Escape Velocity

This week, financial markets are preparing for what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceX is reportedly targeting a Nasdaq listing at a valuation of roughly US$1.75 trillion, with trading expected to begin under the ticker SPCX. The offering is being built around one of the most ambitious corporate missions ever put to paper: making humanity multiplanetary.

I understand the dream. I really do. There is something magnificent about the idea of humans becoming a spacefaring civilisation. Exploration is one of the best parts of us. Curiosity is one of the best parts of us. The desire to reach beyond the known is one of the reasons we have achieved anything at all.

But the irony is severe. We are willing to value the promise of becoming multiplanetary at close to two trillion dollars, while still failing to mobilise anything close to the capital, demand and political will required to protect the one planet that already gives us air, water, food, soil, oceans, forests, rivers, glaciers and a stable climate.

The oasis.

That is the part I cannot get away from. Not because space exploration is wrong, but because it should force the opposite reaction. The further we go, the clearer Earth should become. The more ambitious we are about reaching beyond this planet, the more serious we should be about protecting the only home we have ever known.

The Overview Effect

There is a name for the shift that happens when astronauts look back at Earth from space: the Overview Effect. It is often described as the moment when the planet stops being an abstraction and becomes whole, borderless, alive and impossibly delicate. From the ground, Earth is something we use. From space, it becomes something we love.

I was reminded of this recently while listening to my daughter’s Yoto Daily. For those without small children, it is basically kids’ radio, and on this particular morning they were talking about space ships, astronauts and what happens when human beings look back at Earth from space. We were having breakfast before the school bus came, and suddenly I found myself thinking about one of the most extraordinary images human beings have ever seen: Earth, whole and luminous, suspended in darkness. And trying to explain it to a 6-year-old.

Not Earth as a map. Not Earth as countries, borders, jurisdictions, markets, politics, ideologies or asset classes. Earth as an oasis. A fragile blue oasis in a universe that is, as far as we know, almost entirely indifferent to us.

Her response was simpler: “Everyone should love the earth.”

There is something strange about us as a species. As adults, we seem to need distance before we feel reverence. The tragedy is that most of us never get that perspective. We live inside the system, so we mistake its generosity for permanence.

That is the great illusion of modern life. We wake up, turn on the lights, charge the phone, cool the room, fly to meetings, move goods across oceans, stream data, eat food grown somewhere else and assume the machine will keep working. But we forget that the machine is our oasis. The machine is the climate, the hydrological cycle, the soils, the oceans, the forests, the atmosphere, the rivers, the glaciers, the pollinators, the stable seasons, the predictable rains and the invisible natural systems that make the economy possible in the first place.

And we are overheating it.

The Atmosphere Kept the Receipt

Our civilisation has been built on energy. Cheap energy. Dense energy. Fossil energy. Energy that allowed billions of people to move out of poverty, cities to rise, medicine to advance, food systems to scale and human life to become longer, safer and more abundant. That part matters, because this cannot be reduced to a cartoon morality play where energy is evil and modern civilisation is a mistake. That kind of thinking is lazy and useless.

But it is also not honest to pretend there has been no cost. The atmosphere has kept the receipt.

The next few years are likely to test that cost in ways that are increasingly difficult to ignore. The scientific community has been warning that we are entering a hotter and more unstable operating environment, with global temperatures likely to keep pushing into record territory and El Niño expected to add another layer of volatility. El Niño is often described casually as “a hot year”, but that understates what it actually does. It is a global climate amplifier. It shifts rainfall, changes drought patterns, increases heat stress, affects food production and interacts with ocean temperatures, atmospheric circulation and regional vulnerability.

On a stable planet, that would already be significant. On a planet already warmed by human activity, it becomes something much more dangerous. The heat does not arrive evenly or politely. It shows up as dangerous combinations of heat and humidity in some regions, violent oscillations between drought and flood in others, stressed rivers, failed harvests, melting glaciers, insurance losses, infrastructure strain, water insecurity, migration pressure and political fragility.

Climate change is not one thing. It is not just heat, sea-level rise, a coral reef, a wildfire, a flood, a drought, a failed harvest or an insurance premium. It is a systems problem, and increasingly those systems are colliding.

The New Fragility

That is why a disruption in one place can now cascade so quickly into something much larger. A geopolitical shock affects shipping. Shipping affects fertiliser. Fertiliser affects crop yields. Crop yields affect food prices. Food prices affect households, elections, social stability and migration. This is what fragility looks like now. Not one clean crisis that can be isolated and solved, but cascading stress across the operating system of civilisation.

And yet, somehow, we keep adjusting. That may be our most dangerous talent. Human beings are astonishingly good at normalising deterioration. A record-breaking heatwave becomes summer. A once-in-a-century flood becomes the new normal. A failed harvest becomes inflation. A burning forest becomes air quality. A collapsing glacier becomes tourism impact. A food shock becomes cost of living. A climate emergency becomes a line item.

I remember coming across Andrew Boyd’s I Want a Better Catastrophe years ago, the book, and it stayed with me because it captures something darkly funny and painfully true about the climate crisis. We keep behaving as though the next disaster will be the one that finally reorganises our priorities: the next fire, flood, drought, record-breaking summer, failed harvest, insurance shock or geopolitical rupture linked to food, water, energy or migration.

But then the news cycle moves on, the political window closes, markets adjust and the lesson is absorbed into the new normal. We do not ignore the warning signs exactly. We see them, price them, rename them, insure against them, litigate them, politicise them and then somehow continue as before.

This is where the story stops being abstract for me, because carbon markets sit directly inside this failure of mobilisation. They are not the whole answer, but they are one of the tools we have to move capital into mitigation, protection and removals now. And yet even here, in a market built to finance climate action, we have found another way to delay.

The finance available for climate mitigation is nowhere near the scale required, while trillions continue to flood into IPOs, AI infrastructure and data centres. That dichotomy is mind-boggling.

What Happens After Integrity?

For the past several years, carbon markets have been consumed by integrity, and rightly so. Additionality matters. Permanence matters. Leakage matters. Benefit sharing matters. Methodologies matter. Ratings matter. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) matters. Article 6 matters. Corresponding adjustments matter. The market needed scrutiny. It needed discipline. It needed to move beyond lazy claims and weak credits. The criticism was not all bad. In many cases, it was necessary.

But at some point we have to ask the next question: what happens after integrity?

What happens when the frameworks are built, the labels are assigned, the methodologies are tightened, the ratings are published, the registries are upgraded and the consultants have finished telling everyone how difficult this all is? Where is the demand?

Because right now, corporates are not flooding the market at the scale required. Not even close. And that is the part no one wants to say loudly enough. We have spent years arguing about quality. Fine. We had to. But quality without demand does not finance climate action. Integrity without mobilisation does not protect forests. Ratings without buyers do not restore ecosystems. Frameworks without capital do not scale removals. Endless market architecture without actual purchasing starts to feel like rearranging deck chairs while the ship takes on water.

The Titanic analogy is overused, but sometimes clichés survive because they are true. We are arguing over the furniture while the ocean is already inside.

Physics Is Not Waiting

The problem is not limited to carbon markets. The broader economy is still largely structured around delay. Governments delay because election cycles are short. Corporates delay because quarterly pressure is real. Consumers delay because convenience is addictive. Investors delay because risk-adjusted returns need to be justified. Carbon markets delay because everyone is terrified of being criticised. So we wait for better rules, better signals, better prices, better policy, better claims guidance, better macro conditions, better political cover and better timing.

But physics is not waiting. The carbon cycle does not care about our governance process. The atmosphere does not care about our internal approvals. The oceans do not care about our cautious procurement strategy. Glaciers do not care about our stakeholder alignment.

This is what makes the moment so uncomfortable. We are not short of information. We are short of conviction.

Perspective, Not Escape

Maybe the point of space exploration is not escape. Maybe it is perspective. Maybe the real value of Artemis, Apollo, SpaceX, Starship and every human who has ever looked back at Earth is not that they show us where else we might go, but that they remind us what we already have.

A home. Not an asset class. Not a jurisdiction. Not an offset claim. Not a political battleground.

A home. Our home.

And we are running out of time to behave like we know that. The science is clear enough. The impacts are visible enough. The risks are connected enough. The market tools are mature enough. The question is no longer whether the emergency is real. The question is whether it is finally big enough for us to act like adults.

Because from space, Earth still looks like an oasis. From where I sit, increasingly, it looks like a test.

And I am not sure we are passing.