Three uncoordinated crises — climate, fertility, AI — converge on infrastructure bottleneck

The article frames a fundamentally novel problem: not a single dramatic crisis with a clear date and villain, but three independent systemic pressures converging on shared resource and infrastructure constraints. Each pressure originates from entirely separate causes — atmospheric physics, demographic and gender dynamics, competitive capital allocation — yet all require massive institutional coordination and financing to manage. The key insight is timing mismatch. Biological and evolutionary adaptation unfold across thousands of generations; atmospheric CO2 has shifted in roughly one human lifetime. Labor markets and pension systems built to handle one shock at a time now face multiple overlapping demands: climate infrastructure requires capital and coordination, but the workforce funding it is simultaneously shrinking, aging, and exhausted by domestic cultural conflict (as evidenced by South Korea's political polarization along gender lines). This isn't a story of coordinated human response; Google Cloud grew 63% while Meta's comparable numbers fell, showing competitive market sorting rather than unified strategy. The article's most concrete example — NEOM's stalled foundations — demonstrates that even unlimited capital hits structural limits. What emerges is not doom but exhaustion arriving earlier than expected, with institutional absorption happening "more slowly, and more unevenly, than either the optimists or the doomers expect."