Infrastructural Overshoot: When Planetary Systems Hit Governance Limits reframes climate change as a governance‑layer failure rather than an environmental anomaly. The paper argues that modern infrastructures extract from planetary systems faster than those systems can regenerate, producing a sustained E > R overshoot condition. Drawing on emissions data, ecological decline indicators, military fuel consumption, resource extraction trends, and governance‑layer asymmetries, the paper demonstrates that climate change emerges from structural imbalances rather than aggregated individual behaviours. The analysis shows that institutions increasingly regulate individuals because they cannot regulate infrastructures—a dynamic the paper terms downward regulation. High‑impact systems such as fossil fuel production, global logistics, plastics manufacturing, and military operations remain structurally intact, while behavioural interventions dominate policy discourse. The result is a persistent overshoot condition in which extraction accelerates, recovery declines, and governance architectures fail to constrain system‑level drivers. This paper synthesizes climate science, political economy, ecological systems research, and infrastructural analysis to provide a diagnostic grammar for understanding climate change as a structural and governance‑layer phenomenon.
Signal Rupture (Fri,) studied this question.