Surviving the 21st Century - Julian Cribb
|
|
AUTHOR
Julian Cribb AM is an Australian science writer and author of seven books on the human existential emergency. His latest book is How to Fix a Broken Planet (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
|
Climate heating and the global collapse of nature confront humanity with the greatest security challenge yet, the British Government has warned its closest allies.
In the wake of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York, the UK privately briefed select European and African governments of the findings of a secret report by its intelligence services into the risks posed by accelerating climate change and collapsing ecosystems worldwide.
More wars, mass population movements, global price inflation and famines were among the key threats identified by UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband in his confidential briefing on reports compiled by the British Joint Intelligence Committee, the body that oversees the UK’s defence and security services.
A heavily redacted part of the report, focussing on the global collapse of nature, was released after a long delay by the UK Government in January 2026. The full report, especially details of climate impacts, has never been made public.
In his public remarks at the UN, Miliband said “climate and nature loss represent an urgent national security issue and demand action equal to the scale of the challenge…” He admitted that, previously, “climate change and the destruction of nature were treated as peripheral environmental issues” by government.
“I think you all know the picture, and it is gloomy, I warn you, but I’m just going to say some of it to you today because we need to be truth-telling about this:
- Over 150 million hectares burned globally in the first four months of 2026 alone.
- Record extreme heat causing widespread loss of life.
- Nepal’s devastating floods happening due to glacial collapse and the coming El Nino, as (Australian) Prime Minister Albanese said, is already forecast to be the strongest in living memory.
- And the nature loss crisis is just as acute, with ecosystems being degraded in every region of the world.
“That is the conclusion of the UK’s recent nature security assessment, which you can all read.”
Miliband was disingenuous. In saying “you all know the picture” he deliberately masked the efforts by governments worldwide, including his own, to obscure the real impacts of climate and ecosystem crisis from their citizens.
In citing Australian PM Albanese he inadvertently drew attention to another government hellbent on deceiving its citizens and increasing greenhouse emissions. In 2022, the Albanese Government ordered the Office of National Intelligence - Australia’s peak intelligence assessment agency - to urgently assess the national security implications of climate change.
The report has never seen the light of day. However, former defence and intelligence commanders in the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLGC) have issued two papers highly condemnatory of their government for failing to alert its citizens to the building security crisis – Missing in Action (2021) and Too Hot to Handle (2024).
Meanwhile the US Trump Administration has committed itself wholeheartedly to destroying both the planet and the USA by accelerating the burning of fossil fuels, while pretending to not know what it is doing. According to Amnesty International, Trump has:
- Withdrawn the US from global climate bodies
- Promoted disinformation against established climate science
- Used coercive measures to push pro-fossil fuel policies
- Weakened domestic climate protections
- Defunded climate science
- Cracked down on citizens’ climate protests.
In 2023 the annual US National Security Threat Assessment stated that “Climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to U.S. national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about the global response to the challenge.” By 2026 that chapter was completely gone from the report despite worsening global conditions. Also redacted was all reference to “climate”.
Even Canada, under Carney, was still deceptively trying to have a bet both ways – pledging to prepare for climate disaster while maintaining its rank as the world’s 4th largest oil producer and a major producer of natural gas. Alas for Canada, there will be little it can do about 100 million climate refugees fleeing the US – a scenario increasingly likely in a world of 1.2 billion refugees.
Only China, among the world’s leading countries, appears to be serious about acting on climate. It is accelerating the switch to green energy and electric transport, is replanting its deserts, has started a national carbon market and is taking an active global role in helping other countries to adapt and prepare.
As Alvin Foo, a Chinese AI guru, wittily observed: “In the US, you can change the political party – but not the policy. In China you can change the policy, but not the political party.”
Not enough people are asking the hard questions about why this is so. The best explanation is that in the West, government is now controlled, not by the people, but by powerful, cashed-up supercorporations, such as the fossil fuels sector, tech giants, the military-industrial complex, AI, the banks and Big Pharma. Even if the government changes at election, the policies decreed by these commercial dictators do not. Democracy has been neutered, if not expunged.
This process, known as “state capture” or sometimes as “kleptocracy”, involves the reins of government being taken over by the few in order to exploit the environment and the many.
In China, by contrast, being a billionaire invites scrutiny from the state – and quite often, disappearance. As a result, the number of Chinese billionaire oligarchs has shrunk from 1058 in 2021 to 406 in 2026. Meanwhile wealth and private property have boomed for ordinary people. China’s poorest 50% have had a 500% income rise since 1978 – while the US’s poorest 50% have had a 1% decrease.
This is all by way of saying that most governments are today self-evidently more interested in serving global corporate capital than serving their people – and consequently are reluctant to truthfully inform the people of the harm that capital is doing to the planet and humanity. As a result they redact, dilute or withhold the findings of their own reports about the building global crisis lest the people discover the true causes and react accordingly.
Science takes a different perspective. Assessing the destruction as ‘ecological overshoot’ caused by human numbers and demand wilfully exceeding the Earth’s capacity, a group of eminent researchers has asserted that behind this ‘behavioural crisis’ lie three potent drivers: economic growth, marketing and pronatalism.
“These three drivers directly impact the three ‘levers’ of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. We demonstrate how the maladaptive behaviours of overshoot stemming from these three drivers have been catalysed and perpetuated by the intentional exploitation of previously adaptive human impulses,” they declared.
Neoliberal economic theory believes in an economy that is “untethered from nature”, consumer demand that is “insatiable” and human ingenuity that is “unbounded”. These three lead to the prevailing belief in economic growth that is unlimited, in a limited world.
At the same time marketing has mined consumers’ private online data to create demand for things the consumer neither wants nor needs, but can be induced to buy. By the time a child is 13 years old, the global marketing machine has already collected 72 million data points on its personal preferences, likes and dislikes.
Despite huge advances in reducing child mortality, there remains a strong pro-birth lobby worldwide, led mainly by businessmen and those unwilling to surrender their ancient patriarchy.
The scientists conclude that these three tools – economic growth, marketing and pronatalism – are being used to engineer human behaviour into overshooting the Earth’s ability to support us and “As the effects of overshoot worsen, the likelihood of societal breakdown increases.”
They call for an urgent worldwide effort to revise the values and beliefs that underpin this self-destructive system, especially the belief in endless growth.
This perspective makes it crystal clear why governments in general do not want their publics to know about the nature or extent of collapse – because they, themselves, are deeply implicated in driving it. And the public must be held in ignorance, at all costs.
Most likely, however, the Earth itself will engineer the revision of human values, by collapsing food, water, civilisation, numbers, countries, learning and health simultaneously. It will then be up to Earth citizens, not oligarchs or governments, to define how they wish to survive in future. Assuming they do…
Julian Cribb Articles
- Here comes the Human Tsunami
- Sounding the Earth Emergency
- Turning Waste Into Wealth
- Up to our eyeballs in 💩💩💩
- Plasticide: a crime against humanity · Our Rising Oceans
- Will climate change put women in the ascendant?
- When the water runs out...
- The great dying
- Australia issues ‘terrifying’ climate warning
- 'Died of a delusion': the fate of modern civilisation?
- Collapse is near, scientists warn
- De-icing the Earth: a fatal human choice.
- Rivers of Death
- Unlike politicians, thermometers do not lie
- Welcome to BunkerWorld: Home of the rich and fearful
- Wisdom of the elders
- The black work of Big Oil
- Stealing the Breath of Life
- The Earth Uncloaked - a catastrophe in slow motion
- Military experts warn of climate wars
- Tackling the Earth Emergency
- A distracted world marches steadily towards catastrophe
No comments:
Post a Comment