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.
This hegemonic denial of existential climate risk and the proximity of collapse has brought us to this “zero point”. And collapse is not too strong a term. In their 2024 State of the Climate Report, 14 leading researchers warned that:
We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis… We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo.
Avoiding civilisational collapse requires governments and nations to make climate the first priority of economics and politics, especially for the world’s largest and high-polluting economies. For a moment during Europe’s fire season from hell, there was a glimpse of recognition. The Spanish prime minister said the wildfire crisis must become a turning point for climate action and called for a nationwide pact to confront the "climate emergency". The French President said the wildfire fight was the “toughest since World War Two”.
Translating those sentiments into sustained action would mean making human security, not national security, the focus of geopolitics. It would mean the rich providing the capacity for developing nations to make a fast transition and adapt.
It would recognise that disruption is inevitable, dislocation is necessary and this is not a period for business and politics-as-usual.
The action required to protect human civilisation is now without precedent. So why should we assume the existing system — in which climate policymaking is embedded — is capable of achieving the task?
Let me start with some physical realities.
Global annual greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow. So far, renewables have added to energy supply, but are not displacing fossil fuels and other emissions in toto as energy demand grows. The data centre frenzy deepens the problem.
The fossil fuel industry is on the front foot. Both oil and gas industries plan expanded production to 2050. Big banks and big business are abandoning previous climate commitments. The political focus on, and mainstream media coverage of, climate are at a low point; climate disinformation is a growing force; and more right-wing political parties are denying climate change.
The rate of warming has accelerated and almost doubled over the last two decades. Warming has reached 1.5°C, with the imminent El Nino likely to produce an astounding 1.75°C in 2026-27. Earth’s Energy Imbalance, an indicator of future warming, has doubled in the last 15 years and continues to increase, suggesting a warming trend of 2°C before 2040 is likely.
Even global warming of 1°C, a threshold already passed, risks triggering some tipping points. One study shows that at 1.5°C, six out of 10 studied climate subsystems already show large-scale abrupt shifts across multiple models.
Beyond 2°C, says Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute:
“It’s very likely that we have caused so many tipping points that you have probably added another degree just through self-reinforcing changes… The moment that the Earth system flips over from being self-cooling — which it still is — to self-warming, that is the moment that we lose control”.
On the current emission path, warming will likely exceed 3°C. A plausible worst-case scenario is 4°C or more of warming by 2100.
Many impacts are occurring faster than forecast. Extreme events and their impacts have been underestimated in climate models, including the severity of heatwaves, wildfires and flooding. Tipping points have passed for some large Earth systems — polar ice sheets, coral reefs — and others are close at hand, such as the Atlantic circulation and the Amazon. The recent Himalayan glacial collapse illustrates what abrupt change looks like.
Scientists are now warning that the Atlantic circulation is on the edge of tipping, with a collapse of the transport of warm tropical waters northward. That would result in agriculture in north-west Europe becoming non-viable, and perhaps some countries, too. The government of Iceland has designated this potential collapse as a national security concern and an existential threat.
The current level of greenhouse gases is sufficient to produce levels of warming — and sea-level rises of tens of metres in the longer term — that would contribute to widespread social collapse and the end of the human project as we have known it.
Sir David King, the former UK Chief Scientist, says that on our current path, civilisation as we presently know it will disappear: “If we meet current commitments only – net zero by 2050 – perhaps some form of humanity will survive, managing the challenges of continued extreme weather events, ice loss, and sea-level and temperature rises”.
It is possible, but not probable, that climate action has been “too little, too late”, in the sense that political inertia means that the radical actions now necessary to arrest accelerated warming and prevent abrupt change are not remotely on the agenda. And on present political trends, they are unlikely to be in the relevant time frame.
Scientists describe climate as an existential risk, a circumstance in which the reaction time to an alert — the time it would take to correct the situation — may be greater than the intervention time, which is the time actually available to do it. The Titanic is a good example: the ship was too close to the iceberg to be able to turn in time.
Once triggered, many changes in the Earth System cannot be reversed on timescales relevant to human survival and development. Above 1.5°C, there is also a physical “point of no return” risk, after which “it may be impossible to stabilise the climate close to conditions that we are able to adapt to”. Where this “point of no return” lies is not certain, but waiting to find out is suicidal.
And an immediate challenge is derailment risk: society being too distracted by escalating crises and resources diverted to adaptation to address the root causes of climate change by reducing emissions and other actions. This dilemma would produce a feedback loop that if left unchecked, “could render societies incapable of undergoing a sustainable transition, leading to runaway climate change and nature loss.”
Actions
At this moment, the climate zero point, there are two starting points in ascending the mountain.
Firstly, government leadership must be founded on a strategy of “acknowledgment rather than denial of a crisis’s reality; acceptance of responsibility to take action; and honest self-appraisal”, in the words of Jarod Diamond.
Thus the assessment of climate risks should be carried out in line with risk-management best practices, taking into account the full range of outcomes, including tipping points and the risk of ruin. This must not be based only on historic experience, which may well be irrelevant to the future state, and must incorporate methods to understand unprecedented climate impacts. Only emergency precautionary action will address the level and speed of change required. Climate risk analysis must give particular attention to the high-end possibilities because that is where the greatest damage and disruption lies. This is the issue the Nordic Council is coming to grips with right now.
The second starting point is to establish normative goals, including identifying events that should be avoided at all cost, including crossing Earth system tipping points, the breakdown of critical ecosystems; and climate-driven forced displacement, conflict and mass death.
Current climate policymaking and advocacy goals are outdated and unsafe, and represent a political compromise, not a scientifically sound normative goal. Sir David King had collaborated with the small-island states in the lead-up to the 2015 Paris conference, arguing successfully that global temperature should not go above a 1.5°C rise for safety. But in 2021, The Independent journalist Donnachadh McCarthy reported that King “astounded me by saying he now realised this was wrong, and believes the passing of the Arctic tipping point has been reached... He said the 1.1°C rise that we already have is too dangerous — and candidly admitted he believed US climate professor James Hansen had been right after all in 1988, when he warned the US Congress that we should not pass 350 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
More recently Hansen has said that: “We will need to return to a global climate no warmer than the middle of the 20th century, and likely somewhat cooler, for the sake of maintaining global shorelines.“ That is a goal of less than half a degree of warming.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director-General of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, has said that: “Our survival would very much depend on how well we were able to draw down carbon dioxide to 280 parts per million”, that is, the pre-industrial level.
And in 2022, a group of Australian scientists suggested that, from a geologic perspective: “In the long-term, the best target global temperature for the planet might be something akin to a pre-industrial climate.”
It is only on this ethical basis can we build actions commensurate with the scale of the problem. And the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on the Responsibilities of States in regard to climate change confirms that international law requires states to prevent significant harm to the climate, and failure to do so can trigger legal responsibility.
The key actions to mitigate climate impacts are well known: moving rapidly to reduce methane and other short-lived climate forcers, halting deforestation, and supercharging the energy transition on the path to zero emissions.
But due to the decreasing aerosol impacts, weakening carbon stores in nature, reducing planetary reflection and the delayed impact of past emissions, even a sharp reduction in carbon emissions will have little discernable impact on the rate of warming for the following two decades.
This means that mitigation of emissions is not a sufficient strategy.
Because a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the pre-industrial level, working with nature to enhance large-scale carbon dioxide removal or drawdown is imperative, but it is a slow process that by itself is insufficient for the climate system to avoid catastrophic and abrupt change.
Together with fast mitigation and drawdown, there is a need to establish a safe means of active cooling for the planet as a necessary action to avoid collapse, what might be thought of as an emergency brake.
A range of potential solar reflection solutions exist to rapidly reduce Earth’s energy imbalance, reduce warming and mitigate the risk of tipping points. Climate interventions such as solar radiation management, are now the least-worst option in the short term, but most climate advocates and policymakers are either opposed, or silent on the issue.
There are valid concerns about the implications and potential unintended consequences of some of these methodologies; more research and testing is urgently needed to more fully understand these options, as well as efficacious governance and international cooperation which simply does not exist today.
All this cries out for government policy and research funding, and global coordination.
But climate policymaking has been built on two foundational pillars: a bedrock assumption that change should be slow and incremental in a manner that does not disrupt growth or inhibit the market, or leave capital stranded; and that levers for change should be market-focused. Hence the emphasis on such mechanisms as carbon prices, tradeable offsets, tax credits, new markets for carbon capture and storage with or without bioenergy, and even commodifying nature. This has failed and driven us to the edge of the precipice.
With courageous state leadership, a fast transition is possible. Renewable stationary energy generation and batteries are now cheaper than fossil energy. In China, renewables have overtaken coal as a stationary energy source. More than half the cars sold in China are now electric. Most investment growth in China is in these sectors. China is becoming the world’s first “electrostate” and now has the upper hand in its strategic and economic conflict with the USA.
The richest one per cent emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity. Rapid emissions reduction requires recognition that the most affluent 10% of the global population are responsible for 50% of emissions.
Dragging the consumption level of that 10% back to the European average would by itself reduce global emissions by one-third. That is, the transition requires, amongst other things, a deep reduction in aggregate energy demand and the curtailment of hyper-consumption. This, of course, is anathema to the market.
The UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries has shown how the climate crisis qualifies as an existential emergency because it presents irreversible, existential risks to planetary systems; it undermines the foundations of national and human security; it exceeds the scope of conventional risk management; and it exceeds the capacity of governments working in incrementalist modes which ignore the most damaging, high-end risks.
The transition is not impossible, but requires a level of political commitment and economic mobilisation comparable to an emergency or a large-scale war effort. Emergency mobilisation is not about panic but about priority and activating all available capacities toward a common goal, removing bottlenecks and bypassing market failure. Emergency mode is a shift in governance, mindset, and tempo. It replaces fragmented reform with coordinated transformation.
It should not be assumed that strong state intervention requires an autocratic government. If, as a society, we are to engage in a rapid change, it will require the active democratic participation of the population, rather than its passivity. The tools exist and the capacity exists; what has been missing is the decision to act.
In 2011, Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption concluded that it was an illusion to think the contradictions can be resolved within the current economic frame and that disruption and chaos was now inevitable as system failure occurs. It laid out the reasons to “address the emergency with the commitment of our response to WWII and begin a real transformation to a sustainable economy.”
There is no longer any prospect of an orderly, market-driven transition. The physical changes in the climate system are often non-linear and hence difficult to project, but markets crave stability and fear disruption. Climate damages are deeply uncertain — that is, basically, unquantifiable — so that cost-benefit analysis, which is a basic tool of private-sector risk management, breaks down. The risk cannot be priced and traditional risk calculations fail.
It is now clear that, as bankers and economists such as Nicholas Stern and Mark Carney have recognised, the inability of risk and financial markets to respond adequately to the threat of climate collapse is the greatest market failure in history. Only governments can lead in correcting this huge market distortion.
This requires explicit recognition of the leading role of the state in strategising, guiding and regulating the transition, as in any emergency mobilisation. This in turn requires a (further) turning away from the globalization/neo-liberal agenda. In the present economic circumstances — low growth, stagflation, disruption — the material needs of decarbonisation cannot be absorbed by growth, but only by reallocation of financial and physical resources.
There is now a new opportunity for governments to assert the right, and necessity, of their leading role in defending humanity’s future by courageous leadership and incisive interventions, before it is too late.
By abandoning failed global mechanisms and globalised coercive controls, there is a chance for nations to forge bilateral and regional agreements on climate action and other issues that reflect higher ambition, rather than lowest-common-demoninator compromises. And to recognise that a crisis of civilisation-threatening proportions requires a government in emergency mode, and all that entails.
This is our “zero point”. Now is the moment to set forth on the Long March in response to the climate emergency.
Note: This article is the text of a keynote speech at the CLIMATEXLAW Conference, Reconceptualising Legal Paradigms for Climate Change, held at the University of Ljubljana on 10-11 September 2026
