Is the world being destroyed?

High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell”.

Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years.

However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked.

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The global attack on nature is threatening the UK’s national security, government intelligence chiefs have warned, as the increasingly likely collapse of vitally important natural systems would bring mass migration, food shortages and price rises, and global disorder.

Food supplies are particularly at risk since “without significant increases” the UK would be unable to compete with other nations for scarce resources, a report to ministers says.

Some vital ecosystems could face collapse within five years, threatening the UK’s national security and prosperity, according to the 14-page report*.

Ministers suppressed a report after intelligence chiefs warned that climate change could drive mass migration to Britain and trigger a nuclear war in Asia.

The study, entitled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, was put together with the help of the joint intelligence committee, which oversees MI5 and MI6.

Initially due to be published last autumn, it was blocked by No 10 for being too negative.

When the government was forced to release the report after a freedom of information request, it published an abridged version that outlined a “realistic possibility” that the decline of forests and glacier-fed rivers would lead to “global competition for food” beginning in the 2030s.

But a full, internal version of the report, seen by The Times, goes further, suggesting that the degradation of rainforests in the Congo and the drying up of rivers fed by the Himalayas could drive people to flee to Europe, leading to “more polarised and populist politics in the UK” and putting “additional pressure on already strained national infrastructure”.

It noted that Britain’s large south Asian diaspora could make it an attractive destination to people from the region.

The internal version also warned that collapsing ecosystems could motivate acts of eco-terrorism in Britain, as well as drawing Nato into conflicts over remaining breadbaskets in Russia and Ukraine.

Described as a “reasonable worst-case scenario”, the report said that many ecosystems around the world were so stressed that they could soon pass a tipping point, after which they would inexorably degrade no matter what humans did to protect them. Forests in Canada and Russia might pass a tipping point by 2030, as might glaciers in the Himalayas that fed rivers on which two billion people depended, the report suggested.

Intelligence chiefs warned that the decline of Himalayan rivers would “almost certainly escalate tensions” between China, India and Pakistan, potentially leading to nuclear war.

Britain, which imports 40 per cent of its food, including a fifth of its animal feed from South America, would struggle to feed itself unless it made expensive investments in its supply chains, the authors said. These investments could include lab-grown meat and new crop varieties.

“This government is hiding the true danger of climate change from the people,” a source close to the development of the report claimed. “We need to have an honest conversation about the risks we face to our prosperity and how to mitigate them.”

A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson said: “Nature underpins our security, prosperity and resilience, and understanding the threats we face from biodiversity loss is crucial to meeting them head on. The findings of this report will inform the action we take to prepare for the future.

“The UK has a resilient food system and remains one of the most food-secure nations in the world, producing around 65 per cent of all the food we eat. We have access through international trade to food products that cannot be produced here, which supplements domestic production and ensures that any disruption from risks such as adverse weather or disease do not affect the UK’s overall security of supply.”

When tropical rainforests are logged, replanting them with seedlings seems like an obvious solution. However, new research from Borneo reveals this approach faces serious challenges that persist for decades.

Scientists from the University of Exeter, ETH Zürich, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology tracked 5,119 seedlings over 18 months in the rainforests of Malaysian Borneo. They compared seedling survival in pristine natural forests with that in areas logged three decades earlier.

Study tracks thousands of seedlings

The research took place in the Danum Valley Conservation Area and the surrounding Ulu Segama landscape of North Borneo. The team studied three types of forest environments: undisturbed natural forests, areas recovering naturally after logging, and locations where active restoration efforts, including tree planting, had occurred.

The logging in these areas happened 30 to 35 years ago. Some sites underwent active restoration between 15 and 27 years after the initial logging.

During the study period, researchers observed a rare phenomenon known as mast fruiting. This process occurs when trees simultaneously drop massive quantities of fruit across the landscape, creating a surge of new seedlings.

Initial results seemed promising

At the start of the monitoring period, both natural forests and actively restored areas showed high numbers of seedlings. This initially suggested that restoration efforts were working effectively.

The abundance of young trees in restored areas appeared to validate current restoration practices. These findings gave researchers hope that replanting programs could successfully restore logged forest areas.

Long-term survival tells a different story

By the study’s conclusion, however, the results revealed a stark contrast. Seedlings in restored forests and naturally recovering areas experienced significantly lower survival rates compared to those in undisturbed natural forests.

“We were surprised to see restoration sites having lower seedling survival. After such a productive fruiting event in the restored forest, it’s disappointing that so few were able to survive – and to think what this might mean for the long-term recovery of different tree species,” said Dr. Robin Hayward, who conducted this research during their Ph.D. at the University of Stirling.

The difference in survival rates was substantial enough to raise questions about whether current restoration methods can truly restore forest biodiversity and ecosystem function.

Stress factors in logged forests

The research indicates that logged forests create stressful conditions for seedlings through multiple environmental changes. These include alterations to canopy structure, microclimate conditions, and soil composition.

“Our findings suggest that seedlings are experiencing stress in logged forests. This could be due to changes to the canopy structure, microclimate, and soil, with current restoration treatments insufficient to eliminate this stress,” explained Dr. David Bartholomew, who was based at the University of Exeter during the study and is now at Botanic Gardens Conservation International.

The study revealed that highly specialized tree species particularly struggled to survive. This leaves plant communities with lower species diversity than in intact forests.

Dr. Daisy Dent of ETH Zürich and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute noted additional complexities. Animals that consume seeds, such as bearded pigs, may be drawn to restored forest patches where seeds are more abundant, potentially contributing to higher seedling mortality.

Implications for forest conservation

The findings published in Global Change Biology have significant implications for tropical forest conservation worldwide. They suggest that simply planting trees may not be enough to restore the complex ecosystems altered by selective logging.

Dr. Lindsay Banin of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who participated in the research, emphasized the need for further investigation. “Together, these results reveal there may be bottlenecks in recovery of particular elements of the plant community,” she said.

The team is now progressing research into various stages of the regeneration process. This includes studying fruiting, germination, establishment, and causes of seedling mortality to better understand how to assist forest regeneration.

These findings underscore the critical importance of protecting remaining pristine tropical rainforests rather than relying solely on restoration to compensate for logging. Restoration efforts can help degraded forests store more carbon, but they may not fully restore the ecological complexity and species diversity of undisturbed forests.

The research emphasizes the need to implement adaptive management strategies in forest restoration projects. Current methods need refinement to better replicate the conditions that allow seedlings to thrive in natural forest environments.

The full study was published in the journal Global Change Biology.

The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as for the first time, a three-year period, ending in 2025, has breached the threshold. And climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the emissions that are causing the warming.

The 1.5-degree target was set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago, at the insistence of more vulnerable nations, to forestall severe weather impacts and potential runaway warming that could lead to exceeding irreversible planetary tipping points. But climate scientists say that 10 years of weak action since mean that nothing can now stop the target being breached. “Climate policy has failed. The 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead,” says atmospheric chemist Robert Watson, a former chair of the U.N.’s arbiters of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Meanwhile, a picture of what lies ahead is becoming clearer. In particular, there is a growing fear that climate change in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, as formerly stable planetary systems transgress tipping points — thresholds beyond which things cannot be put back together again.

• “Nature has so far balanced our abuse,” says Johan Rockström, a leading Earth systems scientist. “This is coming to an end.”

“We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature,” says British global-systems researcher Tim Lenton, of the University of Exeter. If he and other scientists are right, then hopes currently being expressed of a temperature reset by reducing emissions after overshoot may be fanciful. Before we know it, there may be no way back.

The effects of imminent 1.5-degree overshoot are already apparent in a rising tide of weather catastrophes: soaring heatstroke deaths in India, Africa, and the Middle East; unprecedented wildfires in the United States; and escalating property damage and floods from tropical storms and extreme precipitation.

Last year, Bailing Li of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center disclosed that her agency held un-peer reviewed data showing a dramatic increase in the intensity of the world’s weather in the past five years. Meanwhile, the International Chamber of Commerce reported that extreme weather linked to the changing climate had cost the global economy more than $2 trillion in the past decade and damaged the lives and livelihoods of a fifth of the world’s population.

But that is just the start. Climate change is gathering pace. The last three years have been the hottest on record, with both 2023 and 2025 nearly reaching 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels, and 2024 hitting 1.55 degrees.



Average global temperature compared to the preindustrial average.

A three-year breach of 1.5 degrees does not mean we have broken the Paris limit, which is framed as a long-term average. Conventionally, scientists measure this over 20 years, to smooth out year-on-year aberrations caused by natural cycles such as the El Niño oscillation. Using this method, it will be several more years before researchers can say for certain if warming has reached 1.5 degrees. But according to two studies published last year, the world has likely already surpassed this critical threshold.

Without an abrupt change of course, the warming will only accelerate. James Hansen, the Columbia University climatologist who first put climate change on the world’s front pages during testimony to Senate hearings in 1988, believes we could hit 2 degrees C as soon as 2045, a forecast based on several climate models under a high-emissions scenario.

The reason for the escalation is that the climate system is in a pincer grip. First, emissions of planet-warming gases remain stubbornly high, and second, natural carbon sinks are weakening. The result is an accelerating rise in atmospheric concentrations of CO2. 2024 saw the biggest jump ever.

The faltering natural sink is perplexing scientists. For as long as we know, nature has been quietly mitigating our damage to the climate by soaking up around half of all the CO2 we put into the air. Trees have grown faster in a warmer climate, capturing carbon in the process; oceans have been absorbing excess atmospheric CO2, burying it in the depths.

• There are also fears of a domino effect, in which crossing one tipping point triggers the exceeding of another.

But now oceans are becoming more stratified, reducing their ability to remove CO2. And trees are succumbing to heat and drought.

A string of recent research papers has reported an “unprecedented” weakening of natural land-based carbon sinks in 2023 and 2024, triggered in part by an epidemic of extreme wildfires, which have doubled globally in the past two decades. African rainforests, previously responsible for around a fifth of the terrestrial take-up of CO2, recently turned from a long-term carbon sink to a source.

Looking forward, the predicted death of the Amazon rainforest would load billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. And the melting of Arctic permafrost, which is already underway, will unlock huge volumes of frozen methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Researchers last year concluded that this methane will have a “critical role… in amplifying climate change under overshoot scenarios,” making a comeback from that overshoot significantly harder.

“We are seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems,” concluded Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end.”



A woman keeps vigil on a man who suffered heatstroke during a 2024 heat wave in Varanasi, India.

These escalating impacts could soon lead to irreversible damage to the climate and ecosystems, scientists warn. In the past three years, unprecedented warming of the oceans has led to an epidemic of marine heat waves. The waters of northwest Europe last spring were up to 4 degrees C (7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal. In the tropics, ocean heating is triggering a rising rate of cyclones, and ever more loss of coral.

Researchers say tropical coral reefs may have already crossed a tipping point, portending mass dieback. Studies suggest they may all be dead by mid-century, with massive repercussions for wider marine ecosystems and fish stocks, which are heavily dependent on reefs as nurseries and feeding grounds.

Near the poles, some ice sheets may already have been irreversibly destabilized. Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice every hour. The “current best assessment,” Watson says, is that this melting could become unstoppable at around 1.5 degrees. The giant Arctic island’s estimated 2,800 trillion tons of ice would take centuries to melt into the ocean. But that would eventually raise sea levels globally by around 23 feet. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet faces a similar fate.

• Because tipping points are hard to model with any precision, they are often left out of climate projections.

Likewise, ocean circulation systems could be approaching breakdown. These currents move vast amounts of heat around the globe, dictating much of the weather over adjacent land. Most at risk, modelers suggest, is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which currently warms Europe and the eastern coast of North America with the Gulf Stream.

Hansen has argued that “shutdown of the AMOC is likely within the next 20-30 years, unless actions are taken to reduce global warming.” Other studies suggest it is unlikely this century, or that we may soon pass a tipping point beyond which it is inevitable. A 2025 Global Tipping Points Report, led by Lenton, said AMOC’s failure would “plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters.”

A modeling study of a range of potential tipping points by researchers at the Potsdam Institute found that if the world did not get back to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century, there was a one in four chance at least one major global threshold — it listed the collapse of AMOC, the Amazon rainforest ecosystem, or the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheet — would be crossed. “If we were to also surpass 2 degrees C of global warming, tipping risks would escalate even more rapidly,” says coauthor Annika Ernest Högner.

There are also fears of a domino effect, in which crossing one tipping point triggers the exceeding of another. One scenario sees the melting of Greenland ice turning off the AMOC, which in turn is the final straw for the Amazon rainforest. But much remains unclear — including whether the risks of exceeding tipping points are less if the overshoot is short term.



Estimated temperature increases at which the planet crosses key tipping points. Source: Armstrong McKay et al., 2022.


Because tipping points are hard to model with any precision, and harder still to predict, they are often left out of climate projections — and hence are still largely ignored by climate negotiators. “Current policy thinking doesn’t usually take tipping points into account,” says Manjana Milkoreit of the University of Oslo, a lead author of the 2025 Global Tipping Points Report.

The science is shaping up to suggest that the damage done by an imminent overshoot of the 1.5-degree threshold may not be easily undone. Still, that looks like the world we are entering. So, how could we draw carbon out of the atmosphere by achieving the “negative emissions” that might bring temperatures back down and, in the best-case scenario, stabilize the climate system?

The most obvious action is to bolster and increase carbon sinks by planting trees or encouraging natural forest regrowth. In the past decade, the world has developed a modest carbon market, using forestry and other projects that soak up CO2 to earn carbon credits that can be sold to offset carbon emissions by industry and nations.

• Proposed solutions like solar radiation would be like “turning on the air conditioning in response to a house fire,” a scientist says.

The market has been widely discredited by failed, poorly monitored, and fraudulent forest schemes. But, if better managed and audited, it could be repurposed as part of an effort to generate negative emissions.

One proposal favored by many climate scientists would have the trees harvested and burned in power stations, so new carbon-grabbing trees could be planted on the vacated land. If the power-plant CO2 emissions were then captured and kept out of the atmosphere, the result could be an energy system that drew CO2 out of the air.

But the scientific consensus is that there isn’t room on a crowded planet for enough forests. Currently, work to protect and restore forests is soaking up an estimated 2 billion tons of CO2 annually. But lowering global temperatures by an average of even 0.1 degrees C would require a total of a hundred times more, according to the IPCC. And recent studies suggest 400 billion tons might be required to get back to 1.5 C by 2100.

Another idea is to industrialize carbon capture through the mass deployment of chemical plants that use solvents to extract CO2 from the air and convert it to inert material. This remains, at least for now, prohibitively expensive, costing hundreds of dollars for every ton removed.



A stream of meltwater atop the Greenland ice sheet.

Many scientists regard such carbon-capturing solutions as fanciful. And, given that we may need them in a hurry after some major planetary emergency such as warding off a tipping point, they could not be deployed fast enough. If a quick fix were needed — even a temporary one to “peak shave” temperatures while negative emissions were fast-tracked — we would need some form of outright geoengineering.

Most likely, these scientists say, this would involve shading the Earth from solar radiation by injecting into the stratosphere sulphur aerosols similar to those sometimes released in volcanic eruptions. Spraying from fleets of aircraft would have to continue for as long as the cooling was required. But it might work, and it might do so quickly and cheaply enough to be a realistic proposition. Researchers are enthusiastic. The British government last year invested $80 million to explore the potential of solar modification, including small-scale real-world experiments.

But others are horrified. They warn that leaving atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels high will also leave the world’s weather systems fundamentally altered. Even if the shading can get us back to 1.5 C of warming, the weather will not revert.

• It took until 2025 for U.N. negotiators to even acknowledge the need to address how to handle an overshoot.

“Having temperature targets makes solar engineering seem like a sensible approach because it may lower temperatures,” says Watson. “But it does this not by reducing but increasing our interference in the climate system.” The world’s weather would still be broken. He likens it to “turning on the air conditioning in response to a house fire.”

IPCC scientists have consistently argued that achieving the Paris target will ultimately require some form of negative emissions. But it took until the 2025 climate conference in Belem, Brazil, for U.N. negotiators to acknowledge the need to address how to handle an overshoot, declaring in its final statement that “both the extent and duration of an overshoot need to be limited,” though without going into further detail. So far, only Denmark has a national negative emissions target — promising reductions of 110 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.

Negative emissions are “not a political project yet,” says Oliver Geden of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. And even the suggestion seems optimistic right now, when even modest international efforts to achieve “net zero” emissions by mid-century are falling far short, and the world’s second largest emitter, the U.S., has exited the entire project.

But the warnings are stark. Without action to draw down atmospheric carbon, the climate system will likely move into an era of accelerated warming that may be impossible to halt. Overshoot will be permanent.

Though talks of climate change typically conjure up images of dripping glaciers and rising tides, it turns out the rapid destruction of our planet is also affecting our bodies in profound ways.

According to new research published in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health, the rising concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is weakening human skeletons at an alarming rate.

Australian researchers Alexander Larcombe of The Kids Research Institute Australia and Phil Bierwirth of the Australian National University analyzed the level of HCO3 — bicarbonate, a byproduct of CO2 found in human blood — in the blood of US adults between 1999 and 2020. Since the last year of the 20th century, they found, the amount of HCO3 in human blood rose about 7 percent, which corresponded to a similar rise in CO2 concentrated in the atmosphere.

At the same time, Larcombe and Bierwirth examined calcium and phosphorus levels in US adults, both of which fell over the study period.

This isn’t a coincidence, the study’s authors warn. When our blood has a higher concentration of carbon than our bodies expect, our bones shed calcium and phosphorus in order to absorb more CO2.

Under normal circumstances — before we started pumping our atmosphere full of exhaust, that is — our bones would take a few weeks to reabsorb those nutrients and go about their business. If heightened blood carbon levels become the new normal over time, however, its effect on this complex and delicate system can cause a net loss of calcium in our bodies, therefore weakening the bones of just about anyone who breathes air to stay alive, among other issues.

The trend is becoming so pronounced, the researchers estimate, that it could start to cause serious health issues within just 50 years.

Given that humans have spent the majority of our evolutionary lifespan with a “usually stable level of atmospheric CO2,” the recent rise in airborn carbon pollution has forced our bones to compensate. As the researchers blunty explain: “human physiology has progressively and consistently altered over the last ~25 years.”

Following those trends, the authors suggest that carbon levels will be at the “currently accepted limit of the healthy range within 50 years, with calcium and phosphorus reaching the currently accepted minimum levels shortly after.”

“What effects this may have on physiology remain to be elucidated,” the researchers write, “but urgently need to be considered.”

Atmospheric CO2 Getting So High That It’s Weakening Human Skeletons

"Human physiology has progressively and consistently altered over the last ~25 years."

Quote:

...

This isn’t a coincidence, the study’s authors warn. When our blood has a higher concentration of carbon than our bodies expect, our bones shed calcium and phosphorus in order to absorb more CO2.

...weakening the bones of just about anyone who breathes air to stay alive, among other issues.

The trend is becoming so pronounced, the researchers estimate, that it could start to cause serious health issues within just 50 years.

...

futurism

Humans can be loving and cruel, generous and selfish, rational and impulsive — sometimes all in the same afternoon. That complexity is part of what makes us human. It’s also a nightmare if you’re trying to define ‘human nature’.

Human nature refers to our natural dispositions. It’s about how we think, feel and act — and these characteristics are shared by all humans. What we believe about human nature matters because ideas about it influence laws, institutions, social norms and ultimately, how we see ourselves.

Few disciplines have shaped those beliefs more powerfully than economics. Economists build models, stories if you like, to explain how the economy works. But you can’t build a coherent story around a character who is emotional, contradictory and unpredictable.

To overcome that unpredictability, economists have embraced a simplifying strategy—ignore the parts of humanity that don’t fit those models, and amplify the parts that do.

Economics did not set out to define human nature in its entirety. It selected a narrow version of it — one that “worked” within its models — and built a system around that version.

We are self-interested

One of the core assumptions of economics is that humans are fundamentally self-interested.

In The Wealth of Nations, written in 1776, Adam Smith argued that every person prioritises their self-interest. The fact that each person makes decisions for their personal gain is a good thing because when each person follows their self-interest, the “invisible hand” of the market transforms private motives into public benefits.

If individuals reliably pursue their own advantage, then markets become self-regulating systems. The pursuit of profit becomes socially productive. Regulation begins to look unnecessary, even harmful, because interference could distort the natural alignment between private interest and public good.

We thrive in competition

Smith’s argument was later reinforced by the cultural impact of On the Origin of Species. Published in 1859, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection described how organisms better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce.

Darwin was writing about biology, not morality or economics. But social and economic thinking absorbed his language of adaptation, competition and selection.

The phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology to describe how animals most suited to their environment have the best chance of survival.

But the term was misappropriated and became shorthand for a broader social belief: that competition is natural, inequality is inevitable, and those who succeed do so because they are inherently more capable.

By framing competition as natural, markets could be presented not as a political design but as a reflection of natural systems. In this translation from biology to society, natural selection was recast as market selection, helping to establish a belief that markets create a meritocratic system in which everyone has an equal chance to succeed.

Economic winners in such a system aren’t fortunate or structurally advantaged, but are the “fittest.” Poverty isn’t a sign of systemic failure, but more evidence of individual inadequacy.

While they are not conscious, free markets are said to be moral because they fairly and rationally reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour.

If economic theory justified self-interest as productive, evolutionary language appeared to legitimise competition as unavoidable. Together, they helped entrench a powerful idea: that systems built on rivalry and individual advantage are not political choices, but reflections of nature itself.

We are greedy and never satisfied

Self-interest may strengthen the argument for free markets, but not for the underlying goal of economic growth.

For expansion to be continuous, desire must be continuous.

In the 1830s, John Stuart Mill described “economic man” as motivated by the desire for wealth. Accompanying that motivation is a dislike of work and a love of luxuries; essentially, humans are hedonists who aim to maximise pleasure and minimise pain.

Mill argued that these motivators influence the structure of the economic system. For example, property law is an institution that allows people to accumulate wealth.

In the 1870s, William Jevons argued that humans are pleasure-seekers who exist to maximise utility (defined as the satisfaction derived from consuming goods).

Jevons drew on the psychological principle of satiation to create a law of diminishing returns, arguing that the more you have of something, the less you’ll want more of it. However, this does not diminish your overall appetite to consume; only the consumption of a particular product.

The assumption that human desire is endless justifies the goal of economic growth and endless expansion. When it’s assumed that happiness increases with more, then a system of growth aligns with human nature. A steady-state economy would seem neither stable nor stable, but stifling, because it would frustrate our presumed instinct to accumulate.

Based on these assumptions, growth is not a policy choice, but a psychological necessity.

Within this framework, free-market capitalism is not simply one system among many — it is the system most compatible with ever-expanding preferences. Deregulated markets facilitate accumulation, innovation and consumption at scale. Endless desire, therefore, justifies endless expansion.

We are rational

In the twentieth century, man evolved into his modern form, the ‘rational economic man’, also known as ‘Homo economicus’ or ‘economic man’.

The rational economic man is self-interested. He seeks to maximise utility. But crucially, he does so rationally, meaning choices are logically consistent and uninfluenced by emotion or bias because he has perfect information, where he has complete knowledge of choices, costs, and future outcomes.

The issue is not simply that humans are imperfectly rational. It is that rationality came to be defined narrowly — as efficiency in satisfying preferences.

Rationality did not mean wisdom, moral judgment or collective flourishing. It meant optimisation.

If individuals are rational utility maximisers, then markets become the ultimate coordinating mechanism. Each person pursuing their own interests in a logical, consistent way contributes to efficient outcomes. Government intervention appears unnecessary unless correcting clear market failures.

Again, the conception of human nature strengthens the intellectual case for free-market capitalism and weakens arguments for regulation. If individuals can calculate what is best for themselves, markets can aggregate those choices more effectively than any central authority.

We are destroying the conditions for life

The character at the centre of the economic story is selfish, insatiable and devoid of emotion. When those assumptions are embedded in economic theory, they become institutionalised — in law, markets, incentives and cultural norms.

The extreme simplifying strategy embraced by economists strips humanity down to what can be measured, priced and optimised. It ignores the arts and culture —the things that bring people joy—it strips away all aspects of life that bring wonder and inspiration.

Activities that cannot be easily priced — caregiving, ecological preservation, artistic creation — become economically invisible.

Not only that, but if rational individuals produce a rational system, why do carbon emissions continue to increase, threatening the conditions for life itself? This is only reinforced by the fact that carbon emissions, the greatest market failure of all time, are not baked into prices through a carbon tax, which could work to limit the failure.

But then, that would be disastrous for vested interests like oil companies and their shareholders.

We have designed society to serve an economy based on flawed assumptions about human nature. The traits rewarded within that system are those the model assumed in the first place: self-interest, accumulation, competition, and relentless expansion.

It sure doesn’t feel like we’ve created an economy designed to enhance happiness. If anything, the result is a dysfunctional, environmentally destructive society that is eating itself alive. If what we’ve built is the logical outcome of our assumptions about human nature, then the flaw is not in humanity itself, but the stories we have been taught to believe.