Yesterday the Climate Catastrophe

Yesterday we were still on the brink of climate catastrophe. Today only the threat to our prosperity is relevant. The climate catastrophe no longer matters. The petrol price, on the other hand, matters all the more.

I. The Observation

It is not a new phenomenon — but it grows starker with every decade. The Iran war began on 28 February 2026. In the first days there was a brief silence: nuclear weapons were mentioned, the Strait of Hormuz closed, missiles fired at Gulf states. The world held its breath. Briefly.

Then came the numbers. Oil price up thirty percent. Gas prices rising in Europe. Stock markets in free fall. And suddenly the discussion shifted: what will heating cost next winter? When does the recession arrive? How long can we afford this?

The climate catastrophe was displaced — not by an all-clear, but by a bank statement. Not because the threat had grown smaller, but because another threat moved closer: that of one’s own standard of living. This is not indifference. It is brain architecture.

II. The Biological Root

The human nervous system was not built for contemporary civilisation. It was built for the savannah — for immediate threats that are visible, smellable, audible. The lion in the grass. The fire in the village. The hungry winter.

The limbic system — the evolutionarily ancient part of the brain that governs fear responses — does not distinguish by objective danger. It distinguishes by proximity and concreteness. An abstract threat that will take effect in ten years barely activates it. A concrete threat that hits the wallet today activates it immediately. That is not a weakness — for millennia it was a strength. Whoever reacted to immediate danger survived. Whoever lost themselves in abstract scenarios was eaten.

Civilisation has inherited this nervous system without being able to overwrite it. So we react to petrol prices more strongly than to nuclear weapons or climate tipping points — not because we are stupid, but because petrol prices are concrete and nuclear weapons or climate tipping points are abstract. The climate catastrophe is an idea. The bank statement is a number. Ideas fade. Numbers remain.

III. The Political Exploitation

What evolution produced, politics has discovered. Whoever can generate prosperity anxiety can displace existential anxiety. This is not a conspiracy theory — it is the foundational principle of populist politics worldwide.

Trump has taken it to its extreme — but did not invent it. The message always runs: your prosperity is under threat. From outside — through immigrants, through China, through unfair trading partners. From above — through elites who take your money and spend it elsewhere. From the left — through climate policy that makes electricity more expensive, through social spending that devours your taxes.

This message works because it appeals to what is biologically primary. Climate change is long-term and abstract. The heating bill is short-term and concrete. The Iran war is geographically distant. The petrol price is felt at the next filling station. Whoever sets the agenda on prosperity captures attention — and whoever has attention has power.

This explains much of the political landscape of recent decades: why climate policy fails the moment it becomes costly; why wars are ignored until they hit the supply chain; why existential risks are systematically undervalued as long as they do not translate into immediate costs. Democracy is a system optimised for short electoral cycles — and short electoral cycles are exactly the format that favours the prosperity threat over the climate catastrophe.

IV. Prosperity as Cause

Here lies the actual point — and it is uncomfortable.

Prosperity is not the opposite of catastrophe. It is its cause. The system that sustains our standard of living — the petrodollar system, global free trade, Western financial dominance — is the same system that produced the Iran war. America attacks Iran to defend the foundation of its world financial power: the dollar as the leading currency of the oil trade. Europe finances this war with PURL funds originally earmarked for Ukraine. European prosperity depends on a system whose defence brings the world to the edge of catastrophe.

This is not an abstract thesis. It is the concrete causal chain: prosperity requires cheap oil. Cheap oil requires control of the Middle East market. Control of the Middle East market requires military presence. Military presence generates resistance. Resistance generates war. War generates the possibility of catastrophe. And then Europe worries about the prosperity that stood at the beginning of the chain.

We do not fight despite our prosperity. We fight for it. And call it security.

V. The Circle

The climate catastrophe is displaced — by the threat to the prosperity that produces the catastrophe it displaces. That is not a paradox. It is a circle. And circles cannot be broken by appeals. One cannot appeal to people to think long-term when their nervous system is built for the short term. One cannot appeal to democracies to solve decade-long problems when their institutions are calibrated to four-year rhythms.

What might break the circle is not better information. It is collapse. When the catastrophe becomes concrete — when the costs of climate disaster, resource war, systemic failure become tangible in daily life — then the hierarchy of fear shifts. Not because people have become smarter, but because the abstract threat has become concrete. The limbic system responds then. But perhaps too late.

Yesterday we were on the brink of climate catastrophe. Today prosperity is under threat. The difference between the two is smaller than we believe — and larger than we feel.