheap. In its latest NDC, the country seems wary of producing cash figures but there is one mention of the need for $1.23 billion for 21 adaptation initiatives. A recently announced plan for a dedicated nature conservancy plan calls for new, additional, predictable, assessable and non-debt increasing international aid. In other words, a regular one-way lorry load of cash.
As the Daily Sceptic reported recently, the big winner in this giant Net Zero cash protection scheme is Bhutan. This small, landlocked country in the eastern Himalayas has huge hydroelectric power, while 93% of the land is carpeted with carbon dioxide absorbing forest. As the poster country for Net Zero, its demands for waterfalls of cash are suitably impressive. With a population of only 800,000 and a GDP of around $3 billion, it notes in its latest NDC that it requires “continued and predictable” financial support amounting to $13.7 billion over the next decade.
In the land of the Net Zero cult, cash might not be God, but it is a deeply religious experience. Sadly, the collection plate has come back a bit light of late. In America, President Trump has ruthlessly cut federal funds for both domestic and international Net Zero boondoggles. The United Nations, which is the ringmaster for pumping up climate panic, is talking about financial collapse after the Americans withdrew the feeding bottle. Indeed, the Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently spoke of the organisation being on the “brink of bankruptcy”. But then this particularly clownish act often gives a passable impression of complete derangement having recently claimed that the era of “global boiling” had arrived.
No doubt some international aid does environmental good in the developing world once it has passed through the sticky fingers of those on the crowded bandwagon from politicians to NGOs. But the stories of waste and misappropriation are legendary. In 2023, a database of ‘climate finance’ was compiled by Reuters in collaboration with researchers from Big Local News. Drawn together from UN data filed by countries signed up to what was then a $100 billion annual pledge, it highlighted spending from 2015-2020 on new coal and gas-fired power stations, along with airport and hotel developments. At the time, it seems that a number of countries were sticking a ‘climate’ tag on already existing foreign aid commitments.
At least oil and gas plants are more useful than hopeless wind turbines. Different considerations were no doubt applied for the Italian contributions that helped a retailer set up a chain of chocolate and gelato stores across Asia. Persuading an Italian to open an ice cream shop does not normally require subsidies from the taxpayer. Meanwhile, the Belgians chipped in with funding for a romantic film about a green activist and a rugby-playing logger set in the rainforest. The film does not appear to have had a large distribution but one can only hope that in the end the chap managed to get his log over.
Getting screwed is the name of the game for long-suffering taxpayers in the developed world. In the last 20 years, average income in the Maldives has quintupled to around $19,000, helped by a massive growth in the tourism industry. The Maldives is one of those chains of Pacific islands where constant mainstream fears of inundation by sea level rise are matched by frequently ignored scientific data showing overall land growth. There has been huge recent development of infrastructure including hotels and airports. The country promises to reduce its emissions, but this is said to be “conditional” on collecting “adequate international support”. Primary areas for support are said to be renewable electricity and waste management. Many resort hotels continue to pump some untreated sewage into the sea.
The Maldives offers an idyllic tropical vacation for high-end tourists. It is not immediately clear why they, along with the increasingly wealthy owners of local businesses, cannot pay for necessary sewage facilities, rather than poorer taxpayers thousands of miles away who might only dream of such a holiday.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that the organization faces “imminent financial collapse” due to unpaid member state dues and rigid budget rules, with cash potentially running out by July 2026.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that the organization faces “imminent financial collapse” due to unpaid member state dues and rigid budget rules, with cash potentially running out by July 2026.
Key points from reports:
The UN ended 2025 with a record $1.568 billion in outstanding dues (more than double the prior year), with collections covering only about 76.7% of assessed contributions.
The US, as the largest contributor (typically around 22% of the regular budget), owes billions—estimates include roughly $2.2 billion to the regular budget and additional amounts for peacekeeping (around $1.8–$1.88 billion for active missions).
Contributing factors include unpaid mandatory dues, a rule requiring the UN to return unspent funds to members (creating a “Kafkaesque cycle” per Guterres), and cuts/withdrawals under Trump.
In early January 2026, the US withdrew from dozens of international organizations, including 31 UN entities (e.g., certain agencies tied to climate, gender equality, and others deemed contrary to US interests or wasteful). This involved slashing voluntary funding and withholding or delaying some mandatory payments.
Guterres urged members to pay in full and on time or overhaul financial rules to avert collapse, without directly naming the US in the letter, though context points heavily to it as the primary cause of the shortfall.
Potential impacts: Threatened program delivery, possible closure of New York headquarters by August if unresolved, and risks to operations like peacekeeping and humanitarian aid.
He blamed unpaid fees and a budget rule that forces the global body to return unspent money, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Friday.
The UN has struggled for cash after the US – its largest contributor – cut voluntary funding to the body’s agencies and refused to make payments to its regular and peacekeeping budgets.
Earlier this month, Washington announced the US would withdraw and cease funding for 31 UN entities, including a climate treaty and body promoting gender equality.
Mr Guterres told Washington at the time that it had a legal obligation to pay its contributions to the budgets.
“The crisis is deepening, threatening programme delivery and risking financial collapse. And the situation will deteriorate further in the near future,” Mr Guterres wrote in a letter to ambassadors dated Jan 28.
“Decisions not to honour assessed contributions that finance a significant share of the approved regular budget have now been formally announced.”
It was not clear which members he was referring to, and a UN spokesman did not immediately respond to The Telegraph for comment.
Mr Guterres urged all member states to “honour their obligations to pay in full and on time” or to “fundamentally overhaul our financial rules to prevent an imminent financial collapse”.
For Northern Hemisphere readers, Australian football (AFL) has its own rules – there is no ‘offside’ rule – and the Final draws a crowd of 100,000. Monash University is ranked by THE at 58th worldwide and has nearly 60,000 students, plus more at overseas campuses.
For Northern Hemisphere readers, Australian football (AFL) has its own rules – there is no ‘offside’ rule – and the Final draws a crowd of 100,000. Monash University is ranked by THE at 58th worldwide and has nearly 60,000 students, plus more at overseas campuses.
Today’s AFL Grand Final between Brisbane Lions and Geelong has fans at peak excitement. But for other groups, their real excitement is how many top footballers they can draft to spout alarm about global warming.
As background, The UN chief Antonio Guterres warns about what he calls climate carnage, “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived”, insisting “we are now in a battle for our lives” because “humanity has opened the gates of Hell!” With Hell’s gates a-yawning, which team wins today seems almost a secondary issue.
A lot of footy fans are cheesed off with footy being politicised. When Monash academics surveyed nearly 600 fans, these views popped up in the “comments” box:
♦ “Sporting clubs/organisations should stick to sport not be pushing inane social dogmas! Sick of it…”
♦ “Please explain what makes an AFL/AFLW player a “Climate Change” expert??????”
♦ “AFL clubs should get on with the business of playing footy and only speak on issues such as drugs and domestic violence and the like.”
♦ “I would actively withdraw my financial membership if a club started spouting about climate change.”
♦ “AFL and its players should stick to what they get paid to do; play football and butt out of political agendas like climate change!!!”
If there’s any real problem, it’s that footie people’s climate spiel has to jostle for air-time with messaging about Marngrook matches on Naarm’s unceded lands[1], respect for LGBTQIAs, Snoop Dogg attention-grabbing and “free free Palestine!”
The climate crazies are targeting footie and other big sports because the players and execs carry credibility, and because they’d like to co-opt the fan base of millions to pressure politicians to net zero. Almost everyone loves sport and the net zero-ists hope to deflect some of this love to their pernicious cause.
I’ll start with the Monash Hub, which hosts more than 100 career climate bedwetters. On climate, the Hub makes every other League of Eight campus, even uber-green Melbourne University, seem like wimps. Its openly declared strategy is to piggyback (or parasite) its climate spruiking onto already popular sports, “rather than to think that the message is powerful enough to gain attention by itself.” It seeks out those hosts by “extensive research into the ‘attention economy’ of national media ecosystems.”
The Hub’s biggest sports effort was its survey for the “FrontRunners” lobbyists on “AFL fans’ perception of climate change and of AFL action on climate change.”
The questions are loaded with anti-emissions virtue signalling. The Hub says,
Relatively large proportions of those surveyed remained undecided or neutral for many of the questions. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but suggests that clubs & players’ capacity as environmental spokespeople hasn’t fully been considered by fans and might require priming.
The Hub surveyed 567 un-primed fans and found most want more club and AFL climate action. We also learn that there’s a hard core of 10% of fans “who don’t believe in climate change and do not support AFL action on climate change.” According to the Hub,
Only 15% want “AFL clubs to butt out of climate spruiking: This suggests clubs provide an important place to begin climate communication initiatives.”
Dopey survey questions included, “Do you think climate change is happening?” Since it’s been happening here for the past 4.5 billion years, I also doubt it has stopped. In the event, 70% agreed climate change was happening, which the Hub somehow viewed as “accepting the scientific consensus”. A quarter of fans sampled had no idea, and 7% thought it was all utter nonsense.
Another inane question was whether climate change will impact how AFL and local-club footy “is played professionally”. Half the fans said yes and a quarter said no.
Fans were asked if Australian sport “had already felt the impacts of climate change, such as extreme heat, flooding, heavy storms, drought?” The Hub ensured it got a “yes” answer (83%) because, against IPCC evidence, it had defined climate change as bad weather.
Question:“How worried are you about climate change?” Three quarters were a bit or a lot worried, and one quarter couldn’t care less. And so the survey went on – “How much do you think climate change will harm you personally?” (80% – some hurting or a lot). “How much do you think climate change will harm future generations?” (90% fearful, 10% don’t give a stuff).
Asked if AFL players should deliver opinions on “social and environmental issues”, 43% said yes and a quarter said no. On players spouting climate, only 40% approved versus 27% disapproving.
Would fans pay “a slight increase” in member fees to finance AFL climate action? More than half agreed, but none knew what was meant by “slight” (20% were not fee-paying members anyway).The Hub has always taken the cake for weirdness – see here. I kid you not, this Hub — or better, “hubbub” — has been hosting
♦ Inspirational climate poetry about Bat Piles by its three-year resident poetess Ms Amanda Anastasi. As the Hub explains,
“a range of poetry that captures the science, politics, impacts and ways ofimagining climate change futures. The poems here include one line poems that anticipate a world changed by climate, as well as longer poems in which climate is infused with everyday life in confronting ways.”
“My Dear Friend, no one around us is taking us seriously, her [the planet’s] symptoms worsen by the day … they are appearing sooner and with more ferocity than I thought they would. She is crying out in pain, crying out for help … I feel so lost. Some days I feel like I need to scream at the top of my lungs. “JUST DO SOMETHING!!!”, but I am running out of energy…. I’ll continue fighting for her. Because if we don’t, who will?”
Right now the Hub and contiguously-green Casey City Council are creating climate lessons for high-schoolers, called Empowering Youth for Climate Action. The cost to Casey ratepayers is at least $18,000. The draft lessons are supposed to be online for public inspection, but the Hub has emailed me that they’re not, at least not yet. The Hub’s blurb goes,
Young people need opportunities to engage in climate action and educators require the skills to facilitate this engagement inside and outside of STEM subjects.[2] This pilot project aims to equip high school students with the knowledge and practical tools to address climate change in their homes, schools and communities. [I’m not sure how anyone “addresses” climate change, the usual dopey verb is “tackle”]. Over 12 months [to March 2026], this project brings together teachers and students from schools in the City of Casey alongside local scientists to co-design hands-on climate and energy lesson plans aligned with the Victorian Curriculum.”
When the teenagers, teachers and “local scientists” (heaven knows who they are and what their qualifications might be) have nutted out their brainwash blueprints, organisers will trial draft lessons in classrooms as “action-research” projects. I don’t know whether they’ll deliver their climate texts in poetry or prose, perhaps with music added.The Hub is run by Director Libby Lester, like me a former hack at The Age, but unlike me internationally famous for her studies of the legacy media’s promoting of Net Zero. Until last year she ran the Institute for Social Change at Tasmania University, a campus-rated global top for “Climate Action”. This is an awesome career result, climate alarmism being such a competitive academic specialty.
I took a squiz at Libby Lester’s research output[3] and its quantity is impressive. However, Libby seems to be working with gritted teeth on her sport news analyses, unhappy that popular matches could “generate adverse ecological impacts”. It’s fair to say she’s not big fan of motor sport, for example. Her paper Formula One and the insanity of car-based transportation says,
Formula 1 is among the most environmentally destructive practices today, not least as a sign of the legitimacy of an unsustainable car culture.
Do any Hub academics own cars?
It also indexes the power of a lapsed, amateur hegemonic masculinity and its technocratic equivalent today. The greenwashing done by and for the industry must be systematically unmasked and criticized.
Now try Libby’s,”Environmental protest and tap-dancing with the media in the information age.” I never did any tap-dancing at The Age, with or without environmental protesters burning the floor Riverdance-style. But don’t mock journos’ tap-dancing, it’s lauded by a certain Manuel Castells, whom Libby calls the “pre-eminent theorist of the information age and the network society … His explanation of this dance and its choreography, however, is overly general, ignoring its specific features and workings in terms of representation.”When not tap-dancing with media reptiles, radical environmentalists enjoy sitting in trees. Specifically, Professor Lester has chronicled the 449-day tree-sit of Ms Miranda Gibson “living on a small platform 60 metres above the ground in an ancient gum tree” near Tasmania’s Tyenna Forest hamlet of Maydena.
At the time (2011-13), Miranda was a high school teacher specializing in society, environment, and English studies. She equipped her perch in the “Observer Tree” with a solar powered laptop for live-streaming to fellow-activists, a rain-proof canopy and a bucket (don’t ask!).
Pro-loggers ran their own demos at ground level. To escape a bushfire (perhaps someone lit it), Miranda eventually shimmied down. Proud but disappointed, she segued to road-blockading. See the movie about her here. Could it be she is now sitting in another tree on a forest-topped Queensland mountain to protest clear-felling to make room for and access to wind turbines? Probably not.
“This [academic] article responds to the recent call made in Sport in Society for scholarship that examines the social and political tensions of the age through cricket. Cricket is shown to be an international sport that emphasises the material, political and symbolic realities of the global climate crisis … a constellation of sporting, political, media and environmental actors are working to establish and communicate a new normative consensus about the game’s role in averting the worst impacts of climate change…
The urgency of these efforts is underpinned by the sport’s particular susceptibility to extreme heat, drought, rain and flooding, now and into the future.”It did occur to me that Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis enjoy cricket although it gets more hot and muggy over there than at the MCG.
“political, social, and cultural issues, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, commercialism, nationalism, and citizenship… an urgent next step is to imagine what a post-carbon media sports cultural complex looks like, and to assess how media sport might contribute to a fundamental transformation in the resource and energy foundations of global society.”
A Hub strategy is to put out plausible-looking “reports”, see here, on cricket, tennis and cycling for gullible and leftist media, especially the ABC. The scare stuff is also welcomed by non-gullible media such as the Communist Party-run Xinhua Net digital agency.[4] (The more the West cripples itself with renewables, the better China likes it).
“Cricket Australia has the opportunity to not only reduce its overall climate impact and mitigate the impacts of extreme heat on its players, but to mobilise its huge nationalaudience on the importance of collective climate action from every sector of the community.”
The reports argue heat is getting so dire that January contests need to be switched to November or March. The Hub warns top organisations to ditch fossil-fuel sponsors like Santos and Alinta Energy, and they advocate boycotts of banks and insurers which dare to do business with coal, oil and gas projects. Authors stress to sports directors the dire risks of getting sued over climate inaction, failure to notify clients about (imaginary) climate risks and players’ and fans’ heatstrokes. A common thread is urging top bodies to sign on to sport/climate protocols put out by UN bureaucrats.[5]
I hate to be mercenary but no-one in the climate-panic business ever seems short of a quid. For example, the Hub helped a little mob called Footy for Climate to get going, started by AFL ex-Melbourne players Tom Campbell and Jasper Pittard in 2021 under the mistaken impression that the Black Summer bushfires were climate-caused, as if bushfires are quite new to Australia. [6]Collingwood-based, the charity’s been run since last October by CEO Alexi Lynch, who seems the sole employee. (Its latest official filings mention one full-time-equivalent who runs eight volunteers). Lynch has been managing “climate action” outfits for 20-plus years.[7]
Meanwhile manmade CO2 emissions have soared from 28 gigatonnes in 2005 to the current 40 gigatonnes, and with no sign of slowing let alone any arc bending towards net zero 2050. For Lynch, it must be like endlessly backing the bottom-ranked AFL teams.The charity’s sole employee (full-time equivalent) has been paid, in total, $330,000 for the three years to July 2024. During those years the charity acquired donations ($524,031) and grants ($300,000) from mystery parties totalling $824,000. At July 2024 it was sitting on $298,000 at the bank. It’s good to be green, but my email query asking who’s been donating and granting six-figure sums has received as yet no response. The ACNC likes (but does not enforce) such disclosures and I hope the name(s) will emerge soon.[8][9] Footy for Climate makes one interesting admission:
“Since 2020, the AFL have provided financial relief to 595 clubs impacted by a natural disaster. Rising energy costs are adding to the challenge, making it harder for volunteer-run clubs to keep their doors open.”
It continues that “clean energy technology” will slash energy bills, but this seems to contradict anyone’s and everyone’s energy bills these days.Time now to look at the Hub’s ugly brother FrontRunners — yet another sports-focused pusher of climate peril that is said to be “striking at the heart of the games we love”.
It was founded in 2020 by Emma and David Pocock (independent ACT Senator) and governmental lobbyist Lachlan Crombie. FrontRunners is strongly linked with the Labor-subsidised and now notorious Environment Defenders Office (EDO). Just last July David Morris took over as CEO from Emma, who remains on the board. Morris had spent 13 years at EDO including five years as its Australia-Pasifik CEO. FrontRunners collaborated with EDO to put out last year a Sports, climate change and legal liability report purporting to detail climate risk for sport organisations.
EDO and the Munkara v Santos case (2023–2024) involved Tiwi Islanders, represented by EDO, challenging Santos’ $6 billion Barossa gas pipeline over alleged risks to underwater cultural heritage, including angering a rainbow serpent and annoying the “Crocodile Man” who dwells out to sea. As Andrew Bolt put it, “They also claimed the pipeline would disturb graves and sacred sites of Aborigines who lived there more than 20,000 years ago, when the seas were 120m lower and the sea bed there was land.”
Justice Natalie Charlesworth, throwing the case out, accused EDO of “subtle coaching” of witnesses, distortion of evidence (via a manipulated map), and fabrication of oral traditions. EDO was later ordered to pay Santos $9 million in costs. WA Premier, Roger Cook labeled the case “environmental lawfare” and ex-Labor minister Joel Fitzgibbon urged ending of government subsidies for environmental activism against projects.
Meanwhile FrontRunners, with its heavyweight advisory team, does lobbying, media and campaign training, and crisis management. It specialises in encouraging legal opposition (“high-impact litigation”) against energy projects and emitters. As climate extremists, FrontRunners demanded that federal Labor cut 2035 emissions at least 75% below 2005 l;evels as “the minimum scientific floor required to do our fair share globally. It sends a powerful signal, and would cement Australia as a global leader.” Labor’s new target is 62-70%.
The charity runs on just four part-timers — equivalent to two or three full-time staff. Its accounts show a remarkable $1.1 million unspecified donations in the four years to 2024, with wages payout of nearly $900,000. After losses last year, net equity was down to $50,000.
FrontRunners’ team is of impeccable leftist pedigree.
♦ Emma Pocock helped launch Footy for Climate and has supported climate-fearful Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins and his Cricket for Climate Foundation. She co-managed partner David’s Senate campaign.
♦ Co-founder Lachlan Crombie is CEO of climate-political consultancy PremierNational. FrontRunner, without self-consciousness about climate emissions,says, “Lachlan has travelled the world to attend major sporting events, including the 2011 and 2019 Rugby World Cups, and the 2018 Football World Cup.”
♦ Another Strategic Adviser is journo Dylan Quinnell, media manager for Engie ANZ, and formerly with Flannery’s Climate Council on its Media Centre. In Australia Engie(formerly Simply Energy) claims to power 400,000 homes and serve about 12% of the energy market.
♦ Strategic adviser and ex-netballer Amy Steel is Engie Impact’s leader in WA of climate risk and decarbonisation.
♦ Media director Tim Fisher is an ABC alumnus and deputy chair of Psychology for a Safe Climate, whose uber- loopy activities and ideas I chronicled four years ago. He is also the longest-serving board member of the Emerging Writers Festival.
♦ Operations Manager David Brice, according to FrontRunners, “took a brief hiatus from [previous] work to design and build a tiny house, where he now lives with his wife and two active, young boys as they explore what it looks like to live more simply and sustainably.”
Maybe Prime Minister Albanese could provide his immigrant millions with tiny houses to take the pressure off local buyers.
Frontrunners’ acknowledgement of Aboriginal custodians not only maintains the “80,000-plus” years of residence furphy, but expands the claim beyond land and water to “the stars in the sky, since time immemorial.” If astronauts ever travel four million light years to Proxima Centauri, let’s hope they’ve done their paperwork concerning our local traditional owners.
[4] “Xinhua Net plays a central role in China’s state media ecosystem, promoting official narratives while providing broad news access.”
[5] In 2019 Tennis Australia signed on to the “UNSports for Climate Action Framework” pushing anti-emissions.
[6] In its first major analysis in 2012,the IPCC said decades more study would be needed before any linkage between warming and extreme weather could be detected, and warming might turn out to reduce extreme weather rather than increase it.
[7] He managed ICLEI Oceania’s Cities for Climate Protection campaign, engaging over 230 councils representing 84% of Australia’s population. From 2009 to 2024, he led strategic projects on energy efficiency and climate action at Ironbark Sustainability.
[8] Footy for Climate also goes overboard on respecting unceded sovereignty, claiming that Aborigines “have looked after this land for over 80,000 years.” The best scientific estimate (Appendix One) is actually 30,000 years less, around 50,000 years.
[9]The Guardian (12/5/22) said the AFL has no official involvement in Footy for Climate but “fully supports player-led initiatives in raising further awareness and encouraging action on climate change”.
I suffer eco-anxiety. It hit new highs when the UN’s socialist Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that “the era of global boiling has arrived” but I continue to draw comfort from counsellors at Psychology for a Safe Climate, who have a website full of tips on how neurotics like me can cope with global boiling.
I suffer eco-anxiety. It hit new highs when the UN’s socialist Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that “the era of global boiling has arrived” but I continue to draw comfort from counsellors at Psychology for a Safe Climate, who have a website full of tips on how neurotics like me can cope with global boiling. The members, largely female and Sydney-Melbourne based, will tackle the panoply of clients’ eco-anxieties including anger, fear, hopelessness, guilt, betrayal, sadness, shame, shock, trauma and delusion, plus some 200 other discomforts catalogued in a taxonomy of climate hurts by endlessly quoted eco-psychologist Panu Pihkala of the Theology Faculty of Helsinki University.
PSC now offers a “Climate Feelings Space” which went live a few months back. As they alerted me by email (Feb 15) ,
Preparing ourselves emotionally for unpredictable climate events may also be leading to unpredictable internal worlds. This is why we created this new offering. The Climate Feelings Space is filled with practices, events, and training to support your emotional wellbeing as we navigate complex climate impacts.
For my heebie-jeebies about global boiling, they recommend I take a slow walk into my back garden. It’s actually my wife’s territory and the length of a kitchen bench. I’m not normally permitted near it. But under PSC guidance I allowed myself to notice a flower and “be allured by it.” PSC continues,
Move toward this other being, with curiosity. Notice it: take in its details, savour its scent, its colour, its shape, its sound, whatever moves you in the moment … As it feels authentic to you, offer your praise to this other being, out loud. Speak (or sing or dance!) about what drew you to this Other…Appreciate its mysteries and unknowns. Let yourself be surprised at what you express. If it feels right, you might even bow to this being, or offer it a gesture of thanks. Then keep wandering!
I spotted an orange snapdragon and moved close to savour it, although it was actually on its last legs because we’ve been away in Portugal. I spoke to it, “Congrats on surviving. Sorry about you getting parched, and eaten by those pesky caterpillars.”
My next task was to sing and dance to this petalled Other. Not easy as the seedlings bordered my study wall, restricting my dancing to a half circle. I sang to it, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina!” To finish I honoured the plant with the bow I last practised in 1962 in Hamlet at UWA Drama, where I played an attendant lord.
Little escapes my wife. As I scraped off the garden dirt at the back door she called,
“Are you OK? What were you doing out there anyway?”
“Yeah no! Nothing really, like, those seedlings needed a squirt.”
PSC SAYS its reach extends to hundreds of mental health professionals. Members are closely allied with the UK Climate Psychology Alliance and cross-contribute to each other’s journals. Not all the Alliance’s UK psychotherapy is successful: its journal chronicles how a disturbed person, “Charlie”, was being counselled about the planetary CO2 death drive.
Charlie’s own personal journey through climate activism and psychological difficulty came to a head in 2019 when he jumped from the six-storey roof of his psychotherapist’s consulting room. He survived, but only just, and both of his legs had to be amputated. (p27).
Charlie’s own therapeutic and “brilliant” book begins, “I am pretty mad, by conventional standards”. To me he seems just as sane, or insane, as all the green-Left alarmists, writing,
the politics of late capitalism divides, alienates and disorders those who struggleagainst the climate crisis……[involving] the depressing interrelationships of colonialism, disrespect for indigenous culture and environmental destruction…
The Alliance’s reviewer Ro Randall concludes that
there is much here for us as mental healthpractitioners, particularly in his accounts of his own and others’psychological struggles as part of the climate movement.
I expected the leftist PSC crowd to be offering counselling gratis to mentally distressed Hamas fighters, but found no such evidence.The UK Alliance twin, however, has gone the full keffiyeh. Last March the Alliance’s co-founder Paul Hoggett wrote
The liberal West needs to face up to another truth, that the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza may be the forerunner of the catastrophic loss of life that the deepening climate crisis will visit upon the Global South in the coming decades. We don’t yet have a word for it – a mass extermination which will affect many different peoples who nevertheless will have one thing in common, they will be overwhelmingly non-white.
He deplores what he calls “the events” of October 7, but claims
we are afraid to face up to the difficult truth that, despite suffering persecution at the hands of Christians for a millennium, despite the Holocaust, Jewish people are themselves capable of becoming perpetrators … The comforting distinctions we hold to between good and bad, right and wrong, collapse under the rubble of Gaza … There is a genocidal dimension to the Israeli attacks on Palestinians, one which could prefigure the massive casualties to come in the Global South arising from the climate crisis. If we let this happen in Gaza we have taken a step towards ensuring that our indifference will be visited upon the peoples of the South in the climate deranged future.
“Deranged”? They got it in one. Back home, PSC members divide their time between hand-holding ferals at “coal protest camps” and relieving the eco-distressed of their professed emotional loads. PSC members appear to be let loose by the Education Departments on “teachers and students and parents”. But they struggle to get government grants for mental support for highway blockers, and others “grappling with grief, fear, despair, rage and hope”. In 2019 PSC did raise $40 from a workshop on “grief for activists”, but the financial grief involved a $2.98 cash loss after $42.98 for the name-tags. In 2021-22 their accounts show fundraising of $4,449.16 but offset by fundraising fees of $15,143.97. Website costs rocketed from $116.18 in 2019 to a phenomenal $11,030.07 in 2022 — if they put this job out to tender I’ll certainly apply The PSC’s top team has included founder Carol Ride, senior psychiatrist Dr Charles Le Feuvre, activist Dr Sally Gillespie, newsletter stalwart Bianca Crapis, secretary Dr Yalcin Adal and scribe Dr Susie Burke of Castlemaine from the parent Australian Psychological Society (27,000 members). Without wanting to create an encyclopedia, I’ll sample their talents and output.
Dr Sally Gillespie is a Jungian “with a background in depth psychology and ecopsychology”. I was initially perplexed to read that she’s a recent guest editor of Quadrant, but found that her Quadrant is the Journal of the CG Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology (New York), “embracing different cultural, mythological, and arts-based perspectives including painting, music and dance.”
She authored Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our world and ourselves, “an essential resource for counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers and other helping professionals, as well as climate campaigners, policy makers, educators, scientists and researchers.” In this book[i] she describes how, because of a dream “which felt more like a vision”, she abjured her previous career and lifestyle to focus on stopping global warming. Her dream
was a terrifying depiction of global chaos caused by climate disruption. In my dream I swung on a rope above the Earth as land masses shifted around beneath me. I saw continents sinking beneath rising seas. Millions of people in the oceans desperately attempted to cling to fast disappearing land. Somehow I knew I had to join them. I let go of the rope and dropped into this catastrophe, becoming one of many attempting to hold on to the heaving shores. In the midst of this horror, a desperate poodle swam into my arms. I cared for my newfound companion as best I could, while feeling the futility of everyone’s struggle to survive.
I’d label that account as expurgated, because in her PhD thesis, which involved five years’ work, she includes that she “cared for my newfound [poodle] companion as best I could” by stealing biscuits for it.[ii] Maybe dreams of biscuit-stealing wouldn’t look good on a Jungian’s CV. In any event, she was
dazed by the “shock and awe” experience of dropping into an apocalyptic world. Any possibility of distancing myself from climate change reports collapsed…
That dream
catapulted me out of my old life and view of the world. I shook for the vulnerability of all beings on Earth, as my consciousness opened up to the realities of collective fate… my world, the one I knew as a reality, was ending…I felt in my gut that I had to acknowledge the full seriousness of global warming, and that, in one way or another, I would spend the rest of my life acting in response.
My own questioning of myself, my society and our world has catapulted me into a voyage of discovery which I am grateful for, despite the horror and grief I feel.
In following years she had new dreams rounding out her poodle-powered epiphany:
In each dream, I was approached by an animal who looked for care and connection. In one, I gazed into a stormy sea, eagerly anticipating the end of the human race and, with this, the restoration of the health of the oceans. But then a thirsty, bedraggled and crusty-skinned seal unexpectedly leapt into my arms, jolting me into the present. My mind abandoned its bleak and guilty imaginings in order to work out how to best care for this desperate creature….
This series of climate change dreams navigated me through a sea of feelings. Over time, waves of despair, guilt, judgement, grief and confusion made way for currents of tenderness, connection, delight, wonder and love. In 2012, nearly four years after my initial dream, I had two successive dreams which brought some sense of resolution.
In the first, I swam in the ocean circled by two seals and a dolphin who all looked deeply into my eyes before the dolphin reached forward with its snout and touched my arm. In the second, I travelled to the United States and walked along a waterfront when a seal swam up close to greet me. I gazed back, marvelling at its rodent-like features, golden eyes and grey mottled skin…Taken together, my dreams felt like a kind of initiation. They brought me face to face with my human self, my animal relations and my place in the world. Both in dream and waking life, I found my way from hopelessness and horror to commitment and care.
Her PhD thesis[iii] (no longer online) includes another dream, which assigned her to critique a Doris Lessing novel about climate change. She gets low marks from “a young woman, a smart cultural theorist” who provides comments written on ravioli.
The tantalising image of the ‘ravioli marks’ stayed with me, strangely apt in its sensual interplay of inner and outer, forms and fillings, offering richly-embodied sustenance and meaning (p39).
For her thesis she created and tracked a seven-member group of excitable women, some 50-plus, to share their own climate-apocalypse dreams – “fellow crew members sailing a vessel of inquiry.” By their second meeting they’re fantasising about surviving “systemic collapse.” For example, “stories of cannibalism are shared” (p106).
Gillespie:I wonder what those stories are serving for us at the moment, in teasing us into these questions. Not only the literal question: would I eat someone else or not [but] what’s the value of human life and culture and society?
Participant Veronica was the most notable member, in a car-crash sort of way, of the therapeutic group of seven. Sally writes that Veronica
broke into tears on her way to our meeting when she walked past a cat, explaining “I want a cat, but I don’t want a cat. And that’s climate change in terms of species preservation … I mean the tentacles of this issue are every freaking where!” (p186).
Veronica watched the US gas documentary Gaslandon television one night and sobbed “huge wailing tears–my parents live right near where fracking is going on, they’re having earthquakes for the first time in recorded history” (p119). She and her husband fled to Australia from “their very grief-filled time” in the US, “in the hugest bastion of [Republican] denial”. She confessed that if she didn’t believe in the eternal soul, “I would be one angry bitch.” (p77).
Dr Gillespie in her book pays homage to “teenage student climate strikers who call out adult political leaders for their reckless lack of responsibility and maturity in failing to address the climate emergency.” She feels the kids highlight the “inappropriate adolescent behaviour in adult leaders”. She quotes Greta Thunberg, who seems a patron saint of green psychologists and these days gets around in a keffiyeh. Sally quotes Greta, “They [politicos] know they haven’t done their homework – but we have.” Although Dr Gillespie decided that “throwing scientific evidence at dogged denialists never works”, her tract concludes on a hopeful note:
As I finish writing this book, hundreds of thousands of school students around the world are taking to the streets demanding action on climate with placards reading “Save our planet, save our future,” “We are all in the same boat, stop drilling holes in it,” “Global warning,” “We can’t drink oil, we can’t eat money.” Their signs tell us that a global myth of alarm and danger, and care and respect is being born.[iv]
Dr Charles Le Feuvre: Melbourne psychiatrist and psychotherapist Charles Le Feuvre has been the group’s intellectual leader and now its Honorary Senior Advisor. He’s also been a consultant psychiatrist at Royal Melbourne Hospital and psychotherapy chair of the College of Psychiatrists. Sadly, his house at Wye River was completely burnt in the 2016 climate-caused bushfires. Only his statue of Venus was saved.
With fellow-psychs’ help he laid out the PSC manifesto as “The Pschodynamics of Climate Change Denial,” a work heavily referencing fellow-shrink Harold Searles and his Unconscious processes in relation to the environmental crisis. Searles rates the climate-ecological crisis as an even more dire threat to humankind than a brisk exchange of thermonuclear missiles, and he frets that people continue with “severe and pervasive apathy” about climate. Le Feuvre continues,
He (Searles) discusses the Freudian phallic and oedipal stages. Our genital primacy, he suggests, symbolized by our cars, is threatened. He mentions, for example, that our envy and hatred of Oedipal rivals, in particular succeeding generations, makes us happy for them to be polluted into extinction. These factors can contribute to Oedipal guilt. He also speaks of the moralizing tone used by writers on the subject, who imply ‘that we have raped Mother Earth and now we are being duly strangled or poisoned’ (p. 364) projecting, he suggests, their Oedipal guilt.
Searles elaborates:
“Environmental pollution shields one from the full depth of emotional depression within oneself —instead of feeling isolated within emotional depression, one feels at one with everyone else in a realistically doomed world”.
Le Feuvre finishes with a final quote from Searles:
It seems to me that we psychoanalysts, with our interest in the unconscious processes which so powerfully influence man’s behaviour, should provide our fellow men with some enlightenment in this common struggle.
Le Feuvre thinks that our global predicament is so overwhelming and so difficult to process that news on the alleged climate crisis almost needs to come with a mental health warning. Eco-anxiety victims need to get to a health specialist or Lifeline, he recommends.
He’s no fan of conservative politicians, having written (as at 2019)
In Australia there continues to be Government denial. Our leaders could be seenpsychiatrically as deluded and a danger to others and if so certifiable. At worst they can be seen as guilty of crimes against humanity and nature-homicide and ecocide — and indeed in the future they may be found to be …What is the nature of Scott Morrison’s denial?
The authors discuss the failure of political leadership in the face of the climate and ecological crisis, particularly in the Australian context. This failure exacerbates the climate distress of young people.
Dr Yalcin Adal, the group’s secretary, who does cybersecurity at the Bureau of Meteorology. For those who thought BoM staff were dispassionate sciencey types, Yalcin writes that he “believes deeply in PSC and the work it does” and is proud to be its secretary. He says that the BoM’s mission is “zero lives lost from climate hazards” which I find a bit weird. Firstly, droughts storms and floods involve weather hazards not climate. And, secondly, lives lost globally from weather are already down 99%-plus in the past century. I don’t know how Dr Adal or the BoM can stop someone being hit by a falling tree on a windy day, but I hope Yalcin is working on it.
Bianca Crapis, PSC newsletter author, is a foe of “extractivism”, which I assume refers to Australia’s useless mining industry. She works in LGBTQIA+ mental health and ecological justice, and is “passionate about apprenticing in collective liberation practices for all beings.” She did the PSC newsletters for the past three years, “a monthly act of delight,” she says. However, for Ms Crapis
Despair, confusion and alarm about our collective climate collapse floods me regularly …. I am no stranger to catastrophic thinking, the departure of connection to my body, and the regular buzz of anxiety. But each month, I’ve had a ritual [the newsletter] that has kept me grounded…I am reminded of the power that lies in choosing to weave our griefs into something tangible. How that process of remaking our hurts into something that can be shared opens up a part of my heart that wants to keep putting time and energy into dreaming futures beyond collapse, beyond oppression, beyond extractivism and individualism. (email, May 3, 2024).
Dr Susie Burke, of the Australian Psychological Society, is also a member of the Safe Climate crowd, running similar gigs for the distressed and offering similar tipsheets for assuaging climate griefs.
Burke in her co-authored tipsheet for parents wants a total overhaul of Western lifestyles “to stop climate change”, insisting these lifestyle changes “could make us happier and healthier.” The tract illustrates its mantras with a pic of girls about 12-15 parading around Melbourne Central Station with signs “Act Green”.[vii] Her tipsheet [viii] wants parents to teach kids “active citizenship skills” including
♦ “Getting them to join you on marches/protests” (I assume not the farmer-tractor protests against greens’ attacks on farmers’ livelihoods, or covid anti-jab protests)
♦ “Showing them how to write letters and emails to politicians, CEOs of fossil fuel companies, etc.” (Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill must have a pretty full daily mailbox of kids’ templated climate rubbish).
♦ Discuss ways they [parents] could help them, like asking their school to bring in speakers who can raise awareness, raising money to send to communities that are affected by climate change, writing to the government to ask for more overseas aid. (This looks like the magic-pudding economics of unlimited government money).
The Psychological Society feels it is “contributing to a more mentally resilient, future-ready Australia”. Incidentally, 94% of the 27,000 APS members are fretting about the mental health impacts on Australians of the establishment-backed global warming hysteria.
In my opinion the PSC and APS credentials on global warming science are stuck at kindergarten level. The highly-educated members believe every word of the “global boiling” hyperbole from the UN’s climate crazies like Guterres. Like Flannery’s Climate Council, they blame all bad weather, including “droughts and floods” (make up your mind please), on CO2 emissions.
If these thousands of psychs and shrinks really want to help their new-found eco-anxious paying clientele, they should start by reassuring them that
♦ The IPCC’s global warming suite of models has to date over-hyped actual warming by a factor of two or more (also here)
♦ CO2 increases have assisted crop yield growth that shows a prolonged rising trend and is feeding the planet’s burgeoning population. Humanity has never been healthier than today.
♦ The IPCC’s latest Working Group 1 report, as distinct from “Summaries” written and vetted by its political masters, found human influence on weather as follows: Heatwaves, yes: heavy rain, yes; flooding, no; meteorological/hydrological drought, no; ecological/agricultural drought, yes; tropical cyclones, no; winter storms, no; thunderstorms, no; tornados, no; hail, no; lightning, no; extreme winds, no; fire weather, yes.
♦ Climate science after 40 years is still in its infancy, bereft of knowledge and data about key variables including long-term oceanic cycles, impacts of cloudiness and solar irradiance and even causes of warming-cooling cycles in the 20th century, let alone Minoan, Roman and medieval warming.
Why the medical/psych community (or sorority) are so out-front as climate crazies is a mystery. They need to touch base with Hippocrates about “First, do no harm”.
Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here
[ii] “My thesis ‘Climate Change and Psyche: Mapping the myths, dreams and conversations in the era of global warming’ charts the psychological terrain of those who are actively engaged with climate change issues. Based upon phenomenological research, its aim was to capture something of the shifts in worldview, meaning-making, identity, behaviours, social and political understandings and anticipations of the future within individuals whose daily realities involve thinking about and working with global warming concerns.”
At another stage I cling to the shore line and a poodle swims up into my arms. I steal biscuits for us…I know billions must die and only tens of thousands will remain… The air is running out, death is close.
[iii] The book costs $44 even as a Kindle, putting it above my Quadrant pay grade, but I was able to access a sample chapter or two. I’ve infilled with material from her PhD.
[iv] School strikers aren’t actually smart or literate enough to cook up these sassy slogans themselves, it’s done for them by climate PR professionals who provide the templates on line for the kids to download.
[v] “We depend on our leaders to engage with climate reality. However we know they are only taking limited action. To feel this uncared for is deeply traumatic and can also lead to unbearable anxiety, born of a feeling of helplessness and aloneness in the face of survival threats.”
[vi] “Debate: How can child and adolescent mental health professionals show leadership in the face of the ecological and climate crisis?”
[vii] The apparent word “act” is a little hard to read on the sign.
[viii] Another co-author is Professor Ann Sanson who sings in the Melbourne Climate Choir
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