Why climate solutions keep bending back into the problem
Why do climate solutions so often feel both convincing and insufficient at the same time?
From net zero targets to carbon capture technologies, many proposed responses to climate change appear rigorous and actionable. But look more closely, and they often rely on assumptions, deferrals, or accounting practices that seem to reproduce the very conditions they are meant to transform.
This isn’t simply a failure of ambition or political will. It points to something more structural.
When a problem like climate change threatens foundational systems—economic growth, state sovereignty, industrial infrastructure—responses are not generated outside those systems, but within them. As a result, solutions are shaped to fit existing logics, even as they attempt to challenge them.
You can see this pattern in several places.
Many climate mitigation pathways depend on large-scale carbon removal technologies that do not yet exist at the necessary scale. This allows emissions to continue in the present, on the assumption they can be reversed in the future. Responsibility is displaced forward in time.
At the same time, emissions are counted territorially—within national borders—even though production and consumption are globally distributed. This can create the appearance of reduction in one place while emissions are displaced elsewhere.
And technologies such as carbon capture do not simply remove carbon. They reorganise it—moving it through pipelines, storing it underground, embedding it within infrastructures that extend its life rather than resolving it.
Across these examples, a similar dynamic emerges.
Climate action is translated into forms that existing systems can process. The result is a series of persistent tensions:
between present action and future deferral
between national targets and global realities
between decarbonisation goals and fossil-fuelled infrastructures
These tensions are not hidden. But nor are they fully addressed. Instead, they recur across policy, modelling and public discourse as partially visible, often incompatible realities.
At the same time, social and political conditions make it harder to engage with this complexity. Climate change is not characterised by a lack of knowledge, but by a fragmentation in how it is understood and acted upon.
So the question shifts.
Not simply: Are we solving climate change?
But:
What kinds of solutions are we capable of producing within our current systems—and what gets left out, deferred or reshaped in the process?
This space is for working through that question.