Net zero alarmism is a mental illness

Telegraph

22-05-2025

An anecdote, to begin.
In 2023, I was sentenced in Canada by the Ontario College of Psychologists and Behavioural Analysts to an unspecified period of professional 're-education ' for what has been deemed my unprofessional conduct. If I refused to comply, then the college indicated its duty to revoke my professional licence as a clinical psychologist.
I said that I would comply, although insisting – despite the college's entreaty – that I would make every detail of that re-education painfully public.
Part of my unprofessionalism was apparently illustrated in the submission of the entire transcript by a random complainant to said college of a conversation I had with Joe Rogan on his podcast, accompanied by the allegation that I had stepped out of my lane as a psychologist.
How? By daring to share my opinion that the economic models purporting to indicate catastrophic future danger caused by the apparently impending climate change apocalypse were false and unreliable and by implying something that requires the further analysis this column offers: that there are non-scientific, indeed psychological, reasons that such models were and are generated and promoted in the first place.
The complainant had never received any professional services from me, let it be noted. Furthermore, the 're-education' has never been scheduled, despite my agreement to submit to the process, and their publicly stated decision to proceed, because the college appears unable to find anyone at all anywhere willing to act as said re-educator.
Why am I telling you this? First, because the anecdote provides evidence for the genuine social and psychological danger in speaking out against the pretensions of the mad green mob; and second, because the claims that climate change terror is scientifically justified have to be enforced by entrenched propagandistic bureaucratic inquisitors rather than proved scientifically and assessed through genuine discussion in the public arena.
And with that, on to the real show.
Why might a psychologist be qualified to discuss issues of climate change, anyway? It isn't as if my opinion on psychological matters is appropriate, say, when it comes to the validity of Einstein's equations describing general relativity. It is therefore clearly the case that there are issues in the scientific realm that my education and ability should make me cautious in assessing as a professional, speaking in the public domain.
But there are important – nay, crucial – differences between the mathematics of advanced physics and the doomsaying climate apocalypse narrative. The former has had the validity of its claims demonstrated by passing every crucial test of prediction for a century; the latter has failed continually when put to the test – so much so that 'global warming' turned suddenly into ' climate change ' sometimes in the last decade or so because the former phraseology proved untenable both conceptually and practically.
Here is the crucial question: is the climate apocalypse narrative just a scientific theory? Or is it instead a system of belief, unmoored from the objective world, with essentially psychological factors playing the primary role in its initial formulation, current maintenance and widespread dissemination? If the former, then I'm out of my wheelhouse as a commentator, and deserve, arguably, to be called on it. If the latter, however, then I am in my true element, as a psychologist, trained in the analysis of belief – and, more importantly, ethically bound as such to indicate falsehood in conceptualisation where I see it.
And, with regard to that distinction: I have come to conclude, after much detailed consideration (informed by my professional training and experience as researcher and clinician), that the climate doomsayers are possessed by an ideology much more akin to a psychogenic epidemic than they are purveyors of any information remotely scientific.
Might I point out, as well: even if I'm wrong (and I'm not) such a suggestion from a credible psychologist is at least worthy of evaluation as an alternative explanation for our current cultural, political, economic and psychological predicament.
The scientific claim is that the evidence for cataclysmic climate change is undeniable. The counterclaim, psychologically, is that those who make such a statement are acting out the dictates of a set of ideas that are not scientific, but much more something akin to an ideological or even religious movement, unrecognised though that may be to the holders of the doctrine.
The historical origins of climate doomism
Why might this counterclaim be credible? Let's analyse the situation historically, first, to give us some sense of how the climate change ideas came about. Such analysis sheds substantive light on the motivation for holding and promoting – even insisting upon the validity of – such ideas.
In the late nineteenth century, Thomas Huxley, the prominent Victorian scientist (Darwin's famous bulldog, and grandfather of the famous author and psychedelic pioneer Aldous Huxley), was commissioned to investigate the sustainability of commercial fisheries. Huxley argued that oceanic resources were essentially inexhaustible. He believed that human activities could never scale to the point where fish populations might be affected in the vast waters of the world. This idea of natural inexhaustibility, driven by the context and scientific understanding of the time, maintained influence over public perception for many decades.
It wasn't until the mid-twentieth century that environmental awareness began to shift seismically in the opposite direction. The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 was one notable watershed moment in that shift. Carson's work highlighted the allegedly detrimental systemic effects of pesticides, challenging Huxley's presumption that the natural world was large enough to remain immune to human activity.
The environmental movement galvanised by that book experienced another major motivational boost when Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968. Ehrlich's writing emphasised overpopulation as a threat to global well-being, in the specific form of resource depletion and the broader form of general environmental degradation.
His work directly influenced the so-called Club of Rome, which published The Limits to Growth in 1972. That work further associated environmental catastrophe with population growth and economic expansion, insisting that 'unchecked growth' would inevitably produce a panoply of severe societal and environmental crises.
All this work was predicated on the Malthusian presumption that human populations could be modelled as exemplars of simpler biological organisms, and that we were destined to exhaust the intrinsically limited range of so-called 'natural resources' provided to us in the biosphere. This simple biological modelling completely ignored the fact that human beings are unique in their ability to innovate – to radically transform not only the availability of any given 'natural resource' but to produce revolutions in the very idea of what constitutes such a resource.
Examples of the latter? The shift from whale oil to petroleum at the end of the nineteenth century; the green revolution that has enabled us to feed billions of new people; our ability to make complex computational machines from the same chemicals that make up sand.
In case it has to be said (and it does): the imprisoned bacteria that meet their Malthusian fate after they consume all available resources in their artificially limited petri dish are simply not characterised by the same ability. In consequence, they do not serve in any way as a valid let alone self-evidently true 'scientific model' for the destiny of the human species.
The modern green movement emerged from precisely these over-simplistic biological-model precursors – but not only these. The revolutionary progressives soon noted the fortunate confluence between the essentially anti-industrial ethos of the Malthusian environmentalists and the anti-capitalist doctrines favoured by those on the far-Left. This meant the emergence of the alliance between the greens and the 'progressives' that we see dominating one pole of the spectrum of political discourse today – this despite the fact that all the predictions of both Ehrlich and the Club of Rome failed to come true in the timeframes they themselves deemed relevant.
A psychological thirst fulfilled
That's not all on the psychological front, with regard to the climate catastrophe narrative. It's not only that the green movement emerged in the unholy alliance between the Malthusian biologists, seized by a notion of the relationship between human beings and the 'environment,' and the radical Leftists who were stridently anti-capitalist (even anti-liberal). It's also that those who purport to adopt the green/Leftist position can advance their reputations in the political environment, by positioning themselves, essentially, as farsighted advocates of the broad ecosystem – even the survival of the planet and by gaining false and unearned social status and credibility in consequence.
Worse yet: it's that those in the political arena who are willing or even eager to use force and compulsion to control others and advance their own narrowly self-centred personal agendas (electoral success; public acclaim; narcissistic self-aggrandisement) can point to the hypothetical 'fact' of impending climate apocalypse to justify the imposition of any and all economic, political, financial and personal restrictions in the name of saving the planet. The man who is currently Prime Minister of Canada, former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, says it so well himself. Does he actually understand the implications of his words?
'Our goal has been to put in place the information, tools and markets so that every financial decision takes climate change into account – to create a financial system in which a company's contributions to climate change and climate solution are fundamental determinants of its value.'
There is arguably no more totalitarian claim possible than that 'every financial decision' must be made subordinate to the decisions of the purveyors of the climate change catastrophe. Why do they make this insistence? Because they are valid defenders of Mother Earth, or because it enables them to justify every decision they make, including those that are clearly and absolutely in their own self-interest? Given the cost (Carney estimates a minimum of two trillion dollars in the next few decades merely from Canadians) shouldn't a perspicacious observer be at least somewhat suspicious in such a regard?
But who can argue with any preventative 'environmental' measures, when the planet itself is held to be at stake – and when the personal cost can be catastrophic (part of forcing 'every financial decision,' apparently including whether to keep your job, to be governed by climate concerns). But it remains absolutely necessary to note the possibility that such claims of catastrophe can be used by the power-mad to sow fear, even terror, and to capitalise on the opportunity to seize the reins of power in consequence of such manipulation.
Here's a psychological truism: tyrants manipulate with fear and compulsion. If a 'leader' insists that the situation has become so dire that he or she should be given special power, the suspicion should immediately arise: is the emergency real, or dreadfully convenient for the proclaimer? Given the vagaries of human nature, a cautious and wise observer should presume: without certain evidence for the former, the latter should be assumed.
So there's apparently plenty of reason for a psychologist to be concerned, and to let that concern be known, regardless of cost.
The danger of net zero: dirtier energy
Let's consider, for a moment, the actual situation at hand with regard to the climate and the hypothetical apocalypse.
First, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself – the gold standard body for promoting the apocalypse narrative – has admitted itself that there is currently no strong evidence of dangerous climate change in 25 out of the 34 of its own markers.
Furthermore, the IPCC determined that 'high confidence' in dangerous change only existed for 3/34 categories, and the panel had to change the definition of such confidence drastically from scientific norms to even manage that. They decided that an 8/10 chance that the evidence was valid was sufficient, when the time-tested scientific standard for such judgement has been set across disciplines at 19/20. There is simply no excuse for this. No paper with such reduced criteria for significance would be published in any respectable scientific journal.
And that is by no means all. Germany has arguably advanced farther down the green/Leftist net zero road than any other once-developed country. The consequence? Much more expensive, much less reliable energy, and rapid de-industrialisation. Much more reliance on the Russians and other authoritarian fossil-fuel rich states. Did that at least result in an improvement in net CO2 production, per unit of energy produced? Quite the contrary: not only is energy less available and more costly in Deutschland – it is dirtier. Germany completed its nuclear power phaseout in April 2023 (why, if CO2 production is the cardinal problem?), shutting down its last three reactors, which had provided low-carbon electricity (about 6 per cent of the power mix in 2022).
To compensate, coal-fired generation, particularly lignite (brown coal), has remained a significant part of the energy mix. In 2022, coal accounted for one-third of electricity production, up from previous years due to the energy crisis triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This is only one example of counterproductive movement on the carbon front in that country. Similar outcomes are evidenced in other countries that have moved in the same direction, not least in the UK. Thus, not only did the 'green revolution,' motivated by the climate apocalypse narrative, fail, it failed by its own standards: a failure that is very much certain to accelerate, as desperation sets in on the environmentalist/Leftist front, and the proclivity to use emergency force correspondingly mounts.
Plant life renaissance
Shall we also point out another even more annoying skeleton in the closet? Plant life is apparently thriving, on planet Earth, in a manner unparalleled in human memory.
According to no less a source than Nasa (despite its stated commitment to the progressive/environmental narrative), our globe has greened substantially, in direct consequence of increased CO2 levels in the last decades (whether that CO2 is of human origin or not). An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries determined that one quarter to one half of Earth's vegetated lands has shown 'significant greening' over the last 35 years. This represents an increase in leaves on plants equivalent in area to two times the continental US.
Read those last two lines again and think for a moment: how dire and immediate would the climate apocalypse actually have to be for such changes to be anything but the best of all possible environmental news?
Note as well that much of this greening has occurred in the semi-arid areas that the climate apocalypse predictors assumed would transform into desert. Why? Because plants can grow in drier areas when there is more available CO2. They can afford to shrink the size of their respiratory openings, which allows them to grow with less water. Even those who believe the evidence of increasing climate-change induced aridity indicate that the effect on plants is likely to be minimal because of increased CO2 production. Furthermore, it appears that plants are perhaps up to one-third more efficient in their uptake of carbon dioxide than previously estimated – a finding that is perhaps unsurprising to anyone who considers how fast plants grow, say, in the spring, and how much variability there is in that growth over a few mere months. Why in the world wouldn't plants mop up excess plant fertiliser (in the form of atmospheric CO2) when it becomes more easily available? Sometimes being a 'scientist' means not refusing to see the absolutely obvious, ideological pre-commitments be damned.
It is also the case, by the way, that crop yields worldwide have improved, rather than declined, in the face of all this excess CO2 'pollution' providing even more evidence that the promised apocalypse will be very long in coming, at least with regard to agricultural production. Finally, we might note that every 'advance' on the progressive green front in the West in terms of remediation of CO2 output (and there is little evidence of any success whatsoever on that front) has been swamped absolutely and disproportionately by increased output by China and India – countries that might talk a good green game but put their money where their true mouths are.
A perspicacious and pragmatic observer would also note, on the more specifically political front, that the Americans, seeing the writing on the wall, have decided to abandon the Paris Accords, a climate-apocalypse based set of international agreements. In the UK, the leader of the once pro-net zero Conservatives, Kemi Badenoch, has admitted that the once-touted 2050 deadline is 'impossible,' although she has fallen short of the complete disavowal of the doctrine that has become necessary. In other areas of the world – Canada, for example – advocates of the net zero policy still arguably appear to have the upper hand, as they do in the aforementioned Germany and in many places in Western Europe, as well as Australia and New Zealand.
Not too late to save the future
It's clearly high time for all that nonsense to come to a stop, as the Americans, who lead the world in wealth, have clearly realised. That is true in no small part because the reasons for the net zero agenda seem to me neither scientific nor economic. They are, in a word, at least in part psychological. Promoting the radical green Leftist agenda provides the promoters, 'scientific,' political, and economic, with unearned social and moral status, enabling them to put themselves forward without effort or genuine sacrifice as guardians of the planet. Aggrandised falsely in this manner, they are more able to fulfil their own narcissistic desires, putting themselves forward as heroes of the environment on the world stage, capitulating to or capitalising on the wilful blindness of their political audience, while appealing so carelessly and dangerously to the destructive anti-capitalist/anti-industrialist envy and moralising of the revolutionary progressive Left.
Why is this a problem, worthy of serious and immediate note? Because the remedies that are touted, in consequence of this psychological situation, are staggeringly expensive; because they will decimate the poor, worldwide, both in the West and in the developing world; because such policies will produce consequences that are detrimental not only economically and politically (given the authoritarian agenda that does and must accompany the net zero agenda) but environmentally – as the record of the greenest of current governments indicates clearly.
It's time for the true motivation of the net zero zealots to be revealed – not least by psychologists, worthy of the name. The climate panic is the work of a cabal of narcissistic worshippers of fear and force, cloaking themselves in the sheep's clothing of planetary guardians. It is dreadfully and terribly expensive and stunningly detrimental to the poor who are the hypothetical targets of the ideological largesse of the Left. It will render the West poor enough to make its very survival as free and abundant unlikely, while simultaneously emboldening the tyrants of China, who care nothing for the idiot posturing of the narcissistic political elite of Europe, North America and the Commonwealth. It will deprive us of the abundance that so much careful work has made possible. It will severely limit the prosperity of our children and grandchildren and the opportunity that would otherwise be before them. It will do all that, by all indications, while simultaneously worsening environmental conditions – as it has in Germany.
Why would we do something so shockingly counterproductive? We return, once again, to psychology: because our leaders can present themselves as morally superior in consequence of their hypocritical and false worship of Mother Nature; because we are inclined to believe such claims, so what we can collectively participate in that false pride by following their lead; because we can all cloak our envy in relationship to the unequal proceeds of the free market system in the guise of environmental activism and fiddle while Rome (or LA) literally burns.
So says the disgraced and unprofessional psychologist, standing outside of his wheelhouse. Evaluate the situation for yourselves.
Before your children pay for all of this. With their future.
Jordan B. Peterson is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and author of 'Maps of Meaning,' '12 Rules for Life' and 'Beyond Order.'
You can watch The Telegraph's most recent interview with Jordan Peterson via this link.
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