by David Spratt
I want to explore why climate policymaking has reached a “zero point”.
This term comes from Slavoj Zizek’s 2025 essay of the same name, in which he asks how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and confront despair without collapsing into it. He describes the “zero point” as the ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups, a concept taken from Lenin.
Climate policy-making has failed in its core task, which was to stop dangerous climate change. The evidence, the destruction, is accumulating around us, at a pace that has shocked scientists. We have arrived at the rock bottom, though most policymakers seem loath to accept this proposition.
Climate advocacy is dominated by the politics of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, where petrostates have the power of veto, and nominally science-based outcomes are politically mediated and scientifically reticent, underestimating the pace and scale of the transformative action required.
Key components and outcomes such as the Paris Agreement, “net zero by 2050”, carbon budget overshoot and similar constructions are an artifice of poor approaches to risk, rather than a reflection of Earth System conditions.
