Thank you for this astute strategic proposal. I entirely agree with your framing of stabilisation as the key agenda. How stability could be achieved raises a series of difficult political problems. Stability was the core concept used by Deng Xiao Ping to enable China’s transition to a modern market economy, on the premise that without stability nothing is possible. As such, stability appears to be anathema to the climate action movement, who want to destabilise and destroy the fossil economy in order to build a renewable economy on its ashes. Climate stabilisation requires economic stability, which requires alliances with the fossil economy. The constituencies of support for climate stabilisation are therefore to be found outside the climate action movement, and instead should be sought among large industries that face commercial risk from warming.
Where I think your framework still needs a harder political pivot is around the “non-substitution” idea. In principle, yes: we do not want stabilisation to become an excuse to abandon decarbonisation and removal. In practice, the pace of physical destabilisation this century, especially the apparent decadal doubling of darkening and the rapid worsening of Earth’s energy imbalance, does not give us the luxury of making cooling conditional on an emissions coalition that does not yet exist. The conditionality risks preserving the very polarised paralysis that is now stymying action.
A Deng-style approach suggests a different sequencing: stabilise first, then deepen reform. In his memorable phrases, "Cross the river by feeling the stones," and "Black cat, white cat, catch mice, good cat." Applied to climate, that means making cooling the primary macro-stabilisation policy, with carbon action recast as the exit strategy from cooling dependence rather than the entry ticket that blocks deployment.
So instead of “non-substitution”, I’d propose a principle of non-abandonment. Cooling cannot be contingent on accelerated decarbonisation, because that keeps stabilisation hostage to the culture war and to veto players. Removing the excess greenhouse gas burden is not abandoned, it is written into the charter as the funded pathway to reduce long-run cooling dependence, manage termination risk and address ecological stability.
This reframing does not deny the moral hazard critique. It answers it structurally, by recognising the inertia, power and wealth of the fossil economy and hardwiring the exit ramp into the institution from day one, rather than by imposing a political precondition that prevents stabilisation from ever starting.
What is needed is a stability corridor, a defined safe operating range for the climate system and the human systems that depend on it, expressed in measurable indicators with upper and lower bounds (or rate limits), plus clear trigger points for action. A commitment to keep conditions stable enough for civilisation to keep working can enable a realistic assessment of issues around substitution. A stability corridor sets measurable guardrails for climate hazards and socio-economic impacts, with published trigger points and adjustment rules. It shifts the debate from ideology to results: like Deng’s ‘black cat, white cat’ test, the only question is whether a policy ‘catches mice’ by keeping the system inside the corridor fast enough to prevent cascading instability.
Concretely, a stabilisation doctrine could look like this:
Mandate a stability corridor: define objective indicators of system risk (food price volatility, insured losses, infrastructure failure rates, heat mortality, conflict displacement, etc) and target a corridor that protects economic and social functioning.
Portfolio not binary: treat interventions as a spectrum differentiated by scope, reversibility and governance difficulty, with staged learning rather than an all-or-nothing referendum
Cross the river by feeling the stones: bounded pilots, measured outcomes, rapid iteration, scaling only as monitoring and legitimacy prove out
Build legitimacy through transparency: open monitoring, independent auditing, published adjustment rules, clear triggers and clear failure modes, international coordination to reduce unilateral panic dynamics
A capitalist stability compact: be explicit that the aim is to preserve state capacity and economic continuity while the deeper transition is sequenced. Put the natural buyers up front: insurance and reinsurance, agriculture, shipping, infrastructure finance, sovereign risk managers, coastal real estate, supply chain heavy industry
Fund the exit strategy: allocate a fixed share of stabilisation funding to carbon removal, observation systems and adaptation, with a published pathway for reducing reliance on cooling as atmospheric CO₂ is eventually drawn down
Plan an Albedo Accord modelled on the Montreal Protocol, with narrow defined technical mandate to cool the Earth with safe and effective methods
This is not a plea to “go slow” on carbon just because we like fossil fuels. It is a recognition that, politically, a rapid forced contraction of the fossil economy is currently treated as an existential threat by large parts of the capitalist system and by many voters. If stabilisation is framed as contingent on that contraction, stabilisation will likely be blocked or delayed until crisis forces chaotic action. A stabilisation program worthy of the name should be designed to avoid panic governance by building an actionable coalition now around shared interest in economic stability.
If you are open to it, I’d love to see a follow-up post that tackles this question head on: what constituency can actually carry stabilisation to scale in the real world, and what doctrine avoids making stabilisation hostage to decarbonisation polarisation while still preventing permanent dependence.
Thank you for all this detail Robert! I was unaware of the connection to Deng prior to this. I agree with much of what you wrote. I think that one of the first major obstacles is getting policy people and scientists to clearly acknowledge destabilization (or as SCRI puts it, derailment risk) is coming. A few days ago, Quico Toro wrote well on the different perspectives that are commonly held: https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/stop-pretending-climate-change-is
In Quico's terminology, people either view climate change (and risks) as either not that bad, pretty darn bad, or truly horrible. You and I are both in the "truly horrible" camp as we acknowledge the severity of catastrophic risks. Most people in the policy world are either not that bad or pretty darn bad, but that kind of perspective does not justify anything like what you or I would like to see happening.
I like your suggestion for a follow-up post, and will think on this some more. I am beginning work on a larger project to address this exact strategic question.
Paul, you continue to do some of the most thoughtful and important work around.
I very much look forward to each of your posts and after some reflection I will respond as you requested in some detail.
In the meantime since you mentioned seabed curtains and ecosystem restoration
here are two conversations I recently moderated on these important subjects.
The first is on the audacious effort to research the possibility of erecting a seabed curtain to slow the melting of the so-called Thwaites Doomsday Glacier.
One of our speakers Dr David Holland of NYU spoke directly from deck of the research vessel off the coast of Antarctica!
This next video is a conversation with the co-authors of “ Cooling the Climate, How to Revive the biosphere and cool the Earth within 20 years “ a book that makes the case that large scale ecosystem preservation and restoration could directly cool the climate particularly if focused in the Amazon.
Thank so much Herb! And thank you for sharing the seabed curtain discussion, I look forward to watching that. How to save the ice sheets is what got me interested in climate interventions beyond CDR in the first place.
that we need stabilisation would require to admit we made some false assumption about social tipping or scale or something else. And it is like thinking about loss or death, we are just bad in it.
Dear Paul,
Thank you for this astute strategic proposal. I entirely agree with your framing of stabilisation as the key agenda. How stability could be achieved raises a series of difficult political problems. Stability was the core concept used by Deng Xiao Ping to enable China’s transition to a modern market economy, on the premise that without stability nothing is possible. As such, stability appears to be anathema to the climate action movement, who want to destabilise and destroy the fossil economy in order to build a renewable economy on its ashes. Climate stabilisation requires economic stability, which requires alliances with the fossil economy. The constituencies of support for climate stabilisation are therefore to be found outside the climate action movement, and instead should be sought among large industries that face commercial risk from warming.
Where I think your framework still needs a harder political pivot is around the “non-substitution” idea. In principle, yes: we do not want stabilisation to become an excuse to abandon decarbonisation and removal. In practice, the pace of physical destabilisation this century, especially the apparent decadal doubling of darkening and the rapid worsening of Earth’s energy imbalance, does not give us the luxury of making cooling conditional on an emissions coalition that does not yet exist. The conditionality risks preserving the very polarised paralysis that is now stymying action.
A Deng-style approach suggests a different sequencing: stabilise first, then deepen reform. In his memorable phrases, "Cross the river by feeling the stones," and "Black cat, white cat, catch mice, good cat." Applied to climate, that means making cooling the primary macro-stabilisation policy, with carbon action recast as the exit strategy from cooling dependence rather than the entry ticket that blocks deployment.
So instead of “non-substitution”, I’d propose a principle of non-abandonment. Cooling cannot be contingent on accelerated decarbonisation, because that keeps stabilisation hostage to the culture war and to veto players. Removing the excess greenhouse gas burden is not abandoned, it is written into the charter as the funded pathway to reduce long-run cooling dependence, manage termination risk and address ecological stability.
This reframing does not deny the moral hazard critique. It answers it structurally, by recognising the inertia, power and wealth of the fossil economy and hardwiring the exit ramp into the institution from day one, rather than by imposing a political precondition that prevents stabilisation from ever starting.
What is needed is a stability corridor, a defined safe operating range for the climate system and the human systems that depend on it, expressed in measurable indicators with upper and lower bounds (or rate limits), plus clear trigger points for action. A commitment to keep conditions stable enough for civilisation to keep working can enable a realistic assessment of issues around substitution. A stability corridor sets measurable guardrails for climate hazards and socio-economic impacts, with published trigger points and adjustment rules. It shifts the debate from ideology to results: like Deng’s ‘black cat, white cat’ test, the only question is whether a policy ‘catches mice’ by keeping the system inside the corridor fast enough to prevent cascading instability.
Concretely, a stabilisation doctrine could look like this:
Mandate a stability corridor: define objective indicators of system risk (food price volatility, insured losses, infrastructure failure rates, heat mortality, conflict displacement, etc) and target a corridor that protects economic and social functioning.
Portfolio not binary: treat interventions as a spectrum differentiated by scope, reversibility and governance difficulty, with staged learning rather than an all-or-nothing referendum
Cross the river by feeling the stones: bounded pilots, measured outcomes, rapid iteration, scaling only as monitoring and legitimacy prove out
Build legitimacy through transparency: open monitoring, independent auditing, published adjustment rules, clear triggers and clear failure modes, international coordination to reduce unilateral panic dynamics
A capitalist stability compact: be explicit that the aim is to preserve state capacity and economic continuity while the deeper transition is sequenced. Put the natural buyers up front: insurance and reinsurance, agriculture, shipping, infrastructure finance, sovereign risk managers, coastal real estate, supply chain heavy industry
Fund the exit strategy: allocate a fixed share of stabilisation funding to carbon removal, observation systems and adaptation, with a published pathway for reducing reliance on cooling as atmospheric CO₂ is eventually drawn down
Plan an Albedo Accord modelled on the Montreal Protocol, with narrow defined technical mandate to cool the Earth with safe and effective methods
This is not a plea to “go slow” on carbon just because we like fossil fuels. It is a recognition that, politically, a rapid forced contraction of the fossil economy is currently treated as an existential threat by large parts of the capitalist system and by many voters. If stabilisation is framed as contingent on that contraction, stabilisation will likely be blocked or delayed until crisis forces chaotic action. A stabilisation program worthy of the name should be designed to avoid panic governance by building an actionable coalition now around shared interest in economic stability.
If you are open to it, I’d love to see a follow-up post that tackles this question head on: what constituency can actually carry stabilisation to scale in the real world, and what doctrine avoids making stabilisation hostage to decarbonisation polarisation while still preventing permanent dependence.
Thank you for all this detail Robert! I was unaware of the connection to Deng prior to this. I agree with much of what you wrote. I think that one of the first major obstacles is getting policy people and scientists to clearly acknowledge destabilization (or as SCRI puts it, derailment risk) is coming. A few days ago, Quico Toro wrote well on the different perspectives that are commonly held: https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/stop-pretending-climate-change-is
In Quico's terminology, people either view climate change (and risks) as either not that bad, pretty darn bad, or truly horrible. You and I are both in the "truly horrible" camp as we acknowledge the severity of catastrophic risks. Most people in the policy world are either not that bad or pretty darn bad, but that kind of perspective does not justify anything like what you or I would like to see happening.
I like your suggestion for a follow-up post, and will think on this some more. I am beginning work on a larger project to address this exact strategic question.
Paul, you continue to do some of the most thoughtful and important work around.
I very much look forward to each of your posts and after some reflection I will respond as you requested in some detail.
In the meantime since you mentioned seabed curtains and ecosystem restoration
here are two conversations I recently moderated on these important subjects.
The first is on the audacious effort to research the possibility of erecting a seabed curtain to slow the melting of the so-called Thwaites Doomsday Glacier.
One of our speakers Dr David Holland of NYU spoke directly from deck of the research vessel off the coast of Antarctica!
https://youtu.be/SasKEzVkk7A?si=YKx9BKT3qkVxbJXJ
This next video is a conversation with the co-authors of “ Cooling the Climate, How to Revive the biosphere and cool the Earth within 20 years “ a book that makes the case that large scale ecosystem preservation and restoration could directly cool the climate particularly if focused in the Amazon.
https://youtu.be/Co7eigqN2d8?si=IhfawpmIF9X5NLT5
Thank so much Herb! And thank you for sharing the seabed curtain discussion, I look forward to watching that. How to save the ice sheets is what got me interested in climate interventions beyond CDR in the first place.
great read
that we need stabilisation would require to admit we made some false assumption about social tipping or scale or something else. And it is like thinking about loss or death, we are just bad in it.