The system that finances its own destruction: How ecological harm generates power — and how that power blocks every correction

Abstract

This working paper examines why well-established knowledge of climate and Earth-system risks is not translated into institutional limits commensurate with those risks. It does not deny that political inertia, international coordination problems, social dependencies, technological path dependence and individual denial are independent causes of inadequate action. Its central claim is that one feedback mechanism holds a special status because it amplifies other barriers while obstructing its own correction. This externalisation–power feedback consists of four steps: ecological and social costs are shifted outside private or institutional accounts; the resulting profits and rents increase economic and organisational power; that power is converted into political, legal and communicative influence; and this influence prevents, delays or weakens the internalisation of costs. The initial externalisation can therefore continue. Research on externalities, regulatory capture, carbon lock-in, corporate lobbying, political polarisation and climate-delay discourses substantiates the individual links of the mechanism, and adjacent syntheses — the externalisation society, the imperial mode of living, oligarchic wealth defence and the existential politics of asset revaluation — describe important parts of the circuit. The contribution of this paper is to integrate these elements into a single, explicitly recursive meta-barrier, to state the criterion on which its special status rests, and to derive testable hypotheses and conditions that would weaken or delimit the thesis. The implication is direct: an effective strategy cannot regulate emissions and individual harms alone. It must also interrupt the conversion of ecologically generated profits into obstruction capacity. The paper does not yet present a complete institutional design, but identifies the necessary points of intervention. Keywords: Earth system failure; externalisation; concentrated power; regulatory capture; carbon lock-in; lobbying; climate obstruction; political economy; biosphere