As I watch the wildfire tragedies unfolding across the Northern Hemisphere, my mind returns to January 2026 in southwest Victoria.
Standing in front of my home as violent, swirling winds pushed so hard they almost knocked me off my feet. The day came with a Catastrophic Fire Danger Rating; the temperature again above 40°C. For days the sky had been orange with thick smoke, the smell and taste of which was almost impossible to avoid.
As I reflect on that moment, all the debates, policies, and opinions that usually dominate conversations about the climate disappear. One truth remains: physics doesn’t negotiate.
As a physicist by education, and someone who has spent years working to influence system change, the experience that day was a visceral reminder of a simple but profound reality, physics doesn’t care.
Physics doesn’t care about incompetence, fraud and corruption in our political system and institutions, which have enabled these known problems to escalate over decades.
Physics doesn’t care that business is addicted to profit, markets can be manipulated, politics is addicted to growth, and the professional/managerial class is addicted to dopamine fuelled consumption.
Physics doesn’t care that people don’t understand how the money systems works and it would be easy for governments to find the money to tackle the multiple crisis we have long faced.
Physics doesn’t care that through incompetence, fraud and corruption our governments won’t admit that the (unlimited) money that they can spend into existence, to solve existential problems, such as climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, must be productive money; therein lies the problem – too much money in the system today is unproductive.
Physics doesn’t care that a government can spent money into existence to do anything we want, it just can’t do everything we want, which means the productive money created to deal with the crises can’t compete with unproductive money for resources – land, labour, energy, materials – spent creating unnecessary stuff, such as luxury goods and bullshit jobs.
Physics doesn’t care that governments don’t want to tackle the system that has been created in the last 50 years which enables unproductive money because that would mean facing up to the state capture by the rich and powerful.
Physics doesn’t care that the hoarding and speculative spending of the wealthy needs to be closed down, so the money issued by the government to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis is spent on real solutions, not greenwashing such as net zero and nature positive.
Physics doesn’t care that allowing the massive hoarding and speculative spending of the wealthy has resulted in our democracies being dismantled and turned into oligarchy.
Physics doesn’t care that too many in the professional/managerial class idolise this generation’s robber barons, and their companies who have become too big to care.
Physics doesn’t care that we believe in human supremacy.
As President Macron describes the current situation in France as the “worst fire-related crisis since World War II”, physics doesn’t care that this description is inaccurate because, unlike WWII, it won’t be ‘over’ after the firefight has ended.
Physics doesn’t care that this is more comparable to a global nuclear war — mutually assured destruction of the ecosystem and infrastructure that ensure our survival – seen as unthinkable by many.
As a physicist with a PhD in particle physics, I can say with complete confidence that physics doesn’t care about our politics, our ideologies, our economic theories, or the stories we tell ourselves about why meaningful action is too difficult. It will respond only to the laws that govern energy, matter and the atmosphere.
Those laws cannot be lobbied, negotiated with, delayed or spun. They simply keep score. Every tonne of greenhouse gas emitted, every ecosystem destroyed, every year squandered narrows the range of futures still available to us.
And, physics will never care, which is exactly why we should —because while physics determines the consequences, we are still ignoring the true causes.
Lynn Johnson is a physicist by education and has worked as an executive coach and a strategy consultant for over 20 years. In her work she pushes for systemic change, not piecemeal solutions, this includes campaigning for modernising the legal trade in endangered species, to help tackle the illegal wildlife trade.
