by Jared Webb
The accelerating polycrisis is a defining feature of the modern global landscape, wherein multiple, somewhat independent ecological, economic, and political emergencies converge and intensify one another through temporal symmetry. Although the entanglement of these crises presents overwhelming challenges for governance, the important moral dimension inherent to this complexity is frequently and dangerously overlooked. This essay argues that policy paralysis in the face of systemic risks is not a simple political failure—the result of bureaucratic inertia or ideological disagreement—but an outright ethical refusal: a deliberate political decision in which governments consistently favour short-term, often localised stability, be it economic output or immediate energy security, over the undeniable existential imperative of planetary security. In consequence, governance in the Anthropocene requires nothing less than a radical revision of normative standards, forcing us to evaluate the performance of political systems primarily by their demonstrated capacity to safeguard planetary stability and critical ecological systems, rather than according to outdated metrics of economic growth or territorial self-interest.
The Polycrisis and the Ethical Failure of Prioritisation
The polycrisis, born from the exploitation of the natural world, is an existential threat that increasingly fuels so-called secondary crises: mass migration, resource conflict, and global health insecurity. In this light, states’ failure to respond systemically represents not only a practical failure but also a clear ethical failure: the refusal to properly address complex and interconnected harms. Many governments seek to justify their political inertia by pointing to the imperative need to manage immediate, short-term issues, such as sustaining economic growth or ensuring energy supply. "Paleomodernity," in which it is presumed that a civilisation’s greatness is necessarily correlated with its resource use and energy consumption, is a destructive mentality and one that must be ended if humanity is to survive. Yet all too many states, such as the Russian Federation, cling to this out-of-date logic, remaining “petrostates, stuck in the paleomodernity,” where rigid, top-down power structures refuse to adapt to new realities in order to preserve a corrupt system. The moral failure, therefore, resides within the political structure itself: the refusal to accept responsibility for mistakes blocks the reform that is so urgently needed.
Petroaggression: The Weaponisation of Natural Resources
One of the most damaging political expressions of short-term economic thinking over planetary security is the phenomenon of petroaggression. The term defines how petrostates—that is, countries heavily dependent on hydrocarbon exports—use revenues from fossil fuels to finance wars and aggressively expansionist geopolitical goals. Since the endurance of the polycrisis is so integrally entangled with the continued dominance of the fossil fuel economy, transitioning to renewable energy becomes urgent not only for the protection of the planet but also for the elimination of one of the world’s primary sources of conflict. Europe’s reliance on Russian gas and oil had created a situation wherein “energy for security” became actually “energy for insecurity” by 2022. According to Sergii Glebov, Russia’s decarbonisation is all but inseparable from its demilitarization, caught in the phrase “no oil, no war.” The ethical dilemma is unmistakable: should businesses and nations chase self-interested profits or refuse to trade, knowing well that it keeps the war boiling, even if this means paying more for energy? In all, the EU decision to reject cheaper Russian oil and gas in solidarity with Ukraine is emblematic of an act of genuine moral choice—an act of “good will.”
The Geopolitics of the Energy Revolution and the Need for a New Ethical Framework
The ethical refusal in short-term politics becomes most evident when considering the enormous scale of the global energy revolution now needed. The transition away from fossil fuels, critically needed to guarantee planetary security, introduces a plethora of new geopolitical and domestic challenges because of the question of access and control over metals required to build decarbonised infrastructure. How this transition is to be governed lays bare the profound limitations of current political and economic philosophies. The notion of "green growth"—the idea that free-market mechanisms can solve climate change while sustaining limitless economic expansion—is increasingly under fire. Where unregulated free market ideology, one of the pillars of neoliberalism, cannot resolve the climate crisis, it is time to turn to other frameworks. Ethically and centered on the planet, the commitment to post-growth economics will need to redefine progress itself. Frames like Kate Raworth’s "doughnut economics" redefine success, not by the creation of wealth, but by being able to have humanity thrive within ecological limits, harmoniously balancing resource distribution with environmental protection. Such a vision calls for ethical distancing from traditional anthropocentrism—that is, regarding humanity as the custodian of nature—toward a deeper recognition of nature’s intrinsic centrality. Such challenges highlight an important point: without fundamental moral and legal change, even the most ambitious environmental targets are bound to remain politically unreachable.
Ethical Refusal and the Haunting of the Unburied Past
In that sense, the political paralysis characterizing today’s polycrisis echoes earlier forms of ethical refusal—most pointedly, humanity’s historical inability to confront vast social and political traumas. Viewed through the lens of cultural memory, the refusal to confront the existential planetary threat can be seen as a kind of collective psychological and political evasion: a way of evading moral responsibility. In post-Soviet culture, for example—where millions were murdered outside the law—the failure to process the immense loss, a deep, ongoing form of collective melancholy, created what Etkind calls the “unquiet ghosts of the Soviet era,” continuing to haunt literature and civil society alike. Correspondingly, moving through today’s polycrisis demands that political communities acknowledge an existential systemic loss: namely, the end of the paleomodern era of limitless resource exploitation. That paralysis is at once political and profoundly ethical. Where collective mourning is lacking, this is directly related to the refusal or inability to recognize and accept loss. As the text reminds us, “mourning, one might say, is at the heart of our humanity,” and without the capacity to mourn, people cannot truly feel, empathize, or assume moral responsibility. Today, it is precisely that unwillingness to judge politics by its protection of planetary systems, rather than by the logics of economic interest, which reflects a similar ethical refusal. The absence of a shared ethical vision of the future is thus stifling progress, deepening the paralysis that prevents meaningful climate action.
Conclusion: Judging Politics by Planetary Protection
The world now stands in the midst of an immense and unprecedented historical predicament—a polycrisis that simultaneously tests the temporal and spatial limits of resource extraction, even as humanity embarks on a vast, metal-centred energy transformation. In such a context, policy paralysis is morally indefensible. It represents a profound ethical refusal, driven by short-term political expediency that prioritizes immediate economic stability and territorial interests over the long-term, systemic imperative of planetary security. To govern responsibly in this era means to measure political success not by economic growth or territorial control but by the capacity to safeguard the planet’s vital systems. This new moral standard demands that political systems prove their ability to protect the Earth itself. This shift must place moral responsibility and ecological integrity at the core of political life. Only by fully acknowledging the scale of the systemic harm already done, and by processing this existential crisis through the lens of moral justice, can humanity break free from its ethical paralysis and move toward genuine planetary governance.