With full recognition of the work carried out by millions of committed leaders, scientists, and institutions – among them the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization, and the International Energy Agency – one conclusion is now unavoidable.
After 30 years of “UN Climate Change Conferences” (CC COPs) and a decade since the “Paris Agreement“, political systems have failed to keep global warming within effective “human control”.
Sufficient greenhouse gases are already locked into the atmosphere to drive at least approximately 2°C of global average temperature rise. Meanwhile, the primary drivers of GHG emissions; fossil fuel combustion and industrial meat production continue to expand. At the same time, natural carbon sinks such as oceans, soils, and forests are approaching saturation, while deforestation and intensifying wildfires further reduce the planet’s capacity to absorb emissions.
Despite this reality, the political decision required to address the crisis at its root; a globally binding market for GHG emissions remains far from being realised. This failure cannot be attributed to inaction at other levels. Many corporations have reduced emissions, and billions of individuals are making personal sacrifices to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. However, voluntary action and fragmented initiatives cannot substitute for coordinated political leadership.
80 years after “World War II”, we are heading towards global collapse
In 2025; 80 years after the end of “World War II“, it is highly certain that humanity has failed to transition away from fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) and industrial meat production. Together, these sectors account for nearly 90% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
As a result, we are no longer on a pathway to keep global warming below 1.5°C (relative to pre-industrial levels from 1850–1900) – the threshold required for maintaining a stable climate system.
This conclusion is not sudden. It is grounded in my many years of data collection, observation, and participation in global policy processes; developed in a “heuristic certainty”. Across the global political arenas, the same pattern emerge; policy ambition and realisation remain structurally misaligned with global warming targets.
After processing this overwhelming evidence, one “insight” stands out. Humanity is extraordinarily powerful in its capacity to generate wealth, technology, and growth yet profoundly weak in its ability to govern the consequences of that power.
The evolution of a globalised economy, dominated by multinational corporations, has driven wealth concentration. However, it has relied heavily on fossil fuels and resource extraction while externalising environmental and social costs. These externalities include climate change, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, micro- and nano-plastics in our foods and bodies, and systemic ecological degradation.
Despite decades of climate commitments, global emissions continue to rise, energy demand is increasing, and fossil fuel production is projected to accelerate rather than decline. Instead of a managed phase-out, fossil fuels are entering a renewed expansion; often described by some as the “golden age” (compare featured graph about the outlook of the “Global Primary Energy Consumption by Energy Source”12).
This trajectory pushes the global system further from climate stability and closer to systemic collapse.
Hope rhetoric and nationalist politics reveal institutional weakness
When politicians rely on hope as their primary message, it often reflects a loss of governing capacity. Hope is not a policy instrument. In contrast, leaders in executive or corporate roles are expected to act decisively, manage risk, and deliver results, not appeal to hope as a substitute for action.
Politics traced back to nationalism suppresses the reality of a globally interconnected society and economy. This interconnectedness has enabled unprecedented levels of prosperity, innovation, and cooperation — ignoring it undermines the capacity to manage global resources balanced.
These dynamics are not accidental. They are reinforced by mainstream linear management frameworks that prioritise competition, efficiency, and short-term advantage (cf. e.g. the work from Michael E. Porter) often at the expense of resilience, cooperation, and long-term development. In some cases, they are amplified by imperial power ambitions driven more by insecurity than by strategic strength.
Scientific knowledge has increasingly become detached from political decision-making. Research is frequently reduced to narrow metrics and quantification, limiting its capacity to inform complex systemic challenges. Commercialised digital culture further prioritises speed, distraction, and sensationalism over depth and understanding.
This environment weakens key pillars of democratic governance such as independent investigative journalism, holistic education (“Bildung”), and cultural expression. As these foundations erode, societies lose the capacity for informed debate, long-term planning, and accountable leadership.
Meanwhile, global population growth and living aspirations toward “western standards” drives a huge demand for energy and other resources while emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, intensify energy consumption rather than reduce it.
Politics remains heavily shaped by short-term thinking, driven in part by commercialised media that reward sensationalism over nuanced, long-term analysis, which is often deemed too costly or inefficient. The unhealthy application of “homo oeconomicus” and commercialisation reducing humans to short term profit and wealth generation has been extended into governance, presented as a “good” approach to managing society and politics.
Excessive competition undermines collaboration and solidarity, while mimetic forces like greed, vanity, envy, jealousy, and group-think are normalised and reframed as desirable behaviour
encouraging overconsumption and the relentless pursuit of profit and wealth..
Energy-intensive lifestyles (industrial production processes, mobility etc) and high meat consumption have become status symbols, further entrenching global dependence on fossil fuels.
While technological mitigation tools such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) or Solar Radiation Management/Modification (SRM) are often cited, they are incapable of offsetting the scale of current emissions.
There will be no “overshoot”, there will be collapse
For decades, scientists have warned us about the importance of limiting warming to 1.5°C. At the 2025 UN Climate Summit in New York , Johan Rockström indicated that even though an “overshoot” may occur, rapid reductions in emissions could still return temperatures below 1.5°C by the end of the century.
Given his own foundational work on climate tipping points, this framing is overly optimistic and potentially misleading. It implies reversibility and control in a system that is non-linear, delayed, and prone to irreversible change. Once critical thresholds are crossed, returning to a previously stable climate state is highly unlikely.
At the same event, Katharine Hayhoe – another leading scientist – emphasised collaboration and hope. While well-intentioned, her message lacked concrete data on projected deaths. What is required is not reassurance, but decisive leadership and immediate action by the 195 leaders who were in the room during her speech. Appeals to hope or moral sentiment are insufficient in the face of such imminent danger.
Leadership theory and “change management” show that people act decisively only when they understand “why” action is necessary. Abstract temperature targets or tipping-point language alone insufficient to spur action.
Radical honesty is therefore essential. Scientists operate under intense pressure within competitive research environments that reward quantification and caution. This shapes not only what can be studied, but what can be communicated. This outcome is fully understandable within a hostile environment shaped by distorted liberal economic theories that deliberately constrain resources to intensify competition. In such systems, alternative perspectives, critical inquiry, and pluralism are systematically marginalised – well-known externalities of frameworks grounded in the notion of “perfect competition”.
As a result, even respected scientific voices like Rockström’s included, who has admitted that we failed to stay within the 1.5°C struggle to go a step further. This would mean to acknowledge, that once global warming reaches 2°C, even the best computer models powered by supercomputers and artificial intelligence, cannot reliably predict what happens next. We are entering a period of profound uncertainty.
In the corporate world, such unmanaged uncertainty would be unacceptable. Executives who fail to identify, quantify and prepare for existential risks are removed.
Science, however, is not about producing the largest volume of precise data. It is about asking the right questions and gathering the relevant data with precision starting with “Why?”, and not “What?”
Hence, from a strategic perspective, two insights now define our situation:
- There is no (physical) chance to stay within a stable global climate system any more, because the temperature rise we experience today reflects emissions from roughly 30 years ago.
- We cannot reliably predict further temperature acceleration and its specific impact on the climate and biodiversity system of the planet.
This represents a worst-case scenario; we have become increasingly blind and have lost effective control.
It is 100% political failure
Science can improve, particularly through stronger interdisciplinary research. But on the core issue, science has already delivered. It identified a clear physical boundary beyond which the climate system becomes unstable.
Political leaders have been aware of this boundary for decades. At the latest, it was formally acknowledged with the “Kyoto Protocol” in 2005.
Research in systems dynamics and cognitive science shows that humans perform poorly when managing complex, delayed, and non-linear systems – and the global climate system is among the most complex systems humanity has ever attempted to govern. Political and economic models built on short-term optimisation perform even worse under such conditions. They are structurally incapable of precautionary governance.
Democratic systems have elevated leaders who openly disregard scientific reality and we are currently witnessing the consequences of such poor cognitive performance within e.g. the “Trump administration”.
The insight that global warming, climate change, and biodiversity loss are now largely out of effective human control represents the greatest political failure in human history.
The impacts experienced today; droughts, floods, wildfires, heatwaves, and water scarcity are largely the result of emissions from around 1995. This explains how repeated political failures compound over time and why disasters against humanity by the Trump, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Putin administration are possible and even highly progressive political systems, including the European Union, continue to struggle to implement climate action at the required scale and speed.
In 30 years, many of today’s leaders will not be in office when the most severe consequences unfold.
Based on overwhelming scientific evidence, political leaders who deny or obstruct action on the “greenhouse effect”, caused primarily by burning fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas) and industrial meat production will be remembered by history as those responsible for the greatest death toll of humans, greater than the one caused by Adolf Hitler or Josef Wissarionowitsch Stalin.
It is therefore essential to be precise; the collapse is 100% a political responsibility.
Markets do not govern themselves. The global economy operates under rules set by political systems. Corporations are legally and structurally designed to maximise profit. Fossil fuel and industrial agriculture companies will continue to exploit their assets as long as it remains profitable to do so.
That behaviour is not a moral failure, it is their task and responsibility. Ensuring that economic activity operates within ecological limits is therefore not a market responsibility, but a political one.
Where that responsibility is not exercised, the outcome is not a market failure, but 100% political failure.
What Happens Next?
Collapse – much faster than most expect. Collapse here implies a rapid destabilisation across ecological, economic, and social systems.
At this point, there are basically two options to approach this collapse:
(1) The first is retreat into nationalism and hope repression, and repression solves the problem (like in the Trump & UAE administration). This approach is structurally incapable of success because climate instability ignores borders and political cycles.
(2) The second is acknowledgement of failure, followed by reflection, learning and action. Humanity has built a highly integrated global economy with highly successful corporations, yet failed to develop a corresponding system of global governance capable of managing shared risks. This mismatch is at the core of the climate crisis.
Now, ahead of the collapse, we can proactively start with the development of such a global governance, a new way towards a healthy and thus sustainable global society.
Ultimately, such governance must be democratic, recognising that the true sovereigns of the planet are the people who inhabit it. Without inclusive and credible global decision-making, mitigation efforts will remain fragmented, insufficient, and too slow.
Our delay worsens outcomes and narrows future options. The choice is now between managed transformation and unmanaged collapse, and that choice will define political responsibility in history.
picture shows graph about the outlook of the “Global Primary Energy Consumption by Energy Source”,
Future Investment Initiative Institute (FII-Institute), “Can we solve the energy trilemma? Impact Report“, p. 10, based on data from “pb Energy Outlook 2024 edition“
