A mental model for combating climate change

Read it for a deep dive. Summary of the article: - The goal: To limit global temperature increases to 1.5C, net global emissions need to fall from ~50 Gt CO2e per year today to net ~0 by 2050, and get halfway there by 2030. - There are two main levers to achieve that goal: (1) Emit less CO2e into the air in the first place. (2) Remove CO2 that’s already in the air. - Lever 1: How to reduce emissions. Global emissions can be decomposed into ‘supply’ (sources of emissions, largely dirty energy) and ‘demand’ (what or who uses the supply). To effectively reduce emissions, we have to address both supply and demand, as well as how they connect to each other. We need to reduce emissions from ~50 Gt CO2e per year today, to ~10 Gt by 2050. - Lever 2: How to increase carbon removal. Carbon removal can also be decomposed into supply (the technologies that remove carbon from the air and store it somewhere) and demand (the customers that pay to remove those tons of carbon). We need to increase carbon removal from ~0 Gt CO2e per year today, to ~10 Gt by 2050.