Radical Centrism - The most radical thing we can do is nothing

It is a choice we keep making because our economic system, and the politicians who serve it, remain committed to the idea that the market will eventually sort things out. It will not. The evidence comes not from radicals but from the EU's own scientists, from complexity economists at Oxford, and from biologists who spent decades working within the market framework and have concluded it was a dead end.

The ESABCC describes current adaptation efforts as "insufficient, largely incremental and often coming too late." ^[1] Climate-supercharged rains killed 134 people in Germany's Ahr valley in 2021 and 229 in Spain's Valencia region in 2024. ^[1] Last year's wildfires burned more of Europe than scientists have ever recorded. ^[1] Portugal was hit this year by storms that killed at least 16 people and caused €775m of damage. ^[1] These are not projections. They are happening now, at 1.4°C of warming. We are on course for more than double that.

The market was asked. It said no.

For thirty years, the dominant approach to environmental policy has been to make markets care about nature. Biologists and policymakers united behind "ecosystem services," the idea that if you put a price tag on what forests, wetlands and coral reefs do for us, boardrooms would act rationally to protect them.

Daniel Suarez, an environmental scientist at Middlebury College who traces the rise and fall of this approach in his new book Biologists Unite, is blunt: biologists embraced market-based conservation "not because they really liked them, but because they didn't feel there was another choice." ^[2] They had accepted the structures of the neoliberal era as settled facts, leaving themselves "the impossible task of having to figure out how to optimise within those fixed constraints." ^[2]

The results speak for themselves. Between 1970 and 2020, global wildlife populations declined by 73 per cent. ^[2] A million species are at risk of extinction. ^[2] The private investment that ecosystem services were supposed to unlock never materialised, and in 2020 the international community failed to meet a single one of its agreed 10-year biodiversity targets, for the second consecutive decade. ^[2] Suarez identifies the core problem: whether a mangrove forest gets demolished has less to do with correct arithmetic and more to do with who benefits and who controls the decisions. ^[2]

The models are broken too

The failure is not only political. The economic models that governments rely on to assess climate risk are fundamentally inadequate. Doyne Farmer, a complexity scientist at Oxford, is direct: "The models we have are completely inadequate and even misleading." ^[3] Standard models consistently predicted renewable energy would be slow to roll out and expensive. ^[3] In reality, costs plunged and deployment was rapid. If the models get that wrong on the upside, consider what they are missing on the downside.

A recent report from the University of Exeter and Carbon Tracker found that current models project a 10% GDP loss at 3 to 4°C of warming. ^[4] Physical climate scientists say that at those temperatures, the economy and society will cease to function as we know them. ^[4] The gap between those two assessments represents a category failure in how we measure risk, one rooted in models that assume rational actors in permanent equilibrium. Farmer's proposed alternative, a complexity model simulating 30,000 energy companies and 160,000 assets, would cost $100m. ^[3] The 2008 financial crash cost the world $10 trillion. ^[3] The barriers to better modelling are institutional, not technical.

What the market offers instead

When society refuses to confront fossil fuel infrastructure directly, the "solutions" it produces become increasingly absurd. In their new book The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It's Too Late, Swedish academics Wim Carton and Andreas Malm catalogue what happens when policymakers treat the fossil fuel economy as an unalterable background condition. Researchers have proposed flooding tropical forests with artificial light to boost nighttime photosynthesis, building giant underwater curtains to manage sea level rise, and even nudging the Earth's orbit by attaching asteroids to it. ^[5] All of these appeared in published academic papers.

Carton and Malm see a pattern. "Deference to the political status quo translates into reckless experimentation with ecosystems or an entire biome," they write. "Because the former is unbreakable, the latter must be broken." ^[5] The logic extends to carbon removal technologies, which currently extract around 0.0023 gigatons of CO2 per year, roughly 15,000 times less than the annual emissions from fossil fuels and cement. ^[6] Yet Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, has described direct air capture as something that "gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it's going to be very much needed." ^[7] She told NPR there was "no reason not to produce oil and gas forever." ^[8] Governments, meanwhile, point to these technologies as reasons to delay decarbonisation. As Carton and Malm put it: "The idea of removals has affected the material world while still only being an idea." ^[5]

The numbers tell the story of this failure with brutal clarity. Since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change committed countries to preventing dangerous interference with the climate system, annual carbon emissions from fossil fuels have increased by nearly 70 per cent. ^[9] Atmospheric CO2 has risen from 360 to 431 parts per million. ^[10] Net-zero banking alliances and corporate decarbonisation pledges have been quietly abandoned. ^[5] The market was not just asked to solve this problem. It was given three decades, every incentive, and the full cooperation of the world's governments. The result: more emissions, not fewer.

Doing nothing is the radical position

We are accustomed to hearing that proposals for state-led investment in the green transition are "radical" or "unaffordable." This framing has it backwards. The radical position is the one we are currently pursuing: relying on market mechanisms that have failed for three decades while the planet heats toward temperatures at which, in the ESABCC's own words, we will reach "the limits of adaptation." ^[1]

The UK government, as a currency-issuing state, faces no financial barrier to mobilising resources for the transition. The Consolidated Fund provides sovereign credit that HM Treasury draws on, backed by the ability to raise taxes. ^[11] The constraints are real: physical capacity, skilled labour, the need to manage inflationary pressure. But they are not the constraints politicians describe when they say we cannot afford to act. Finding the money was never the problem. Finding the political will to direct resources toward keeping the planet habitable, that is the problem.

Carton and Malm arrive at a bleak but honest conclusion: "Twenty-first century capitalist society appears constitutionally incapable of solving any problem. All it can do is to expunge symptoms." ^[5] The biologists who tried to speak the language of the boardroom have reached the same verdict from a different direction. The complexity economists have shown the standard models are misleading. The climate scientists are telling us, plainly, that we are running out of time. The only people who seem unable to hear any of this are the politicians and orthodox economists who insist the market will provide, if we just give it a little longer. We do not have a little longer.

 

Sources

[1] Maarten van Aalst / ESABCC, quoted in Damian Carrington, "'Daunting but doable': Europe urged to prepare for 3C of global heating," The Guardian, 16 February 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/16/europe-climate-advisory-board-3c-global-heating

[2] Daniel Suarez, interviewed by Thomas Lewton, "Putting a price tag on nature failed. Can radical tactics save it?," New Scientist, February 2026. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2513274-putting-a-price-tag-on-nature-failed-can-radical-tactics-save-it/

[3] Doyne Farmer, quoted in Damian Carrington, "Economics has failed on the climate crisis. This complexity scientist has a mind-blowing plan to fix that," The Guardian, 12 February 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/12/economics-climate-crisis-complexity-scientist-plan

[4] University of Exeter / Carbon Tracker, "Recalibrating Climate Risk" report, February 2026. Cited in The Guardian and Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org/news/climate-and-economy

[5] Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It's Too Late (Penguin Random House, 2026). Reviewed by Joseph Winters, "So many climate solutions, so few emissions reductions," Grist, 2026. https://grist.org/culture/climate-capitalism-tech-the-long-heat-malm-carton-book-review/

[6] Carbon Brief, "The state of carbon dioxide removal in seven charts," 2023. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-the-state-of-carbon-dioxide-removal-in-seven-charts/

[7] Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, speaking at an oil industry conference, March 2023. Reported by Carlos Anchondo, "Oil companies want to remove carbon from the air — using taxpayer dollars," E&E News / Politico, 8 March 2023. https://www.eenews.net/articles/oil-companies-want-to-remove-carbon-from-the-air-using-taxpayer-dollars/

[8] Vicki Hollub, quoted by Camila Domonoske, "An oil firm wants to pull CO2 from the sky — to keep selling crude," NPR, 27 December 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/27/1210928126/oil-climate-change-carbon-capture-removal-direct-air-capture-occidental

[9] Our World in Data, "CO2 emissions." https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

[10] NOAA Climate.gov, "Climate change: atmospheric carbon dioxide." https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide

[11] Andrew Berkeley, Richard Tye, and Neil Wilson, "The Self-Financing State: An Institutional Analysis of Government Expenditure, Revenue and Debt in the United Kingdom," UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, Working Paper WP 2022/15."