Net zero is not simply an environmental target. It has become a psychological and cultural anchor in a society that feels increasingly unstable.

In Australia, the push toward Net Zero emissions by 2050 has been met with both support and scepticism, revealing a deep-seated anxiety about the future.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has emphasised the necessity of this transition, noting that achieving net zero is critical to limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Yet this urgency is frequently counterbalanced by concerns over economic implications, social disruption, and the feasibility of such ambitious targets.

Speaking at the Sir John Crawford Memorial Address in Canberra, former Labor minister Joel Fitzgibbon warned that the current climate framework “abounds with greenwashing, rent-seeking, unrealistic targets, and ultra-optimistic views about emerging technologies”. His remarks capture a broader unease about whether Australia can meet these expectations without severe economic consequences.

This anxiety is magnified by the language used in public discourse. A recent unreleased government report described the risks of climate change to the nation’s economy and environment as “intense and scary.” Media coverage amplified this tone. Sensational coverage of extreme events, including the 2019–2020 Black Summer bushfires, framed the crisis in catastrophic terms. One Guardian headline declared that _“_Australian politics has to change forever when your own citizens cannot sleep or breathe_”_, accompanied by dramatic images of burning homes and injured wildlife. Heatwaves in Sydney and Melbourne were repeatedly framed as “record-breaking” or “unprecedented”, reinforcing a sense of existential threat.

Business leaders such as Andrew Forrest calling for rapid decarbonisation, alongside politicians warning of economic collapse if targets are missed, added to an already fraught atmosphere.

The media does more than report; it constructs a cultural climate in which urgency and fear overshadow nuance, and anxiety becomes the dominant emotional currency.

Yet the reaction to net zero policies is not simply a product of contemporary politics or climate science. It reflects a deeper human struggle with uncertainty and the desire for stability. Throughout history, thinkers have grappled with how to live in a world that is both knowable and unpredictable.

The pre-Socratic “natural” philosopher Heraclitus insisted that the world is in constant motion: “you cannot step into the same river twice.” For him, change and uncertainty were fundamental to existence. His peer Parmenides claimed that reality is stable and unchanging, offering a vision of permanence and order.

These opposing perspectives, flux versus permanence, highlight an enduring human challenge: how to act in a world that appears both familiar and unstable.

Later philosophers, separated from Heraclitus by both decades and millennia, grappled with this same tension. In classical Greece, Socrates and Plato sought timeless truths such as perfect justice or immutable virtue. Centuries later, Nietzsche argued that this pursuit was destabilising because it set impossible standards that life could never satisfy. For him, the longing for Platonic purity and permanence was itself a symptom of the human discomfort with a world grounded in flux and ambiguity.

Nietzsche believed that modern rationality could produce the same burden when treated as a source of ultimate meaning. Carbon accounting, emissions modelling, and net zero targets promise clarity, yet they cannot fully capture the ethical, social, and economic complexities of lived experience. The reliance on such abstractions can create a sense that no matter how carefully we measure or plan, we will inevitably fall short of an idealised standard.

In this light, Australia’s net zero debate is not an aberration but part of a long continuum of attempts to impose order on uncertainty. The variability of climate impacts evokes Heraclitean instability, while the desire for precise carbon targets reflects a Socratic and Parmenidean longing for permanence. Western nations face similar struggles, attempting to stabilise the unpredictable through rational planning.

Modern philosophers and theorists have shown how this desire for certainty has intensified into what has been described as “Cartesian anxiety.” This is based on the French Enlightenment philosopher Descartes’ attempt to secure a permanent foundation for knowledge through his claim, “I think, therefore I am.”

Yet this attempt at creating a metaphysical bulwark against life’s mystery and instability created a new form of anxiety, by reducing existence to rational thought and leaving individuals aware of the instability of everything beyond the self.

In the 20th century, Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity builds on Marx’s “all that is solid melts into the air” critique of capitalism and argues that rapid technological and social changes erode stable structures, leaving communities, jobs, and identities in constant motion.

Ulrich Beck’s “risk society” adds another layer, contending that late modern societies confront risks that are global, abstract, and often invisible until they materialise. Environmental hazards, financial crises, and technological failures are structural features of contemporary life. Net zero commitments, in this context, function as an attempt to render these uncertainties legible and controllable. But by translating fluid and complex risks into rigid metrics, they can intensify the very anxieties they seek to calm.

Net zero, then, is not simply an environmental target. It has become a psychological and cultural anchor in a society that feels increasingly unstable. Advocates of strict carbon targets often treat them as moral absolutes, offering a clear line between right and wrong. Yet this reflects the deeper human philosophical desire for certainty rather than scientific necessity.

What appears to be a neutral scientific framework rests on a false metaphysics: the belief that complex, uncertain realities can be mastered through perfect measurement and fixed ideals.

By treating carbon accounting as moral arithmetic, the net zero project mistakes numerical precision for ethical clarity. Its rigidity reflects not the world as it is but the anxieties projected onto it, anxieties about instability, identity, economic change, and cultural flux.

These fears are real, but they arise from culture, not from science; they reveal a society searching for an anchor strong enough to steady its uncertainties.

The tragedy is that the mechanism designed to soothe this anxiety can end up deepening it. Net zero becomes punitive rather than pragmatic, producing guilt, division, and impossible expectations. It constrains debate and distracts from more adaptive and context-specific approaches to environmental responsibility.

Until we confront the unexamined anxieties that sustain it, we will continue to pursue rigid targets that do more harm than good, mistaking abstraction for action and certainty for wisdom.