The entropy trap: Climate plans may be adding to global fragility

The mitigation-first model exposes developing countries to the risk of complexity outpacing the buffers needed to manage it

- V. ANANTHA NAGESWARAN

(AFP)

As leaders gather for CoP-30 in Belém, Brazil, the world risks reenacting a familiar ritual: ambitious declarations, accelerated timelines and renewed pressure on developing countries to decarbonize faster. But beneath the rhetoric lies an uncomfortable truth.

The global climate strategy, as currently designed and sequenced, is generating the very disorder, fragility and instability it seeks to avert. It is pushing societies into what can be called ‘the entropy trap’: a condition in which well-intentioned transitions increase systemic complexity faster than they increase the capacity to manage it.

This is not an ideological argument. It is structural and, at its foundation, thermodynamic: Modern economies are vast systems of continuous energy transformation. Every transaction—running a factory, streaming a video or irrigating a field—is a thermodynamic process. And thermodynamics has an unforgiving constant: energy transformations tend to increase entropy, or disorder, unless supported by sufficient buffers, redundancies and stabilizing structures.

For two centuries, advanced economies kept entropy in check by relying on dense, stable and dispatchable energy sources: coal, oil and gas. These fuels powered predictable grids, scalable industrial systems and steady growth that built state capacity and social resilience.

The global climate agenda now seeks to replace these dense energy sources with diffuse, intermittent and geographically dispersed ones—solar and wind. This shift is essential in the long run. But the way it is being pursued—rapidly, uniformly and often prematurely—adds complexity before countries have built the institutions, grids and financial systems needed to absorb it. When complexity outruns capacity, entropy rises.