We've Overshot—What Now?

This will be an account of where we stand—mostly with regard to the new and much-touted United Nations report on climate change. But since it’s the day after Labor Day, traditionally the start of fall campaigning (a quaint and lovely notion that), let’s start with the midterm elections. Where we stand is: All the polling shows Americans ready to vote out as many Republicans as gerrymandering allows. We’ve done our job over the last 22 months, driving up President Donald Trump’s negatives (with plenty of help from him) and making MAGA electoral poison.

Now we have to turn that into facts on the ground, with votes, and wins, and actually putting good people in Congress where they can begin to staunch a bit of the damage. Which means the next 56 days need to be real, practical effort. This newsletter may be a little unpredictable in its timing, because I’m going to be on the road in swing states, helping Third Act and GrayPac in close races; you can help too, by signing up to phone bank or door knock or fundraise or the other chores that add up to electoral success (and this time around, I fear you need to sign up for “election protection” chores as well, something that shouldn’t be necessary but is). If for some reason you’re finding yourself in need of words from me, you’ll be able to hear me helping out the wonderful Ayana Johnson at her podcast all fall—it’s a season totally focused on climate and the midterms, and it begins tomorrow when we talk with Leah Stokes. (I’ll send a special email in the morning, with the link).

And now on to the major climate news of the moment, which is the report from the UN detailing the fact that we’re not going to hit the 1.5°C climate target we set in Paris. I assume that this came as shocking news to exactly no one who reads this newsletter regularly; it was clear even in Paris that it represented a target that only a combination of extremely aggressive national policies and lots of scientific luck could hit, and it’s been very clear for years that we’ve been blessed with neither. I think it is very likely that we’re going to temporarily cross the 2°C line during the hottest phase of the now-developing El Niño (by some measurements now on track to be the strongest in a millennium), and as I’ve been writing for a long time, our current trajectory is taking us toward 3°C, and quite possibly higher.

The term we’ve been using for this condition is “overshoot,” and so indeed we’ve overshot the 1.5°C target. But in fact we’ve been in “overshoot” for decades now. In 2008 I helped start 350.org, which took its name from the carbon dioxide concentration—350 parts per million—scientists said was the upper limit for any kind of safety. We passed that in the spring of... 1986, which by my back-of-the-envelope calculation would be… 40 years ago.

Remember—every tenth of a degree that the temperature goes up moves 140 million people into a more dangerous climate zone.

The danger with reports like this new one from the UN is that they may shock some people into thinking we’re living in a suddenly different world with suddenly different requirements. Chico Harlan wrote a perfectly fine piece about the UN document for the Times, but he was ill-served by whoever furnished the headline:

"Climate Goals Missed, U.N. Says World Must Now Remove Carbon at Scale."

There are two problems with that formulation, and one is that it misses the thrust of the UN recommendations. As the aforementioned Ayana Johnson points out, in the most cogent summary of the document I’ve read:

CDR (planting trees + some much higher tech stuff that’s not yet proven at scale) is a big focus of this report, but UNEP is very clear that it’s not a silver bullet. And it’s certainly not a get out of jail free card for continuing to burn fossil fuels. In their words:

“Overall, even optimistic CDR scaling is unlikely to deliver a temperature reversal beyond a few tenths of a degree this century. This emphasizes the importance of focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions now.”

And the reason that the UN is clear that it’s not a silver bullet is that “Now,” to use the word from the NYT headline, we have no idea how to do it at scale. I mean, the Netherlands yesterday announced that it had opened the “largest carbon capture facility” in Europe. Here’s how the company involved put it in a press release:

Yara Sluiskil, Europe’s largest ammonia and fertilizer plant can capture and liquefy up to 800,000 tons of CO2 annually from ammonia production thereby avoiding carbon taxation on these volumes. The CO2 will be transported by ship to Norway, where it will be permanently stored beneath the seabed by Northern Lights.

Important to note the “up to 800,000 tons,” because so far these systems have had abysmal success in meeting even their own Lilliputian goals. And for context, Europe produces 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually, and that in turn is about 6%of the world’s total, so this is a hair on a mole on the quite ugly backside of the world’s hydrocarbon system. So far, the main use of this technology is precisely to allow us to go on burning fossil fuels. As the Yara press release continued, in the measured tones of those who don’t want to quite blow their own cover:

The technology makes it possible to reduce emissions from energy intensive industries like fertilizers, ammonia, cement, and waste management while maintaining production, jobs, and value creation in Europe.

It is entirely prudent to keep researching and testing carbon capture technology—someday it may be part of the solution to the greatest problem humanity has ever faced. But as for “Now,” well, there is actually one thing we do know how to do, and that is build out lots of cheap solar, wind, and batteries. Doing this makes sense because it can displace fossil fuels (solar-heavy California is using 50% less natural gas than it was three years ago to produce electricity), and because it’s cheaper than the alternative, and because you don’t have to go to war to procure sunshine, and because wind turbines don’t fill your lungs with particulates. As the UN points out, there’s simply no way around it—net zero may be politically controversial, but it’s physically required, “an essential milestone that cannot be skipped.”

Indeed, as the UN points out:

Accelerating the renewable energy revolution is crucial. On the supply side, limited-overshoot scenarios suggest scaling renewables to 60-70% of global electricity generation by 2030, supported by grid expansion, storage, and demand flexibility

We’re already doing this to some extent, of course—a far far greater extent than we’re scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere. But we could be doing it far faster—the Chinese are closing down solar factories to raise the price of the panels, and a new study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis finds that India is using less than half of its solar-panel factory capacity.

It is therefore entirely possible to imagine a worldwide campaign, led by the UN, to double or triple the pace at which we’re putting up solar panels around the world, and coupling them with the wind turbines and batteries that make them fully functional in every season. This is in fact the one thing we could actually be doing at scale and right now that really responds to the numbers about climate overshoot. It is why we’re busy preparing for Sun Day next summer.

Even that doesn’t “solve” the problem—nothing “solves” the problem—but it would reduce the ultimate temperature we are going to hit on this planet, and it would reduce the eventual amount of carbon some future people are going to have to figure out how to pull out of the sky. Remember—every tenth of a degree that the temperature goes up moves 140 million people into a more dangerous climate zone.

Building clean energy is much more likely, and much more effective, if we’re also shutting down dirty energy. The UN, under Antonio Guterres, has been consistently and powerfully calling out banks and other investors for continuing to fund fossil fuel projects, and the new report is no exception. Again, Johnson highlights the key paragraph:

Avoiding carbon lock-in in infrastructure is central to this effort. Investments in long-lived, high-emission infrastructure, such as fossil-based power plants, transport systems, and industrial facilities, can constrain future emissions reductions and lock countries into high-carbon trajectories (Seto et al. 2016; Smith et al. 2019a). Existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure alone could exceed the CO2 emissions consistent with 1.5°C in 2030 by 120%.

The possibilities were tantalizingly displayed in China this summer, where new data shows CO2 emissions fell 1%. As Lauri Myllyvirta pointed out:

The country’s use of oil fell by 9% overall and by 16% for transport, after the disruptions to supply from the Gulf through the strait.

But it could have been far better. As the Centre for Energy on Research and Clean Air documented last week, China has built a lot of coal power for backup, but too often they’re using it instead of the clean energy they’ve built in such abundance:

Estimated wind and solar curtailment, including both reported and unreported curtailment, reached 360 TWh in H1 2026, up 49% year-on-year. Had this electricity been absorbed, the additional power supply could have met all demand growth and allowed coal power generation to fall.

The problem in China is long-term contracts that continue to reserve a “substantial share of limited electricity demand for coal.” They’re protecting the industry, at the cost of the climate, something that should be highly familiar to Americans, because under Trump we’re subsidizing ancient coal plants instead of shutting them down, and even, as of this summer, spending big to build new ones.

And all of this brings us inextricably back to where this essay began, which is with politics. If the US is to play any kind of role (except as obstacle) in this transformation, it begins with resetting the politics around energy and climate. And that begins with the upcoming elections.

A Democratic Congress will not be able to pass important new climate programs—those would be blocked by the Trump White House. But it might be able to use its oversight and budget authority to blunt the worst of the administration’s attack on clean energy. And if the Democrats start to stabilize the country, then they can turn their attention to the next election—one where energy and climate will need to play a central role, because among other things “affordability” is a dead letter without addressing them.

Which is why the next eight weeks (precisely) are so crucial. We’ve overshot—and not just in terms of climate. We need to start reining the horrors back in, so we can go to work not on solving them but at least on keeping them from destroying all that we’ve inherited. I hope you’ll figure out ways to join me in helping make November 3 the most useful day of the last few years. Usefulness may not be sexy, but it’s what we’ve got.