Türkiye Sausages, Part II

"We are confounded by a surfeit of solutions to the climate crisis"

Madam President, the most basic rules of international relations are being tested, not because we no longer know them. We do, but governments increasingly apply them selectively: international law applies until it becomes inconvenient; court decisions must be respected unless they challenge our own actions or those of our friends; sovereignty is sacred only unless someone else’s territory stands in the way of our ambitions.

We cannot build courts, celebrate them when they prosecute our enemies and undermine them when they turn their attention to our friends. When grave violations go unanswered, they are more likely to be repeated. And for small states, this is existential, not simply a matter of principle.

—Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Iceland, Sep 25, 2026.

History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it.

—Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, Senate Judiciary Committee, Sep 30, 2026

Fifteen countries, meeting behind closed doors, are working through a fourth straw poll to select a new Secretary-General, the world’s conflict-mediator-in-chief and the person who will nominally speak for eight billion humans.

Given how it is going, the next SecGen may well be Marco Rubio.

The General Assembly gets to ratify whoever emerges, but the actual choosing happens in the Security Council, where Donald Trump holds an effective veto that, by most informed guesses, quietly rules out Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and women. If you want the inside butchercraft on how this sausage actually gets made, the Outrage and Optimism podcast has Christiana Figueres in conversation with her old friend Susana Malcorra — former chéf de cabinet to Ban Ki-moon, later Argentina’s foreign minister, and herself a 2016 candidate for the job. As Figueres puts it, whoever wins inherits a broke institution in a broken world and gets handed the genuinely thankless task of redefining what the UN is even for. My own dark-horse picks, if the job truly does require a Nordic white man, would be Norway’s Epsen Eide or Finland’s Alexander Stubb.

We should all be steadfast defenders of multilateralism. As Strobe Talbott reportedly remarked, multilateralism is hell, and can be a real pain in the neck. But it is the best option for humanity as a whole. We need multilateralism in order to address our shared agenda, ranging from armed conflicts and climate change to sustainable development and artificial intelligence.

Currently, however, we seem to be going the other way: towards a non-cooperative multipolar world order. This order, as it turns out, is based on zero-sum deals, transactions, and unrestrained power. This is a short-sighted approach. Tempting as it may be for some, such a multipolar order will ultimately lead to conflict. It will turn against us….

—Alexander Stubb, Sep 22, 2026

The old world is dying, and a new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

— Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs Espen Barth Eide, Sep 25, 2026

Which brings us, as everything eventually does around here, back to climate change — the item that topped Guterres’s to-do list during his tenure. We’re two months from COP-31 in Türkiye, where I’ll be attending virtually and filing dispatches. No one nation can possibly repair the climate. A.I. won’t do it either. We are not going to solve our way out of climate chaos by some magic bullet. It will take a United Nations. All climate repair work begins there.

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Here’s the part the professional doomers skip: the UN system, whatever its faults, has actually done stuff. Before Paris, global CO₂ emissions were climbing nearly 2% a year; that’s slowed to roughly 0.3%. Fossil fuel demand has plateaued and is falling in several major economies—China chief among them —where renewables grew more in 2026 than in the rest of the world combined, and where manufacturing scale has made new clean power cheaper than keeping old coal, diesel, and most gas plants running. Combined CAPEX and OPEX are less than the OPEX of fossil fuels. Since 2025, US policy has undergone a reversal, with hefty tariffs imposed on solar PV wafers, cells, and finished panels, pushing up installed PV to $0.46 per Watt, over four times the cost in China.

Nonetheless, all the installed solar is having its predicted effect. Back in 2015 we were staring down roughly 4°C of warming this century. Today’s projections sit closer to 2.6-3.0°C. Still a genuinely bad number. Still, somehow, a miracle compared to where we were headed just ten years earlier.

The economic center of gravity is shifting too. The Global South holds seventy percent of the planet’s wind and solar potential and half the minerals the energy transition needs, and clean energy now employs more people worldwide than fossil fuels do.

Two key energy powerhouses reached milestones in August. China’s installed solar capacity overtook coal to become the largest power source in the country. Installed solar capacity at the end of July reached 1,286GW compared to coal’s 1,285GW according to China’s National Energy Administration. Secondly, India’s clean energy capacity overtook its fossil-fuel-powered generation.

— GAAEX: September 2026

COP-31 in Türkiye—November 9 to 20—is being pitched not as the “implementation COP”—less pledging, more plumbing; turning paper commitments into financed, measurable, shovel-ready projects. The pre-COP goal is pushing electricity to 35% of global energy by 2035, and the presidency estimates its package could shave 8.5 to 10 gigatons off projected 2035 emissions. Starting from today’s roughly 50 gigatons (Carbon Dioxide equivalent) a year, that would drop annual additions to 40–41.5 gigatons of greenhouse triple-pane glazing. There are already 3 trillion tons up there from past centuries.

Read that again. That announced UN goal is still adding to the atmosphere. Forty billion tons more than nature removes. Every year. And, unless human ingenuity vacuums it out, much of it will remain up there for centuries, trapping heat.

Global electric vehicle (EV) sales rose 9% year-on-year in July to 1.85 million units, according to research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, taking year-to-date sales to 11.5 million, up 4% from 2025. European sales grew 33% as the return of subsidies to major markets drove exceptional performance in France, up 81% at a record 37% penetration rate, Germany, up 46%, and the UK, up 43%. Chinese exports of new-energy vehicles (including hybrids) set another monthly record above 500,000 units while the domestic market fell just 5% in comparison to July 2025, improving the year-to-date figure to -12%. EV sales penetration in China is now above 50% as the wider vehicle market shrinks faster than EV sales. North American sales fell 27% year-on-year as comparisons are now drawn against the pre-expiry surge in US purchases ahead of the September 2025 tax credit removal.

— GAAEX: September 2026

Climate Hacks

There are climate hacks, and they help: sealing fugitive methane leaks at the world’s roughly eight million abandoned oil and gas wells could cut 4.3 gigatons annually, though the actual number is fuzzy since almost nobody is properly counting the wells in the first place. Seaweed farming could pull down 3-4 GtCO2/y. Reforestation and agroforestry, another 3. Enhanced rock weathering, half a gigaton near-term, rising toward 2 later this century. Peatland and wetland restoration, maybe an additional gigaton per year. Biochar will cross the 1 megaton annual production mark in late 2026 or early 2027. If it keeps scaling at its present rate (+70%/y), will draw down 115 megatons per year by 2035. It could scale ten times faster and go 10 times greater if incentives were provided, but it already chalks up annual profit growth of 25% to operators. Add it all up, and we’re still emitting 33–37 gigatons a year — right about where emissions stood in the year 2000, the year George W. Bush and the Supreme Court stole an election (Al Gore won the national popular vote by over 540,000 votes and the Florida recount showed he won the electoral college, too).

There is also the mechanical route, using artificial trees. Klaus Lackner, who originated the concept on the back of an envelope and then launched the industry 20 years ago, calculates it would require 2.74 million Direct Air Capture machines catching dry and pumping out wet 1 ton CO2 per hour to withdraw 1 gigaton from the atmosphere. It presently costs $1000 per tonne of CO2 withdrawn but these are prototype units. DAC had only a net CO2 removal of 675 tonnes in the first half of 2026. Optimistic DAC estimates are one million tons/y in the 2030s, but at entirely subsidized cost.

DAC collectors and their polymers can be produced as repeatable modular goods, eventually at millions of units per year (for comparison, we currently produce 80 million cars and trucks). The cost to draw down 50 GtCO2e/y would range between 1.5 billion USD/y at $30/tCO2 (a 2050 cost target) and $5 trillion USD/y at $100/tCO2 (a 2030 cost target). $5 trillion per year may seem like a lot. Five trillion dollars is roughly what public spending costs the affluent industrial economies (38 OECD members) every 2 months. For the US alone, it would be closer to 9 months’ spending.

The Congressional Budget Office pegs the annualized cost of Operation Epic Fury/Iran War at upwards of $1.5 trillion USD. That is just the cost to one country—the United States. Iran may bear a similar or greater cost, and the Middle East and Europe likewise, from secondary effects like export interruption, higher energy prices, freight and insurance premiums, inflation, loss and damage, and GDP loss. Suddenly, $5 trillion per year doesn’t seem that much to invest in human survival.

Setting the Table

We need to do considerably better than “not getting worse quite as fast,” and to their credit, most people showing up at COP-31 will know that. Germany and France have already pledged to phase out fossil fuels entirely by 2035. The UNFCCC has queued up a Climate Implementation Bridge to turn commitments into investable projects, a Green Industrialization Facilitation Mechanism aimed at connecting developing economies with existing technology and finance rather than inventing yet another fund nobody replenishes, and a stack of voluntary programs on everything from green freight to food systems.

In the near-term, emissions reductions play the strongest role in overall mitigation, with 15.9 GtCO2 per year of reductions by 2035 compared to 2020, while median CDR scales up to 3.9 GtCO2 per year during the same period. When these scenarios achieve net-zero CO2, 7.1–13.3 GtCO2 per year of CDR balances remaining emissions (about 56% through conventional CDR [artificial trees] and 44% through novel CDR [biology]).

—Gidden, et al., 2026

A counter-trend are datacenters, which emitted some 286 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2025, concentrated in the U.S. and China, and are undergoing explosive growth. Climate damage from AI workloads could exceed $50 billion by 2030, global insurer Allianz said.

If Climate Week in New York proved anything, it’s that the era when USAnian politics could single-handedly make or break global cooperation on the biggest existential threat we’ve ever engineered for ourselves is, functionally, over. Nobody is waiting on Washington’s permission anymore. And whatever meddling gets attempted in the Secretary-General race, the long-term effect may simply be to hasten the day the single-nation veto finally gets retired — a day that will be celebrated, quietly but sincerely, in Gaza, Kyiv, and every other place that’s had to watch one country’s “no” outweigh everyone else’s “yes.”

The UN remains, gloriously and infuriatingly, the worst possible system for running a planet — except for every other one we’ve tried.

 

References

Aldakhil, F. A., & Alyousef, H. S. (2025). A Comparative Analysis of Heteroglossic Resources and Power Dynamics in the Trump vs. the United States Supreme Court Argument. Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in English Language Communication, 1(2), 3-18.

Bates A. and K. Draper (2019), Burn: Using Fire to Save the Earth, Chelsea Green Publishers.

Byers, E. et al. AR6 Scenarios Database. (2022) doi:10.5281/zenodo.5886912

Brunner C., Hausfather Z., Knutti R. (2024). Durability of carbon dioxide removal is critical for Paris climate goals. Commun Earth Environ 5:645. doi: 10.1038/s43247-024-01808-7

Caesar, L., et al. (2026). Planetary Health Check 2026: A Scientific Assessment of the State of the Planet. https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/rest/items/item_35009/component/file_35022/content

Dickau, M., Zickfeld, K. & Matthews, H. D. (2025) Irreversible climate changes driven by degree-years of temperature overshoot. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7603499/v1.

Gidden, M. J., et al. (2026), Chapter 8: Paris-consistent CDR scenarios, in The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal 3rd Edition 2026 (eds. Edwards, M. R. et al.)

Höhne, N. et al. (2021) Wave of net zero emission targets opens window to meeting the Paris Agreement. Nat. Clim. Change 11, 820–822.

Javadi, P. et al. (2024) The impact of regional resources and technology availability on carbon dioxide removal potential in the United States. Environ. Res. Energy 1, 045007.

Jorat M., E.KraaviK., E. Manning D. A. C. (2022). Removal of atmospheric CO2 by engineered soils in infrastructure projects. J. Environ. Manag.314:115016. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.115016

McBride, A. L., et al. (2025). Quantifying potential carbon dioxide removal via enhanced weathering using porewater from a field trial in Scotland. Frontiers in Climate, 7, 1606574. https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2025.1606574

Siddik, M. A. B., Shehabi, A., & Marston, L. (2021). The environmental footprint of data centers in the United States. Environmental Research Letters, 16(6), 064017.

Swagel, P.L. (2026). Letter to Rep. Brendan F. Boyle: “Estimating the Cost of Combat Operations Against Iran,” CBO, Sep 15, 2026.

Zinin, A. (2026) Data centers may emit 57% more CO₂ than expected in 2025, study finds. TechXplore.

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#RestorationGeneration.

Even when humans are locked in a cage, the Earth remains beautiful. So the lesson 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 rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrilwith the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion.