A Climate of Cognitive Dissonance
By Kirtan Bhana
15 December 2025
Hurricane Melissa, the largest and most forceful storm ever recorded, tore through the Caribbean with a violence that defies precedent. Jamaica bore the brunt of its fury, while across Asia, from Thailand to Vietnam and the Philippines, entire regions were submerged under unseasonal, record-breaking rainfall. These are not isolated anomalies; they are symptoms of a planetary system under extreme stress. Yet as communities count the dead and measure the ruins, global leaders gathered in Belém, Brazil, for the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30), engaged once again in climate discussions that feel increasingly ritualistic, detached and futile.
This is the heart of our climate crisis: not merely rising temperatures or intensifying storms, but a profound cognitive dissonance, a psychological and political contradiction between what humanity knows and how it behaves.
Since the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the world has been acutely aware of the environmental precipice it stands upon. That moment was infused with promise: a collective recognition that economic growth divorced from ecological limits was unsustainable. In the decades that followed, environmental awareness seeped into daily life. Low-emission lightbulbs replaced incandescent ones. Plastics were reduced, recycled, or rebranded as biodegradable. Engines became fuel-efficient; vehicles learned to switch off when idle. Electric cars, photovoltaic panels, wind farms, and even wave energy emerged as symbols of a greener future.
On paper, humanity appeared to be responding.
In reality, emissions continued to rise. Consumption accelerated. Ecosystems collapsed faster than before.
This contradiction, between action and outcome, has generated a form of collective psychological paralysis. People are encouraged to believe that incremental lifestyle adjustments are sufficient, even as the structural drivers of environmental destruction remain untouched. The result is a comforting illusion of progress that masks a worsening reality.
Cognitive dissonance thrives in this gap.
On one hand, the science is unequivocal: climate change is accelerating, driven largely by industrial-scale extraction, production and consumption. On the other hand, the dominant economic narrative insists that meaningful transformation is financially impossible, politically unrealistic or socially disruptive. This false dilemma, growth versus sustainability, has been carefully cultivated.
Finance and corporate power sit at the center of this contradiction. Scarcity is endlessly invoked: scarce resources, scarce capital, scarce time. Yet the global economy produces a glut - of goods, of waste, of emissions, of inequality. The world does not suffer from a lack of resources, but from their misallocation and overexploitation. Artificial scarcity is manufactured to justify control, hoarding and profit maximization, while abundance is channelled into excess consumption rather than collective resilience.
Corporate obstruction often hides behind the language of responsibility. Net-zero pledges, carbon offsets and glossy sustainability reports create the appearance of action while preserving the status quo. These mechanisms shift responsibility onto consumers and future technologies, deferring accountability for present damage. The climate crisis is thus reduced to a branding exercise, another line item in corporate social programmes, rather than a civilizational emergency.
Politicians, too, participate in this dissonance. Climate rhetoric grows more urgent, yet policies remain constrained by electoral cycles, lobbying pressure, and fear of challenging entrenched economic interests. The result is a theatre of concern: declarations without enforcement, targets without timelines, summits without consequences.
Meanwhile, nature does not negotiate.
The devastation unfolding across the Caribbean and Asia exposes the bankruptcy of incrementalism. These disasters are not just environmental events; they are social, economic and moral failures. The poorest and most vulnerable, those least responsible for emissions, suffer first and worst. Climate change has become the ultimate amplifier of injustice.
Yet even in devastation lies a choice.
Reconstruction need not be meaningless. The loss of life and property, while tragic, can either entrench old vulnerabilities or catalyse a new relationship with the environment. Rebuilding can align with nature rather than defy it: resilient infrastructure, climate-adaptive architecture, decentralised energy systems and urban designs that absorb rather than resist natural forces. Communities can be rebuilt to withstand harsh conditions, minimise damage and enable rapid recovery with reduced human and financial cost.
This requires abandoning the illusion that resilience is expensive and vulnerability is cheap. In truth, the costs of inaction - measured in lives, livelihoods and lost futures - far exceed the investments needed for systemic change.
The deeper challenge, however, is psychological. Humanity must confront the discomfort of acknowledging that the current model of endless growth, hyper-consumption and extractive economics is incompatible with ecological balance. Cognitive dissonance allows societies to postpone this reckoning, to cling to familiar systems even as they collapse.
But denial is no longer a passive state; it is an active risk.
The climate conundrum has not reached the height of rhetoric, it has exceeded it. What remains is a choice between honest transformation and managed decline. Fear and uncertainty are deliberately cultivated to preserve power and control, yet they obscure a simpler truth: a sustainable world is not one of deprivation, but of balance. Not scarcity, but sufficiency. Not domination over nature, but coexistence within it.
Nature has already delivered its verdict. The storms, floods and fires are not warnings; they are consequences.
The question is whether humanity can resolve its cognitive dissonance before the gap between awareness and action becomes irreparable.