As the 30th Conference of the Parties concludes, we must acknowledge that the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change is failing.
Global emissions are lower than they would’ve been absent decades of diplomacy, but the world is nowhere near limiting warming to 1.5°C. We are already more than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels and on a trajectory toward 3°C to 3.5°C of warming. As the problem has grown, the policies required to hit the 1.5°C target have become even more politically unrealistic than the policies we have already failed to implement.
We must accept that reciting scientific consensus and issuing moral exhortations—both cornerstones of my own work—have not delivered global action on the scale required to prevent dangerous warming.
Mitigation will continue; it has already had an effect and can still do more. But humanity’s primary response to climate change—ours and every living thing’s—will be adaptation. And the balance between mitigation and adaptation will be determined less by scientific warnings or moral appeals than by economics.
After this COP, climate policy should be framed around a simple question: What’s the cost and the benefit? The answers will vary around the world because the benefits of economic activity and the costs of climate impacts differ dramatically by region. That complexity is uncomfortable—and often amoral—but it’s unavoidable.
Some economic guideposts are clear. To the extent that reducing emissions remains a priority, the most efficient tool available is a carbon tax. Markets respond more rationally to prices than to mandates, subsidies, and carve-outs that distort investment, pick winners, take resources from other government programs, and provoke political backlash. A carbon tax rewards every household and business that finds a cheaper way to emit less.
For years, climate advocates dismissed carbon pricing as politically unrealistic and instead preferred subsidies, the more palatable way of imposing a price signal but also the less effective and more expensive way. Subsidies have made mitigation costlier than it needs to be. If mitigation is to remain credible, it must rely on the most economically rational instrument, not the most rhetorically satisfying one.
Adaptation must also be guided by economics. Market-driven adaptation will be more powerful than government spending, so the first step is ending the policies that conceal climate risk and encourage uneconomic behavior. The clearest example is the National Flood Insurance Program, which has spent decades subsidizing development in high-risk coastal and flood-prone areas. By socializing losses, it has invited more of them. This is a classic moral hazard and the opposite of economics-guided adaptation. We cannot expect people or communities to make prudent, forward-looking decisions when federal policy shields them from the financial consequences of climate risk. Remove the distortions—subsidized flood insurance, below-market disaster loans, zoning mandates that ignore hazards—and individuals will adapt long before catastrophe forces them to. They will move, invest, and insure differently because the economics will finally reflect reality.
For many champions of the climate movement, this shift in mindset will feel like a retreat. But it isn’t. It reflects a hard-won lesson from the last 30 years: durable progress comes from aligning climate goals with economic incentives, not from doubling down on policies that are politically impossible.
If we want the next three decades to differ from the last three, we must accept the world as it is, not as we hoped it would be. That means pricing carbon to make mitigation efficient, ending policies that hide the real cost of climate risk, and allowing markets to guide adaptation. Only then can proactive adaptation begin in earnest.
This is not defeatism. It’s realism. And it may be the only climate strategy with a chance of working.