The UN has acknowledged that humanity will overshoot the 1.5-degree climate threshold in the very year that the war around the Strait of Hormuz drove global coal consumption toward an all-time record. The philosophers of "dark ecology" explained this paradox long before the first strikes on Iran.
On September 2, 2026, Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, appeared by video link from Nairobi and said something that climate diplomacy had carefully avoided saying for a decade. Global warming, she said, will cross the threshold of 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels within the next few years. The report had a pointedly dry title: "Limiting Overshoot." Behind that bureaucratic heading lay the defeat of the Paris Agreement's central goal.
A week later, on September 9, Brent crude climbed back above $100 a barrel.
The timing looks like a cruel joke by the editor on duty. Since February 28, when Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz after American and Israeli strikes, the world has been living through what International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol on May 28 called "the largest energy security crisis the world has ever faced." Brent opened the year near $61 and closed the first quarter at $118. Market records had not shown a quarterly jump that large, adjusted for inflation, since 1988. By the textbook, expensive oil should have pushed humanity toward solar and wind. Humanity chose coal instead: the IEA expects global consumption to reach a record 8.94 billion metric tons in 2026.
The explanation for this paradox does not come from economists. It was formulated almost twenty years ago by philosophers usually kept at the margins of the humanities, the proponents of so-called dark ecology. Their central thesis is insulting to a species used to seeing itself as master of the planet: humans long ago lost control of the process they themselves set in motion. They are inside it. Seen through this lens, the oil crisis becomes further proof that Homo sapiens cannot get out of oil, even when oil hits it in the wallet.
An Admission a Year Too Late
Let us start with an inconvenient detail. The September report was presented as a historic admission, but in substance the UN had capitulated earlier. In November 2025, presenting the annual Emissions Gap Report, Secretary-General António Guterres already said that a temporary overshoot of the 1.5-degree threshold was inevitable and would begin no later than the early 2030s. He also cited a figure that politicians and most of the public preferred not to notice: even if national climate commitments are fully met through 2035, the planet is on track for 2.3 degrees of warming. That is considerably further from the Paris goal than communiqués care to admit.
September merely moved the date closer. "Humanity is racing at full speed past the limit," Guterres declared in a video address on September 2. Andersen added the same day that the decisions made now will determine whether the world still has a chance of returning to 1.5 degrees or below.
Look closely at the logic. The new UN strategy draws a curve with a hump: temperatures rise above the threshold and are then supposedly brought back down before the end of the century. Bringing them down means pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on a scale for which there is currently no industrial technology and no one to pay the bill. Climate scientists who worked on the report warn that the overshoot could last for many decades.
This is where philosophy comes in. The formula "overshoot and return" is the purest example of the faith in human omnipotence that dark ecology has declared an illusion. The world has lost to the thermometer, yet it keeps treating it like the thermostat in a hotel room: we turned it too far, so we'll just turn it back.
Humans as Yeast: The Philosopher Who Abolished Nature
The term "dark ecology" was coined by the British philosopher Timothy Morton, now a professor at Rice University in Houston. In 2007 Morton published "Ecology without Nature," in which he proposed striking the word "nature" from ecological thinking altogether. Morton disliked the romantic landscape we inherited from the poets of the late eighteenth century, in which forest and silence are viewed from outside, like a painting in a frame. From inside the painting there is nothing to admire. There are mosquitoes, damp, and rotting deadwood.
According to Morton, this distance gave rise to the central error of modernity: the idea of nature as an external backdrop, separate from human beings. Dark ecology removes the distance. Gut bacteria are connected to atmospheric carbon, the city dump to seagulls, a plate of food to the weather over the ocean, a plastic bag to a sperm whale's stomach. Matter lives a life of its own and has no use for human categories of friendship or enmity.
Morton offers an unflattering comparison. People are like yeast in a fermentation vat: within a few days the colony consumes all the available sugar and changes the chemistry of its little world beyond recognition. The impact is total, yet the vat could not care less about the yeast. There is one difference. Yeast never thinks to declare itself the center of the universe because it has eaten all the sugar. The ability to destroy an environment is not the ability to control it.
For Morton, the word "dark" carries two meanings. The first is the impossibility of stepping outside, since humans are always surrounded by compost and bacteria. The second has to do with genre. The ecological crisis is built like a noir story, in which the detective discovers in the final scene that the criminal is himself.
April 1784: The Day the World Ended
Morton's second key concept is the hyperobject. The term describes phenomena so widely spread across time and space that no one will ever see them whole: global warming, plastic, radioactive waste, Styrofoam cups that will outlast their owners by five centuries. Oil fits this list perfectly.
Hyperobjects have a property Morton calls viscosity: you cannot approach them without getting stuck. A climate scientist who studies warming flies to conferences, uses electricity, and leaves a carbon footprint with every test tube manufactured. The measuring happens from inside the thing being measured.
This leads to Morton's most provocative claim: the end of the world has already happened, and it has a date. It was April 1784, when James Watt received a patent for his improved steam engine. What ended, of course, was not the world itself but the "world" in quotation marks, the comfortable frame in which humans lived against a neutral backdrop called "the environment." Once the burning of fossil fuels became woven into the climate, the backdrop disappeared. The crisis is no longer an event that can be waited out. It has become the environment, spread across bodies, cities, packaging, food, and weather.
For anyone from Baku, there is nothing abstract about this idea. Long before Watt, natural gas seeps burned on the Absheron Peninsula, and fire-worshipping pilgrims traveled to Surakhani, to the Ateshgah temple, to pray before a flame that no one had lit. In 1846 a well was drilled at Bibi-Heybat that Azerbaijan rightly regards as the first oil well in the world. Thirty-two years later, in 1878, the Zoroaster, the first successful oil tanker in history, was launched for the Nobel brothers, and by 1901 Baku was producing more than half of the world's oil. Here the hyperobject has always been visible to the naked eye.
In 2008 the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani pushed this intuition to the point of the grotesque. In his book "Cyclonopedia," he described oil as the lubricant on which the entire political history of the Middle East slides. In his account, the region's wars, revolutions, and sacred texts move along a film of oil as if on rails. The book defies classification; it is half treatise and half horror. Eighteen years later, news reports from the Strait of Hormuz read like its sequel.
Carter's Solar Panels: What Oil Shocks Actually Produce
The belief that oil crises speed up the green transition rests on an appealing assumption: expensive fuel will force people to look for alternatives. People do look for alternatives. The question is which ones.
On October 17, 1973, the Arab oil-producing states announced an embargo, and by the spring of 1974 the price of a barrel had quadrupled. Washington's response was called Project Independence: on November 7, 1973, Richard Nixon promised that by 1980 America would no longer depend on imported energy. Nine days later he signed the law authorizing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which delivered its first oil in 1977. Britain and Norway rushed to develop the North Sea. In March 1974 France adopted the Messmer Plan and over the next fifteen years built dozens of nuclear reactors. Solar power appeared in this story only once, and only as a symbol. On June 20, 1979, at the height of the second oil shock, Jimmy Carter unveiled 32 solar panels on the White House roof with great ceremony. In 1986, under Ronald Reagan, they were quietly taken down. That episode shows better than any chart what energy pledges made under price pressure are worth.
The 2022 crisis repeated the plot almost line for line. After losing a large share of its Russian gas, Europe acquired floating liquefied natural gas terminals within months; the first German terminal, at Wilhelmshaven, opened on December 17, 2022. Germany brought reserve coal plants back online, and according to the IEA, global coal consumption set a new record of more than 8.3 billion tons. The agency estimated the oil and gas industry's net income that year at roughly $4 trillion, more than ever before.
The pattern is clear. An oil shock translates the climate agenda into the language of security, and security always chooses whatever is closest at hand. For Japan, that means Australian coal; for China, its own mines; for America, shale and Alaska. Green energy wins only where it is both cheaper and closer. Everywhere else, the crisis serves as an alibi, giving governments a legitimate excuse to postpone climate commitments until better times, which somehow never arrive.
Hormuz 2026: Coal Breaks Records While Ministers Talk Climate
The current crisis is larger in scale, but the logic is the same. On March 2, QatarEnergy halted liquefied natural gas production at Ras Laffan and Mesaieed after Iranian attacks. Spot LNG prices in Asia rose by more than 140%. The Asian market, which buys over 80% of the oil and gas that passes through Hormuz, was cut off from its usual fuel.
The reaction was immediate. South Korea lifted its 80% cap on coal plant output. On March 27 the Japanese government announced a temporary suspension of restrictions on coal-fired power plants, in a country that has officially pledged carbon neutrality by 2050 since October 2020. Norway's Rystad Energy calculated that Asia could need up to 70 million tons of coal above baseline levels in 2026. The IEA's estimate sounds more modest: a 1.2% increase in global demand. In absolute terms that comes to about 100 million tons, so both estimates agree on the essential point. Coal is back, and it has to be counted in tons, not percentages.
Investment data confirm the shift. According to the IEA's World Energy Investment report, published May 28, spending on coal supply will rise to $180 billion in 2026, the highest level since 2012, with nearly 70% of that money going to China. Investment in gas will rise to $330 billion, a ten-year high. Investment in renewable power, at around $665 billion, has essentially stalled after several years of explosive growth.
To be fair, there is another side to this. Of the $3.4 trillion in global energy investment, $2.2 trillion goes to grids, storage, nuclear power, renewables, and energy efficiency, nearly twice as much as goes to fossil fuels. China, which has bet on electrification and its own coal, weathered the Hormuz shock considerably better than Japan and Korea. By the IEA's count, about twenty countries have already announced new energy-saving measures. Over the long term, the crisis really is nudging importers toward electricity.
But the atmosphere does not care about long-term intentions. It counts tons of carbon dioxide, not shares of investment, and the record 8.94 billion tons of coal will be burned in 2026, not in reports about 2040.
From Copernicus to Cthulhu: How Humanity Was Dethroned
Dark ecology was not the first to go after the crown of Homo sapiens. The crown itself, however, is fairly recent. In 1637 René Descartes promised that knowledge would make people "masters and possessors of nature." A century and a half later, in 1781, Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" denied humans access to things as they really are: we can know only their reflection in consciousness, while the "thing in itself" remains unknowable.
In 1917 Sigmund Freud, in his essay "A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis," counted up the blows that science had dealt to human self-regard. According to Freud, Copernicus and Darwin had already evicted humans from the center of the universe and stripped them of their special status among living things. Psychoanalysis added the final argument: a creature that cannot bring order to its own mind is hardly fit to be the master of nature.
At almost the same time, the same intuition surfaced in literature that was then dismissed as pulp. In 1926 Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a little-known writer from Providence, submitted the story "The Call of Cthulhu" to the magazine Weird Tales. The editor, Farnsworth Wright, rejected the manuscript, and it was not published until February 1928. The story opens with an idea that reads like an epigraph to all of dark ecology: the greatest mercy in the world is the human mind's inability to connect everything the world contains. As long as humans do not understand how the cosmos works, they sleep soundly.
Lovecraft's monsters kill without hatred, the way a bulldozer flattens an anthill. Next to them, morality and progress look like the local customs of a single population. Lovecraft himself died in poverty in 1937, before he could see his work recognized. Fame came in the 1940s and 1950s, and half a century after that, philosophers carried off his imagery and turned it into concepts.
Meanwhile, the industrial twentieth century went its own way. In 1986 the German sociologist Ulrich Beck published "Risk Society," writing its preface in the shadow of Chernobyl. The main threat to humanity, he argued, had become the consequences of its own activity. Fourteen years later, in February 2000, at a scientific meeting in Cuernavaca, Mexico, the Nobel laureate in chemistry Paul Crutzen interrupted a colleague and proposed that the current geological epoch be called the Anthropocene. In his view, human influence on the planet had come to match volcanism and the movement of glaciers in scale.
The Anthropocene turned out to be a rare case of an indictment that sounds like a compliment. Humanity admitted its guilt but kept the starring role. Once it set out to conquer nature; now it has set out to save it. Either way, it decides the fate of the Earth. Tellingly, in March 2024 the International Union of Geological Sciences declined to approve the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch. Humanity had cast itself as the protagonist of planetary history without clearing it with the geologists.
The Ozone Hole That Money Closed
The French sociologist of science Bruno Latour, who died in October 2022, spent half his life in laboratories, observing scientists with the thoroughness of an anthropologist studying a tribe. Scientists did not like his conclusion. The division of the world into nature and culture does not work, and science looks more like a factory than a temple of pure truth.
Latour's favorite example was the ozone hole. Where is it? Everywhere at once: in the stratosphere over Antarctica, in chemical formulas, on corporate production lines, in intergovernmental protocols, and in newspaper headlines. Latour called such things hybrids, objects that belong neither to nature nor to society. In 2020 the world got a hybrid in its purest form. The coronavirus, a "nonhuman" in Latour's terms, restructured the global economy within weeks and confined billions of people to their homes. The main historical actor of that year turned out to be a virus, not presidents.
The ozone story deserves a follow-up, because it answers the question posed in the headline. The Montreal Protocol, signed on September 16, 1987, remains virtually the only global environmental agreement that has actually worked. Crutzen received the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on ozone, but it was not science that settled the matter. In March 1988 DuPont, the American company that was the largest producer of chlorofluorocarbons, announced it would phase them out. The company already had substitutes in development, and a ban on the old chemicals opened a new market for it.
A green transition happens when it pays the same people who profited from the old way of doing things. An oil crisis works the other way around: it enriches exactly those whom humanity is being urged to abandon. Every price spike brings billions to oil and gas companies and exporting states, and that money flows into new fields, tankers, and terminals built to operate for thirty years. Dark ecology would call this the viscosity of a hyperobject, expressed in dollars.
Slime Instead of the Crown of Creation
In April 2007, a one-day workshop at Goldsmiths College in London gave its name to a new philosophical movement: speculative realism. It had four participants: Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier. By realism they meant that the world exists whether or not anyone is observing it. By speculative they meant the right to reason about what lies beyond experience.
Meillassoux attacked Kant from the flank. In his 2006 book "After Finitude," he pointed out that science speaks confidently about events that no one was there to observe: isotopic analysis dates the formation of the Earth to about 4.5 billion years ago. Meillassoux called such evidence "arche-fossils." If we can know about the world before humans, then reality cannot be reduced to its relationship with consciousness, and humans turn out to be late tenants in a house that was built without them.
The philosopher Ben Woodard went the furthest. In his 2012 book "Slime Dynamics," he described life as sticky, creeping, mutating matter, indifferent to our aesthetic tastes. This whole intellectual shift has been called the dark turn in philosophy. It is hard to imagine anything bleaker for a species that until recently pictured itself at the top of the evolutionary ladder.
The Chthulucene and a Billionaire's Manifesto: Where the Exits from the Dark Lead
Philosophy rarely stays on the page. Once an idea gains weight, people start looking to it for a program of action, and the dark turn has produced several political readings that cannot be reconciled.
The left-wing reading turned it into an argument against endless growth. If nature is no longer a warehouse of resources, then "green capitalism" turns out to be the same old extraction of raw materials with reporting and good design added on. Advocates of postcapitalism propose producing less and flying less, buying durable goods instead of disposable ones, shortening the workweek, and measuring success by overall well-being rather than GDP.
The American scholar Donna Haraway, in her 2016 book "Staying with the Trouble," proposed replacing the Anthropocene with the Chthulucene, an era of entangled coexistence among species. One detail is usually overlooked: Haraway deliberately spells her term differently from the name of Lovecraft's Cthulhu and explicitly rejects any connection to the writer. Her Chthulucene derives from the Greek idea of the chthonic, meaning the subterranean, and from planetary forces older than humanity. Her slogan, "Make Kin Not Babies," invites people to treat a particular marsh or bird colony as family, and to deliberately lower birth rates in wealthy countries.
The right-wing reading took the opposite road. In his 2012 essay "The Dark Enlightenment," the British philosopher Nick Land proposed reorganizing society on the model of a corporation with a rigid hierarchy, where machine intelligence would make such a structure more efficient than democracy. Exactly three years ago, on October 16, 2023, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," which listed sustainability and degrowth among the enemies of progress. Since humans are not the crown of creation, the techno-optimists reason, they can be treated as a platform for an upgrade: redesign the body and connect machine intelligence to the brain. In their logic, the next stop is other planets.
For all the mutual hostility of their followers, both roads lead to the same place. The left once again assigns humanity the task of saving the planet; the right proposes outgrowing it. Humans are back at the center, and only the scenery has changed. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek advises against rushing: actions that soothe the conscience of the person taking them preserve the very social order that created the problem. Stop and think. The only remaining question is who exactly is supposed to do the thinking.
A Gift of God: What Baku Said Out Loud and Brussels Chose Not to Hear
For centuries, the conversation about the fate of the planet took place within a narrow circle of developed countries whose ideas of normality and progress brought the world to where it is now. Everyone else was cast as the subject of discussion: states that took in other countries' factories and other countries' waste, communities whose survival depended on a particular stretch of coastline. Latour's answer was a "parliament of things," an assembly in which everyone affected by a decision has a voice, including rivers and the atmosphere.
On November 12, 2024, at the COP29 climate conference in Baku, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said something that many Western delegations received with open hostility. Oil, gas, wind, sun, gold, silver, and copper, he said, are natural resources, and countries should not be blamed for having them or for bringing them to a market that needs them. Resources, in his words, are "a gift of God."
Less than two years have passed. The same European and Asian capitals that winced at those words in 2024 are now lining up for barrels that do not pass through Hormuz. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, with a capacity of 1.2 million barrels a day, has suddenly become one of the few routes independent of the Persian Gulf. On May 12, 2026, a tanker carrying roughly 45,000 kiloliters of Azerbaijani crude docked at the ENEOS refinery in Yokohama. From January through August, Azerbaijan exported 14.7 million tons of oil and petroleum products worth $9.28 billion, while the 2026 state budget was based on a modest assumption of $65 a barrel.
The significance of this story goes beyond commercial good fortune. At COP29, Baku did what the organizers of previous conferences had not dared to do: it described honestly where humanity stands inside the hyperobject. Oil will not disappear just because people stop mentioning it in communiqués. A year later, Brazil tested the opposite proposition in practice. The final decision of COP30, adopted in Belém on November 22, 2025, after negotiations that ran past their scheduled close, contained not a single mention of fossil fuels. More than 80 countries supported a roadmap for phasing them out, but major producers made sure the phrase itself was removed from the text. The most committed advocates of a phaseout met separately: in April 2026, in Santa Marta, Colombia, 57 countries representing about a third of the world economy held the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels. It produced no commitments. The next meeting is scheduled for 2027 and will be hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland.
For dark ecology, there is no contradiction here. A parliament of things without oil is impossible, because oil has long held a seat in it as the most powerful member, casting its votes through the price of a barrel, through budgets, exchange rates, and heating bills. Who in such a parliament will speak on its behalf: the oil companies, the exporting countries, or the billions of consumers who vote for it every day at the gas pump?
A Forecast Ahead of Antalya: Why the Next Crisis Will Feed Coal Again
From November 9 to 20, 2026, climate diplomacy will convene in Antalya, Türkiye, for COP31. For the first time, the conference is being run as a partnership between two countries: Türkiye is hosting the event and holding the presidency, while Australia has been given a special role in the negotiations. The informal roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels prepared by the Brazilian presidency is also due to be presented there.
My forecast is unequivocal. The final decision of COP31 will contain no binding timetable for phasing out fossil fuels, at best a reference to voluntary roadmaps. Global coal consumption in 2027 will stay above 8.7 billion tons, even if Hormuz is fully reopened by New Year's. The shale wells and coal mines brought online during the crisis will keep running for decades, because loans have already been taken out to finance them, and creditors don't read Morton.
Dark ecology offers no recipe, and that is both its strength and its weakness. All it does is take away humanity's illusion of a control panel. Oil crises fail to bring the green future closer for a simple reason: at the moment of shock, humans behave like yeast searching for sugar, not like an engineer designing a new vat. Perhaps the only quality that still sets them apart from yeast is the ability to reach agreement with those who are not like them. Belém showed that this ability was not enough even to get the word "oil" into the final document.
In the spring of 2026, as Japanese coal plants ran without restrictions, tankers carrying Caspian oil were sailing toward Yokohama. Meanwhile, in Surakhani, the fire of Ateshgah kept burning. The natural gas seep beneath the temple ran dry back in 1969, and since then the eternal flame has been fed by the city gas main. Humans learned long ago how to keep a fire burning from a pipe. They have not yet learned how to put it out.