This year, with all the extreme heat being experienced in Europe and the catastrophic events in Nepal, a question about energy transitions and climate resilience resurfaces. The bias towards mitigation runs deep: it is all about pulling emissions down when the cliff of climate extremes is already upon us.

While we all worry about the rate of sweating and our heartbeats, there are deeper structural effects emerging on food production, infrastructure and economic productivity.

One crisis follows another – the thunder of polycrisis is hitting pockets hard. These pockets of events happening in different parts of the world have not been fully tallied to gain a systemic view.

We are, perhaps, caught in what the philosopher Timothy Morton might describe as a kind of wishful thinking: that keeping up the treadmill of growth, the giant suction machine of consumption, while switching to green is the same as tactically vanquishing the hyperobject – climate change.

The challenge is that collective action is fractured, while the problem is so large and pervasive, even as its effects are local, that addressing the hyperobject would require a repair of the whole body politic and a transformation of the world’s technoeconomic paradigm. You will find echoes of this – a kind of dawning realisation – in Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine.

The hyperscaling of AI perhaps will not be a story of prosperity and surging productivity gains through Artificial General Intelligence, but rather of the hyperscaling of the consumption pump, where AI anthropogenic-like machines are ever ready to assist you with every psychological dissonance, social post-traumatic stress disorder, and even tell you what and how to buy things.

Data centres themselves are now guzzling energy like AI sports-utility vehicles, sucking up finance and energy at the cost of other investments. The place we are in is full of paradoxes. We see trillions earmarked for data centres and AI, but no superscaling of emissions reductions to meet the Paris Agreement, with climate negotiators still stuck on the question of where the trillions needed for mitigation and adaptation will come from, and who will provide them. A broken record echoes through the halls of Conference of the Parties (COP) negotiations, like a politician’s promise to put bread and butter on the table, knowing well that delivery of the promised land will fall short.

The question of the financial goal for climate is now a well-trodden exercise in kicking the can to the next COP. Meanwhile, climate finance is cut or slow to move, while military and AI spending is on the fast track. Here, the military and AI are now coupling on the same journey, increasing energy demand and consuming critical minerals.

We are in a race against time, yet we are also in a time when the race against emissions may be futile. The Strait of Hormuz may have triggered a surge of interest in alternative energy that a thousand climate change policies have not managed to achieve over decades. Yet democracies have shown that they are not always stable platforms for clean and green transitions.

Skilled political operators and the machinery of manipulating public opinion can turn things on their head. We see this with the decimation of the Inflation Reduction Act and, to some extent, with the EU Green Deal. Transition processes take time, and things that should have been done years ago are now caught in the bog of various frictions: geopolitical rivalry, supply chain dependencies, political populism and rising inflation.

Transitions away from fossil fuels are also premised on the idea of universalism: every country should have a transition plan and a set of policies and programmes that, more or less, must look as though they have been cooked out of the same oven of transition roadmaps and plans.

While there must be universal agreement on the need to fix our global emissions profile and change our way of living, how we go about achieving this goal will vary from country to country. Transitions to cleaner energy and new technologies face the bog of resistance at three levels: public sentiment around the perceived costs of change; the sheer material demand and engineering capacity needed to move the needle; and the alignment of public policy measures with the scale of financing required.

Many countries will face what economists call ‘resource-constrained mobility traps’ – meaning their ability to move at speed is determined by the depth of their resources, financial and technical, as well as the social acceptance of the measures needed.

Global climate risks are produced by a few countries and corporations, but they will not derisk the rest of us. This is the elephant in the room. Without a shift in mindset and new investment trajectories in large economies and corporations to tame these risks, the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves amid extreme events in an increasingly uninsurable world.