Can you please stop the weather?

"Earth is speaking in tongues, and no one understands."

The Baku to Belem roadmap to spend $1.3 trillion per year was put forward during the leaders’ summit that preceded the formal opening of COP30. As expected, it has become the focal point as we enter the second week of negotiations. Roadmaps are an attractive instrument for negotiations that appear to be stuck, but as Brazil’s Environmental Minister put it:

When we have a terrain or environment that is quite grim, it is good that we have a map. But the map does not force us to travel, or to climb.

Scientist Johan Rockström offered the usual grim warning from the science community:

We’re heading towards 2.5°C if we implement all the Nationally Determined Contributions that are here at COP 30 in Belém. But we are actually in a business-as-usual pathway all the way up to 3°C by the end of the century. Now, just a reminder again—3°C—the last time we had that temperature on planet Earth, you have to go … 4 million years back to find an equivalent heat level on planet Earth. So there’s absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever that we can cater for a world as we know it on a planet that actually warms beyond even 2°C. 2°C is the highest temperature on Earth over the past 3 million years.—the entire Quaternary.

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Now, what is worrying us even more right now is also that the rate of warming is showing signs of accelerating. Now that is new findings. You see here that over the last 10 years, there has been a very significant increase in the rate of warming in the atmosphere on the left graph and in the ocean on the right-hand side. Well, this is what we bring to Belém. The consequence of this is that we have to accelerate our way away from fossil fuels even faster than we had thought previously.

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We’ve run out of carbon budget. there’s no space left. … So there no room for new oil or new gas or new coal anywhere. [But,] nobody can follow a path within a budget that requires that we shut down the global economy with the next 5 years. Okay?

The most ambitious climate policy in the world is the one Norway has signed onto which is the European Green Deal, which is a 90% reduction by 2045 and a 50% reduction by 2035. Nobody is as ambitious as that pathway, which is very ambitious, requiring 5% reductions per year…. So the models then add carbon dioxide removal technologies to give a gross budget which is roughly 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide [by 2045] and therefore what we need to do is to phase out fossil fuels at a record speed and the models have already assumed we’ll be able to scale carbon dioxide removal to the order of 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year from basically 2040 onwards until the end of the century in order to allow for this early phase out of fossil fuels, thereby holding the 1.5 Celsius line.

Unfortunately, I mean 20 years ago it could have worked, but today it doesn’t work anymore. And just to make things even more sharp here, not even that is enough [for an] orderly phase out and chance to hold 1.5.

Corraling Carbon

Rockström said that we’d need 600 billion tons per year of CDR capacity by 2100 to hold Earth below a +2°C temperature increase. Apart from the fact that human CO2 emissions in 2025 will have grown 1.1% from 2024, continuing a steady trend of year-over-year emissions growth; and apart from the likelihood that Rockstrom’s 600 GtCO2 is likely an underestimate; and that with public financing CDR costs about $171/tCO2, but with private venture capital can cost ~$322/tCO2, making the 600GtCO2 tab nearly $200 trillion per year to operate (OPEX), none of which is presently flowing from taxes on consumers or fees on polluters; the largest Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) facililty to date, the ClimeWorks Mammoth Project in Iceland, is pulling out an admirable but tiny 36,000 tons per year (0.000036 GtCO2).

Assuming DACCS scales as planned (ClimeWorks and Carbon Engineering are constructing 1 million ton (0.001 Gt) plants in Texas and Louisiana), to remove 600 Gt/y will require 600,000 DACCS plants, each costing approximately $1 billion to build (CAPEX).

Nobody can follow a path within a budget that requires us to shut down the global economy within the next 5 years. Okay?

Biochar sales, by contrast, are projected to pull 1 million tons from the atmosphere annually this year, are doubling every year or two, and return profits and multiple side benefits (a dozen or more of the Sustainable Development Goals) rather than locked-in, forever costs and dependencies. Nonetheless, 600 billion tons of biochar produced annually would require 1.8 trillion tons of dry feedstocks annually, 20 times Earth's annual photosynthetic productivity (half on land, half in the ocean). Scaling is a bitch. 

 

“We can’t eat money,” said Gilmar, an Indigenous leader from the Tupinamba community near the lower reaches of the Tapajos River in Brazil, who uses only one name. “We want our lands free from agribusiness, oil exploration, illegal miners and illegal loggers.”

—Reuters

A Tower of Babel

As I see it, there is a fundamental disconnect in the negotiations going on this week at the UN climate summit in Belém. It’s a Tower of Babel problem.

There is an inherent contradiction between the human desire, entirely understandable, to preserve a civilizational status quo, hard-won over ten millennia of toil, bloodshed, plodding advancement—a triumph of human creativity over the hardships imposed by the natural world.

Recently, I had the opportunity to watch the Australian documentary film "Burning," directed by Eva Orner and Jonathan Schaerf, which documents the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season. For comparison, the record 2020 California wildfires burned 4.4 million acres, whereas the Australian Black Summer fires of 2019–2020 burned a staggering 59 million acres.

One of the interviews was with Australian writer Bruce Pascoe. Pascoe is a Bunurong Aboriginal who has published 36 books, including Dark Emu, which sold over 400,000 copies. His interview stuck with me in the days after I watched the film, and particularly, how he described Aboriginal Australia.

The Earth is the mother of all Aboriginal people. And we treat the Earth like our mother. That’s our law, and if we all respected the Earth to that degree, then we wouldn’t be damaging it as greatly as we are at the moment. I think we’ve been building toward this for 250 years. Europeans had so little respect for Aboriginal people. When the first Europeans came here, they found a sweet and open land. It was pleasant. They said it looked like a gentleman’s park. And it was a gentleman’s park, because the people here were gentle men and women. But Europeans then stopped the method that made it like that.

The narrative then shifted to climate author Tim Flannery, who picks up Pascoe’s thread:

Indigenous Australians have managed this land for at least 40,000 years. And it was carefully curated. And then Europeans came along, we took the fire stick out of the hands of Aboriginal people, and we changed the landscape dramatically.

Now we have 8 billion people on Earth, about 90% of whom have been acculturated to that European gentleman’s model. Since they were children, this way of being is all they have been taught. It is all they know. If the weather is bad and getting progressively worse, they complain to the government, or maybe elect a new government. Try something different, as long as it does not involve any deep lifestyle change.

And that is the real problem.

Hurricane Melissa changed the life of every Jamaican in less than 24 hours. We did not create this crisis, but we refuse to stand as victims. “We call on the global community, especially major emitters, to honor their commitments and safeguard the 1.5 degree threshold for Jamaica. This is survival. It’s about our people and their right to a safe and prosperous future.

—Matthew Samuda, Jamaica’s Minister for Economic Growth

Dare I say it? The issue is not whether Jamaicans should be helped to recover (and Cubans, needless to say). The issue is, why should Jamaica have an Economic Growth Minister?

When I watch the debates at COP30 Belém, I see the same repetitive, unproductive cycles we saw 30 years before. Progress is in baby steps. Colombia, a member of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, announced plans to host its first international conference on the phase-out of fossil fuels in April next year. Newly launched satellites trace methane plumes to their sources. These steps are positive, but they are moving more slowly than glaciers at this point.

Vicente Fernandes Vilhalva, a 36-year-old Guarani Kaiowá leader, was shot dead on Sunday morning in the attack by a group of armed assailants on Pyelito Kue, a community of Guarani Kaiowá people who recently reoccupied part of their ancestral land in southern Brazil. The Guarani are the West Bank Palestinians of Brazil, and little is done to prosecute the illegal settlers who want to take their land.

The issue is not whether Jamaicans should be helped to recover. The issue is, why should Jamaica have an Economic Growth Minister?

As I write this, Indigenous peoples’ groups are blocking the main COP30 entrance, forcing the delegates to use a special side entrance. They are demanding greater presence, even though President Lula and the UN conveners have for the most part given them unprecedented access and opportunities to address the plenary (a counterpoint: more than 200 human rights and environmental groups accused UNFCCC Secretary Simon Stiell of encouraging a state crackdown on Indigenous people by calling on Brazil to step up the deployment of troops around the COP).

The protesters are demanding that the logging stop, and it is somewhat stopping. They aim to halt the fires in the Amazon, which burned 113 million acres in 2024, surpassing the combined areas burned in California, Canada, and Australia. But no amount of demand, protest or government change addresses their real problem.

As Pogo said, we have met the enemy, and it is us.

We are too many, we consume too much, and we produce wastes well beyond our mother’s ability to clean up after us. We do that at the expense of the natural systems she has evolved over not tens of thousands but millions and billions of years.

I teach permaculture for a simple reason. We need to get back to the garden.

References

Richardson, K., et al.. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances. https://doi.org/adh2458

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#RestorationGeneration.

When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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