Human beings are the smartest animals on the planet, we’re told. We can find cures for cancer, send people to the moon (and back, thankfully!), and write achingly beautiful music.

And yet …..

We can allow ourselves to be distracted and deluded by people whose intentions are not for our good. To believe things that a moment’s thought can show are clearly not true.

Sadly, people who identify as Christians seem to be particularly susceptible.

And the consequences can be disastrous.

Give me 5 minutes of your time to reflect together on how the gullible masses are being led towards a cliff by the rich and powerful.

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This is today

Today has been one of the hottest days I have experienced. 42^oC to 43^oC in my city of Sydney, and as high as 48^oC elsewhere in Australia yesterday.

The fire danger in Victoria was “catastrophic” and a number of blazes have taken lives and destroyed homes, while parts of Queensland are experiencing flooding and cyclonic weather.

Not for the first time this decade we’re experiencing record-breaking weather conditions – “unprecedented” is the adjective of choice.

This post focuses on Australia, but similar information is available for countries where readers might live. We’re all in this together.

A sunburnt country

Australia has always been a land of weather extremes, “a sunburnt country …. of droughts and flooding rains”. Australians living in rural areas have learnt how to fight fires, withstand droughts and survive floods.

But bushfires in Victoria in 2009 claimed 173 lives, often because families chose to follow established practice and stay to fight the fire, but found these fires were too fierce. So established practice had to change. When the fire rating was “catastrophic”, staying to fight was likely to be fatal, and fleeing became the best option.

And so “only” 33 people lost their lives when the “unprecedented” fires of 2020 ravaged the Australian east coast, (although hundreds more died from poor air quality caused by smoke blanketing populated areas). But billions of native animals were killed and 20% of Australia’s eucalyptus forest was destroyed. Several factors combined to make these Australia’s worst fires since white settlement.

Similar statistics can be given to show that flooding and coastal erosion are getting worse, the Great Barrier Reef is under serious threat and drought is creating problems for farmers and town water supplies.

There’s a cost to all this

The 2020 fires were estimated to have cost Australia at least $100 bn.

A recent report estimated that almost 800,000 homes (about 7% of all properties) are in areas of high risk from floods, bushfires, tropical cyclones, heatwaves or coastal storms, with this number increasing every year. By 2030 this will likely reduce the value of properties by a total of $570 bn.

It’s not getting better

Studies show that flooding, bushfires and droughts are becoming more frequent or more severe.

Australia’s first National Climate Risk Assessment, prepared by the government, was released in 2025. Described as a “bombshell“, the report predicts the loss of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, conversion of eucalypt forests to open woodland and current extreme heatwaves and bushfires becoming more normal.

The future won’t be pretty – unless we act quickly.

The thing is …. there are answers

We’ve known about climate change for decades, and we humans are smart enough to work out ways forward that can save much of what is under threat.

EY is a major “professional services” company, meaning that it provides financial, information technology and management advice to businesses and government. A recent report by EY in Australia outlined some keys to successfully combatting destructive climate change.

Four actions can reduce costs and generate profits while reducing carbon emissions and four other actions can help Australia adjust to a new low-carbon economy.

Similar actions are available to other high carbon emitters, though the details and benefits will vary.

So what’s stopping us?

This is where it gets murky.

There is evidence that many businesses will act to preserve our world if governments will only set consistent boundaries and incentives. The problem is with government.

Every year the countries of the world attend the Conference of the Parties to discuss action on climate change. COP 30 was held in Brazil in Novermber 2025.

And every year reactionary forces fight to stifle action. Every year governments promise to take certain actions, not enough, but something.

And every year, the actions fall way short of the weak promises.

Exploiting democracy

So why do governments like Australia’s under-perform?

Well, they have to get elected. So If the electors can be persuaded that climate action is unnecessary or too costly, they may vote against a government that is actually acting in the country’s interests.

Rich oil billionaires want to delay action as long as possible so they can keep on getting richer. The smoking industry managed to delay acceptance of the truth about lung cancer and smoking through misinformation, and so the fossil fuel industry is using the same playbook. (Sometimes even the same players – check out the Heartland Institute.)

And of course their mates in the mass media help out through misinformation (yes, I’m looking at you Rupert).

Influencing politicians

And so those who want to stifle change influence the politicians directly (check out Dirty Power, it’s six years old but the ideas, and some of the faces, are the same).

We see the present opposition party in Australia abandoning the goal of net zero emissions for a policy of only keeping pace with what other countries are doing. A foolish policy for four reasons:

• It effectively means all the countries sitting around looking at each other while the world burns.
• Australia’s per capita emissions are 3 times the world average, so we should be among the first to take action.
• Australia is very vulnerable to heatwave, flood, drought and bushfire, and so stands to lose more than many other countries if the world doesn’t take effective action.
• Australia is also better placed to develop renewable energy – solar, wind, tidal and geothermal – than almost any other country. We could be exporting renewable energy!

But the opposition has been conned into this retrograde action because it has been led to believe, perhaps correctly, that the public will be more likely to vote for them.

Misinforming the electors

So the key to it all is misinforming the electors. Don’t let them realise that vested interests are pushing government to act against our interests.

How do they do this?

There’s a whole bunch of tactics that work together. (I want to write about this in more detail, but here is a short list.)

1. Information manipulation: using selective information to create doubt and tell a different story than the truth.
2. Demonising & scapegoating: encouraging partisan tribalism (e.g. left vs right) and unfairly blaming minorities (e.g. immigrants or welfare recipients) for problems, so the target audience sees opponents as not just wrong, but evil. People can then be led to be blindly obedient and more willing to accept policies that are not in their best interests.
3. Fear based manipulation: if alleged threats like those in #2 can be exaggerated until people are afraid, they can be persuaded to do almost anything.
4. Distraction & misdirection: all the above is made easier if the rich and powerful can divert the rest of us from real issues onto culture wars, and by flooding mass and social media with so much misinformation that people become confused or exhausted.

You can probably see some of these in operation around about you right now.

And so electors become manipulated into voting for policies that benefit the rich and powerful, in the confused impression that this will create a better world for themselves.

And getting us all to be unaware or confused or uncaring about the damaged world we are handing on to our grandchildren while fossil fuel companies continue to make bilions at our future’s expense.

They gain now while we all pay later!

Manipulating the Christians

It is easy to see how each of the above tactics has been used to deceive Christians into being sceptical about climate change and supporting earth-damaging policies.

1. Information manipulation.
   There are lots of climate sceptics publishing supposed information which some Christians depend on. Back in 2022 I had a climate fact checking website (now closed, but you can see some of the content still on Facebook). I fact checked over 50 of these supposed climate facts, and found not one was correct.
2. Demonising & scapegoating.
   Christian climate scepticism seems mostly to be part of a larger picture which includes these ideas:
   • leftists who support climate action are against historic Christianity;
   • scientists are against God and anti-Bible (they promote evolution, right?);
   • social concern just takes us away from the gospel;
   • climate action is attempting to stop progress and make us all poor.
3. Fear based manipulation
   America (or choose your own country) is being taken away from God. If we don’t act now, all will be lost. The godless want to take over and …. (insert threat here). Climate action is part of this movement.
4. Distraction & misdirection
   Issues like abortion, immigration, cost of living, the importance of preaching the gospel and threats to freedom can all be used to keep Christians so concerned that they don’t even think about the climate threat. Whatever we believe about those other issues shouldn’t stop us embracing the truth about climate change.

And so the world keeps suffering

I was at a conference last year where a climate scientist and an environmental lawyer were in tears as they recounted the reality they know is awaiting us all if we don’t act now.

This is a moral issue. Jesus calls us to love our neighbour, and inaction on climate will harm many of the world’s poor and future generations globally. Failure to act is actively doing harm.

Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6) so we should be concerned about truth and life.

I hope and pray that more Christians will see that their understanding and actions are being manipulated by people whose motives are selfish and uncaring.

If we don’t treat this as a high priority, we are truly illustrating Bob Dylan’s words (in a different context) in Idiot Wind:

“We are idiots babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves!”

PS I survived this day. I drank a lot of water, sweated a lot and felt uncomfortable. Our house isn’t air conditioned, but we have lots of trees creating a relatively cool microclimate. But plenty of Aussies suffered. Update: a cool change has just come through, dropping temperatures 10^oC in about half an hour. Whew!

Photo: Fabio Partenheimer

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