Last week, I presented at CDR30’s session on “The Global Heating Emergency: What’s the Plan?” The event brought together the carbon removal community during COP30 to discuss the dramatic acceleration of global temperatures and what an integrated climate response actually requires. My presentation synthesizes much of what I’ve been writing about here—the timeline collapse we’re facing, the reality that the planet is already too hot, and what that means for our climate response toolkit.
The core argument is straightforward: carbon removal is absolutely the long-term solution. The IPCC projects we need 10 billion tonnes removed annually by 2050. I’d argue our goal should really be more like 60 billion tonnes removed every year, but even 10 billion is going to be an astronomical lift. And it has to happen one way or another, because there is no substitute for actually drawing down atmospheric CO₂ if we want to solve this permanently.
But the math doesn’t work. Carbon removal won’t scale fast enough to prevent us from crossing critical tipping points. Today we’re removing single-digit millions of tonnes. Even in optimistic scenarios, meaningful temperature reduction from CDR is a next-century solution, and the tipping points—AMOC collapse, permafrost methane release, coral reef systems—aren’t waiting that long.
Which means we’re going to have to cool the planet down while we scale up removal and drive down emissions. The question isn’t whether we’ll intervene to lower temperatures. The question is whether we’ll do it through deliberate choices made via rigorous democratic governance processes, or whether we’ll do it in desperation after crossing points of no return.
I’m not saying deploy stratospheric aerosol injection tomorrow. I’m saying that accepting “one method has problems, so let’s give up” is not a satisfactory outcome. If SAI proves unfeasible due to governance challenges or unacceptable side effects, then we find other approaches—marine cloud brightening, methane destruction, cirrus cloud thinning, approaches we haven’t thought of yet. We keep looking until we find solutions that manage the tradeoffs, minimize harm, and actually work geopolitically. The physics doesn’t care about our governance challenges. The tipping points don’t wait for us to achieve political consensus.
Carbon removal remains essential—it’s the only permanent solution, the only way to address ocean acidification, the only path that lets us eventually scale back cooling interventions. But in the meantime, we have to figure out how to bring the temperature down. Not as a replacement for emissions cuts and removal, but as a bridge that buys time for those solutions to reach the scale we desperately need.
The presentation walks through this logic: why we’re using the wrong mental model when we focus on annual emissions instead of temperature, why tipping points demand faster action than CDR can provide, and why the carbon removal community is uniquely positioned to advocate for cooling research and governance development.
If you missed the live session, this captures the core argument I’ve been building toward over the past year of writing here.
