We can't price our way out of climate change; we have to make the environment a hard limit.
April 17, 2026
Original Paper
u-Kama: Coordinating Value under Ecological Constraint
SSRN · 6466718
The Takeaway
Most environmental policies try to use taxes or carbon credits to 'encourage' green behavior, assuming that if the price is right, we’ll stop polluting. The 'u-Kama' framework argues this is a fantasy. Instead, it proposes a system where ecological reality is a physical, structural constraint on the economy—if a resource is gone, the system literally stops you from using it. It’s a total departure from the idea that we can manage the planet with a ledger. For us, it means the future isn't about paying more for gas; it’s about a world where the Earth itself sets the rules of the game.
From the abstract
Modern economic systems exhibit a persistent failure to maintain ecological continuity. This failure arises not from insufficient data or awareness, but from structural conditions that allow economic incentives to override ecological constraints. Incentive-based conservation frameworks-including carbon markets, payments for ecosystem services, and environmental certification systems-share a common architecture: economic signals are designed to induce ecological behaviour. This paper argues that