Why, despite decades of awareness of the severity of the climate crisis, do we continue to respond in a timid and fragmented manner? In The Enigma of Climate Inaction. Why Are We Doing Nothing (or Almost Nothing) in the Face of Catastrophe? (Routledge, 2025), Frédéric Samama – PhD in economics and MA in philosophy, among the pioneers of international green finance – describes the climate crisis as a “true turning point in human history, a green swan-marked by massive, nonlinear, interlocking forces that threaten human life”.
By combining neuroscience, anthropology, economic history and finance the books argues that the cognitive, technological, and economic achievements of humanity have become a conceptual cage for fast-paced climate action. The starting point is in the mind: the human brain has evolved to recognise rapid, visible and personal threats. Climate change and collapse of biodiversity are instead slow, diffuse and probabilistic risks. The consequence is a structural gap between what science tells us and what our instincts perceive as urgent: we are ready to mobilise in the face climate disasters such as fires or floods, far less so when confronted with temperature curves or emissions graphs.
From this perspective, the climate crisis calls into question the very foundations of social, economic and political institutions. However, the original question remains the heart of the matter: why has a risk known for decades – and caused by our own activities – still not prompted an adequate response? To answer, Samama shifts the focus from the individual to society as a whole.
Like a living organism, society organise itself around the imperative of survival: securing access to resources while minimising effort and uncertainty. The human brain prefers simple, relatively stable and sufficiently accurate models of the world that are functional to achieve energy, security and well-being. The same logic applied on a collective scale favours economic, political and cultural models that promise continuity and control, while exploration – complex, uncertain and initially costly – is pushed to the margins.
This is where the concept of “social bubbles” emerges. Major historical frameworks such as agriculture, modern science and neoliberalism provided for centuries a competitive advantage in terms of access to resources. Today they are instead a source of systemic fragility. Alongside these, there is a “modelling bubble”, in which abstraction and models become the primary conduit to reality, to the point of replacing a direct, human and sensory connection with the living world. In this context, the climate crisis is destabilising on two fronts: on the one hand, it erodes the material foundations that sustained the development of the bubbles, such as natural and human resources; on the other, it spotlights the inadequacy of the coordination mechanisms of humanity to managing a global, intergenerational and non-linear risk.
The book’s core argument centres on three imperatives. The first is to recognise the interplay of urgency, complexity and ethical dimensions that define the problem, moving beyond naïve techno-optimism. The second is to revert decades of state retreat in front of the markets and restore its coordinating role towards the protection of the most vulnerable. The third is to urge businesses to rediscover their long-term exploratory mission, beyond limiting themselves to short-term profit schemes. What emerges from these imperatives is a sharp critique of placing excessive confidence in the capacity to model the world, forcing it into representations, measurements and simulations.
From this perspective, climate mobilisation is the return of a shared responsibility and of a sense of belonging to the living world. It can be thought of as a sort of update to our social DNA, capable of reactivating societal resources of innovation and solidarity. The Enigma of Climate Inaction then becomes more than just an essay on our collective apathy: it is an ambitious, rich in analogies and well-documented endeavour to reinterpret humanity mental and social models in the light of that “green swan”. Its objective is as simple to state as it is difficult to achieve: transforming a critical phase into mobilisation. It does so by offering a new lexicon – perhaps more aesthetic than rational – that is made up of fragility, beauty and responsibility. This can help to rethink “the uniqueness of life” in the age of the climate crisis. Because, after all, perhaps it all starts in the brain, both individual and collective.
Cover: a detail from the book