Bhumics Sidebar: Is Humpty Dumpty Dead?

The Fragmentation of Climate Action in a Polyconflict World

When I first became invested in climate action a little over a decade ago, I understood it as a failure of the liberal democratic system. While problems like air pollution and ozone depletion had been effectively addressed between the 1970s and 1990s (at least in developed nations), carbon emissions continued unabated. Despite this troubling trajectory, I maintained faith that the system could correct itself—that eventually, a combination of public pressure, economic incentives, technological change, and international cooperation would produce a lasting solution to the climate crisis.

In the liberal imagination, climate change represented the central node in what we now call the "polycrisis" afflicting our global system. As Wainwright and Mann argued in their influential book Climate Leviathan, this crisis would ultimately lead to the establishment of a global regime capable of enforcing decarbonization measures across national boundaries. Their framework proposed four potential futures emerging from the intersection of economics (capitalist or non-capitalist) and politics (planetary sovereignty or anti-planetary sovereignty), with "Climate Leviathan"—a capitalist planetary sovereignty—deemed most likely.

But this vision now seems increasingly fantastical. As my thinking shifts from polycrisis to polyconflict, I've become convinced that climate action as a coherent, unified enterprise is broken—and like Humpty Dumpty, may never be reassembled.

The Liberal Leviathan—the United States—is no longer so liberal, nor is it interested in being a leviathan. Climate action is becoming disaggregated; energy security considerations now regularly trump (pun intended) decarbonization goals, while renewable energy adoption increasingly follows security rather than mitigation logic. The very stability of the liberal order has become just one among various competing polyconflict priorities.

"Climate change" and "climate action" as operational concepts presuppose the existence of a stable, powerful liberal order, with environmental concerns positioned as a subset of that order's priorities, even when sidelined. Once saving the liberal order itself becomes the primary polyconflict concern, sustaining "climate action" as a coherent basket of cultural, economic, and administrative responses becomes nearly impossible. Consider the latest IPCC report forecasting increasingly dire conditions—I predict it will land dead in the water, making barely a ripple in our public discourse.

Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute recently addressed this dilemma in his examination of "The Coming Avocado Politics". Gilman identifies a "fundamental challenge" in maintaining "focused urgency" on climate change without resorting to apocalyptic rhetoric that can "justify and promote deeply illiberal or worse solutions to environmental issues."

Gilman critiques the dominant paradigm for promoting ecological transition, which operates under what he terms a "dangerous illusion"—that the sheer gravity of climate and biodiversity crises, scientifically validated and amplified by catastrophic events, would automatically generate popular consent. Policies derived from this paradigm—carbon taxes, stringent regulations, mandated technological shifts—have often been designed in what he calls a "socio-political vacuum," assuming a resilience and adaptive capacity that simply doesn't exist for most of the population.

This problem is especially acute in countries like India, where many more people live precariously. Gilman's proposed solution is to "improve daily life first, in order to enable the ecological transition." I have a different perspective: we must "improve daily life by making the ecological choice the default."

If everyday life is inherently planetary life, then everyday choices should be planetary choices. Planetary Design must become our most important design discipline.

This creates a dilemma for developing nations: Is it easier to embed planetary choices in places like India, where high-carbon intensive economies don't yet dominate, creating an opportunity to make planetary choices the default? Or is it actually harder, necessitating carbon-intensive development first before ecological transition can occur?

Back to the Future

The roots of our current predicament stretch back further than we might think. In April 1970, George Kennan, better known as the architect of America's Cold War containment policy, published "To Prevent a World Wasteland: A Proposal" in Foreign Affairs, diagnosing a planetary emergency caused by industrial overreach, political short-sightedness, and a lack of global coordination.

Surprisingly, this Cold War hawk was among the earliest advocates for international environmental governance. Kennan proposed an International Environmental Authority independent of national interests to enforce protections for the global commons. He noted that national responses, while necessary, were inadequate for addressing cross-border pollution, oceanic degradation, and atmospheric contamination.

Kennan didn't believe existing international arrangements would stop "the massive spillage of oil into the high seas, now estimated at a million tons per annum," or prevent the "plundering of the seabed for selfish national purposes." His solution was a transnational entity empowered to review environmental needs holistically.

With characteristic geopolitical bias, Kennan envisioned this authority emerging from "a small group of advanced nations," including the ten leading industrial countries, both communist and non-communist, alongside Scandinavian and Benelux countries due to their maritime interests. Though his proposal reflected the prejudices of his era, Kennan fundamentally believed a planetary perspective was essential for survival.

More than fifty years later, we still lack anything resembling an International Environmental Authority. As Nils Gilman observes in "Governing In The Planetary Age", "from rising seas to invisible viruses, many of today's and tomorrow's problems are inherently planetary in scale and scope. Yet the primary governance institution that we have to address them, the nation-state, is not." This fundamental mismatch between planetary challenges and national governance creates a situation where problems like climate change and pandemics remain "uncontrolled and uncontrollable."

The failure of nation-states to govern effectively at both planetary and local levels has produced a crisis of legitimacy. Climate change operates at a planetary level, but its consequences vary dramatically locally—Miami, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis all face climate impacts that have more in common with cities in other nations than with each other. Our governance structures aren't designed for this reality.

The multiple, accelerating crises we face today—ecological, economic, geopolitical, military, social, demographic, technological, epidemiological, and climatic—have been dubbed the "polycrisis", a term coined by Edgar Morin in 1993 to describe "complex, interconnected, planetary-scale challenges that produce cascading failures if not addressed holistically." I have argued that the Polycrisis is now a Polyconflict, and yet, we seem unable to learn or act effectively, caught in a cycle of perpetual surprise without adequate response tools.

This transition from polycrisis to polyconflict represents more than semantic wordplay—it acknowledges that we've moved from a world of manageable crises to one of entrenched struggles over resources, power, and survival itself. Unlike crises, which imply temporary disruptions to an otherwise stable system, conflicts represent ongoing, structurally embedded power struggles that reshape the world order. And in this polyconflict world, climate action becomes not a unifying global project but another battlefield where competing interests clash.

Perhaps real change must come from the bottom rather than the top—from people acting in solidarity across the world rather than waiting for international institutions to emerge. As Blake and Gilman suggest in Children of a Modest Star, we need "a clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences," one that recognizes how "deadly viruses, climate-changing carbon molecules, and harmful pollutants cross the globe unimpeded by national borders."

This new approach must acknowledge that while the consequences of these flows range from planetary to local scales, the authority and resources to manage them remain concentrated primarily at the national level—creating a profound mismatch that leads to cascading systemic failures. The breakdown of climate action as a coherent enterprise doesn't mean the abandonment of environmental goals, but rather their transformation and redistribution across multiple domains. In a world of polyconflict rather than polycrisis, climate considerations will be integrated—sometimes explicitly, sometimes tacitly—into security policies, economic planning, technological development, and local governance.

This fragmentation of climate action mirrors what we're seeing across other domains: the breakdown of global consensus, the resurgence of national interest as the primary driver of policy, and the intensification of competition for resources and influence. The holistic planetary perspective that climate science demands has collided with the fractured reality of a world increasingly organized around competing blocs, zero-sum thinking, and short-term advantage.

So, is Humpty Dumpty dead?

In its original unified form, perhaps. But the fragments of climate action may yet find new life embedded within the interstices of our evolving global order. The planetary perspective remains essential, even as the institutions meant to embody it struggle to emerge. Our challenge now is to foster this perspective from the ground up, making ecological choices the default in everyday life while building new governance structures that match the scale of our planetary predicament.

It's worth noting that even in death, Humpty Dumpty remains instructive. The nursery rhyme never actually states that Humpty was an egg—that interpretation came later. Similarly, perhaps our conception of what unified climate action should look like has been too rigid, too brittle. The future may not be a reassembled egg but something more adaptable, distributed, and resilient to the realities of our polyconflict world.

If everyday life is planetary life, as Gilman suggests, then our daily choices must reflect that reality—not as extraordinary measures, but as the natural course of human existence on a finite planet whose stability we can no longer take for granted. The path forward may not be the one we initially imagined, but it remains open to those willing to reimagine both governance and daily life in planetary terms.