The Overshoot Age: We've Already Crossed the Line — Now What?

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In 2024, global temperatures exceeded the 1.5-degree Celsius Paris Agreement threshold for the first time as a full calendar year average. The line humanity spent three decades racing toward is now in the rearview mirror. Scientists call what comes next the overshoot age — and it demands a completely different conversation.

In this episode, hosts Michelle Bruecher and Scott Bleakley explore:

• Why "exceed and decline" has replaced the old single-target paradigm — and why the path down is fundamentally different from the path up
• The irreversibility problem: why cooling a graveyard isn't the same as preventing one
• Six roadblocks to corporate net zero, drawn from practitioners who've deployed over a billion dollars in climate capital — including the SBTI's delisting of $4 trillion in companies and the Scope 3 accounting crisis
• Why the carbon removal industry — the declared safety net for the decline phase — is going broke in a free market that refuses to pay for an averted crisis
• The BECCS land use paradox: the most widely modeled carbon removal solution requires land the size of India, almost certainly overlapping indigenous territories in the Global South

References:

Climate u-turn? What happens if we exceed 1.5°C and then go back

Implications of overshoot for climate mitigation strategies

Living in the overshoot age

The hard road back from overshoot

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:25

This is Heliox, where evidence meets empathy. Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Speaker 2: 0:49

I want you to imagine for just a moment a line drawn in the sand.

Speaker 1: 0:54

Right.

Speaker 2: 0:54

A very specific, you know, very famous line. You've probably been hearing about this exact line for a decade now.

Speaker 1: 0:59

At least a decade. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:01

And it's the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. You know, the Paris Agreement's ultimate defining guardrail for global warming.

Speaker 1: 1:07

A big one.

Speaker 2: 1:08

The big one. For years, the message to you, to me, to, well, the entire world has been incredibly simple and incredibly binary. Do not cross that line.

Speaker 1: 1:18

Exactly. It was the ultimate boundary.

Speaker 2: 1:21

Right. And in fact, on July 23rd, 2025, the International Court of Justice even ruled that striving for this 1.5 degree target is, well, it's legally binding.

Speaker 1: 1:31

Which was a massive deal.

Speaker 2: 1:32

Huge deal. So there is this immense global, legal, and moral weight resting right on that line in the sand. You picture that line.

Speaker 1: 1:41

I see it.

Speaker 2: 1:43

Now, I want you to imagine the collective shock when you look down and realize our footprints are already on the other side of it.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Yeah. Well, it's a profound psychological shift. I mean, the entire architecture of global climate policy, of corporate sustainability, international diplomacy, all of it was built around the absolute necessity of not crossing that boundary.

Speaker 2: 2:05

Right. It was the finish line. Exactly.

Speaker 1: 2:06

The finish line we were all supposed to be sprinting toward. Well, sprinting to stop just short of, really.

Speaker 2: 2:11

Yeah. But if you look at the data coming out of the scientific community right now, the consensus is hardening. That line we weren't supposed to cross, the data suggests we may have already crossed it back in 2024.

Speaker 1: 2:23

Which is just staggering. I mean, the 1.5 degree threshold is no longer a boundary ahead of us. It is firmly in the rearview mirror. It's behind us. It is. We are officially entering what the scientific community calls the overshoot age. And the discourse, you know, it has to violently shift from prevention, which has been the sole focus for 30 years, to something much more complex.

Speaker 2: 2:44

Which is what exactly?

Speaker 1: 2:45

Well, how do we manage the reality of living beyond the limit? And more importantly, how do we eventually pull the global temperature back down?

Speaker 2: 2:53

And that right there is the core mission for our deep dive today. We're going to explore this pretty unsettling reality.

Speaker 1: 3:03

Yeah, we have to.

Speaker 2: 3:04

We need to unpack what it actually means to live in this overshoot age and then untangle the very messy, you know, real world corporate and technological roadblocks that are actively preventing us from fixing it.

Speaker 1: 3:18

And we have some incredible source material to help us do that today.

Speaker 2: 3:20

We do. We're pulling from a massive stack of sources. We've got cutting-edge scientific articles from Nature Climate Change, a recent piece from Scientific American, some deep industry analysis from MIT Technology Review, plus a fascinating lecture from the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change by Andy Reisinger.

Speaker 1: 3:38

And we also have insights from actual practitioners, you know, people on the front lines of corporate net zero strategy.

Speaker 2: 3:43

Right. And, you know, what becomes immediately apparent when you synthesize all these sources is that overshoot completely shatters the old paradigm.

Speaker 1: 3:50

Completely. I mean, it's not a cliff we fall off and the world just ends. It's an urgent, highly complex management problem.

Speaker 2: 3:57

Let's try to visualize this concept of overshoot, because I think it can feel a bit abstract when we just throw numbers around.

Speaker 1: 4:04

Sure. Analogies help here.

Speaker 2: 4:06

Think about it like this. Imagine you're standing in a room with a glass ceiling, and that glass ceiling is the 1.5-degree threshold.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Okay, I'm picturing it.

Speaker 2: 4:17

You take a baseball, and you hurl it straight up. Overshoot isn't the ball just tapping the glass and resting there. Overshoot is the ball shattering the glass ceiling, continuing up into the air above it for, well, an unknown amount of time. And then eventually, gravity pulls it back down through the exact hole it made.

Speaker 1: 4:36

That's a great way to look at it.

Speaker 2: 4:37

So the critical questions for us and for the planet are, you know, how high does that ball go? How long does it stay up there above the glass?

Speaker 1: 4:45

And most importantly, what permanent damage is left behind in the room once the ball finally comes back down?

Speaker 2: 4:49

Exactly. All the broken glass.

Speaker 1: 4:51

Right. The glass ceiling analogy captures the trajectory perfectly, but we really need to focus on those shards of glass left behind. Because overshoot isn't a failure to just, you know, throw our hands up and surrender to.

Speaker 2: 5:03

We can't just give up.

Speaker 1: 5:04

No. We have to unpack the physical mechanics of exceeding 1.5 degrees and understand why the path down is fundamentally different from the path up.

Speaker 2: 5:13

And then we need to dissect the corporate world, right? Yes.

Speaker 1: 5:16

Why are these massive net zero efforts stalling out just when we need them the most? We'll look at the crumbling economics of carbon removal, which are the very technologies meant to pull that ball back down.

Speaker 2: 5:28

And finally, we're going to explore the profound socioeconomic tradeoffs waiting for us in this new, totally uncharted era.

Speaker 1: 5:35

It's a huge roadmap.

Speaker 2: 5:36

It is, but it's arguably the most important conversation happening on the planet right now. So let's start with the physical reality, the mechanics of the overshoot.

Speaker 1: 5:45

Let's do it.

Speaker 2: 5:45

You mentioned earlier that the paradigm has shifted. If the goal isn't just stop the warming anymore, what exactly is the new goal?

Speaker 1: 5:53

Well, the new goal is defined by two distinct phases of the overshoot. We call them exceed and decline.

Speaker 2: 6:00

Exceed and decline.

Speaker 1: 6:01

Because we are crossing the threshold, the objective function of global climate policy changes from a single target to a curve.

Speaker 2: 6:08

Right, because we're already past the single target.

Speaker 1: 6:11

Exactly. So now it's about limiting the magnitude of the overshoot, meaning how hot it gets at the absolute peak and the duration.

Speaker 2: 6:20

Duration being how long it stays up there.

Speaker 1: 6:22

Right. How long the temperature stays elevated before we can force it back down.

Speaker 2: 6:25

So magnitude and duration, how high the ball goes and how long it hangs in the air.

Speaker 1: 6:30

Yeah. And to grasp the sheer momentum behind that ball, I want to bring in a brilliant visualization from that CMCC lecture by Andy Reisinger.

Speaker 2: 6:38

Oh, yes. The former vice chair of the IPCC's Working Group 3.

Speaker 1: 6:41

That's him. He asks us to imagine that we are driving on a highway.

Speaker 2: 6:46

Okay, I'm behind the wheel. I'm driving.

Speaker 1: 6:48

You're driving, and you just blew right past the exit sign for 1.5 degrees Celsius. It's gone.

Speaker 2: 6:53

Completely in the rearview mirror.

Speaker 1: 6:54

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:55

But Reisinger emphasizes that missing that exit doesn't mean the steering wheel is locked and the brakes are cut. We are not trapped on this highway forever.

Speaker 1: 7:04

Okay, so there are other exits. We just have to take the very next one possible.

Speaker 2: 7:08

Exactly. The exits for 1.6 degrees, 1.7 degrees, and 1.8 degrees are rapidly approaching. Right. But here is the terrifying metric he points out. Because global emissions are still rising, we are still accelerating. Those subsequent exits are coming at us faster and faster. Because we're speeding up. Right. And Reisinger calculates that every five-year delay in coordinated global action adds about 0.1 degrees Celsius of global warming.

Speaker 1: 7:35

I just let that sink in for a second. Every five years is a tenth of a degree. Yeah. That sounds small. But in planetary terms, a tenth of a degree is a massive, massive amount of kinetic energy.

Speaker 2: 7:45

It is an incomprehensible amount of trapped heat. I mean, to put that into perspective, the effort required today to take the exit for 1.7 degrees is the exact same transformational economy-breaking effort that taking the 1.5 degree exit would have required back in 2018.

Speaker 1: 8:00

We have burned through our buffer completely. If we want to limit the overshoot to 1.7, we have to peak global greenhouse gas emissions immediately, reach net zero by mid-century, and then actively deploy net negative emissions to initiate that decline phase.

Speaker 2: 8:17

All right. I'm following the math, but I'm going to push back here a little bit on behalf of everyone listening.

Speaker 1: 8:21

Sure.

Speaker 2: 8:21

Because if I'm hearing this, I might be thinking, okay, we missed 1.5. We take the 1.7 or 1.8 exit.

Speaker 1: 8:26

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:27

But you just said we're going to use net negative emissions to pull the temperature back down later.

Speaker 1: 8:31

Right. That's the plan.

Speaker 2: 8:32

We're going to invent technologies to suck the carbon out of the sky. So if we possess the technology to eventually bring the temperature back down to 1.5 degrees, why are we panicking? Isn't this just like, I don't know, turning down the thermostat in your house after accidentally leaving the heat on for too long? It gets a bit sweaty. You bump the dial down. And in an hour, the room is perfectly fine again.

Speaker 1: 8:54

Yeah. The thermostat analogy is incredibly tempting. It really is. It suggests a world that is perfectly elastic, where actions can be neatly undone.

Speaker 2: 9:04

Right. Just flip the switch.

Speaker 1: 9:05

But the Earth is not a living room. And dismantling that thermostat analogy is absolutely critical to understanding the true danger of the overshoot age. The path up the temperature scale and the path down are not mirror images.

Speaker 2: 9:20

But mathematically, if it gets 0.2 degrees hotter, and then we remove enough carbon to make it 0.2 degrees cooler, Don't we end up exactly where we started? I mean, the global average temperature is the same.

Speaker 1: 9:31

The global average number on a thermometer might be the same, but the physical reality of the Earth? Absolutely not.

Speaker 2: 9:37

How so?

Speaker 1: 9:38

This brings us to the concept of irreversibility. In the sources we're reviewing, specifically that nature climate change feature, they speak with Christopher Tresos.

Speaker 2: 9:47

Right, the biodiversity expert.

Speaker 1: 9:49

Yes, he's the director of the Climate Risk Lab, and he makes a devastating point. A return of global temperatures does not equate to a recovery of the Earth's systems.

Speaker 2: 9:58

Because the heat actually breaks things while it's up there.

Speaker 1: 10:00

Exactly. Think about what happens biologically when an ecosystem is pushed beyond its thermal limits. Let's look at a coral reef or a specific type of alpine forest or the Arctic permafrost. If the temperature overshoots to 1.7 degrees and it stays there for 30 years before we manage to cool the planet back down, What occurs during those three decades?

Speaker 2: 10:24

Well, the reef bleaches and turns to rubble. The alpine forest burns, or I guess gets decimated by invasive beetles that can suddenly survive the warmer winters. The permafrost thaws and collapses.

Speaker 1: 10:36

Exactly. And Tresos points out that if a keystone species goes extinct during that peak warming period, it simply doesn't reappear when the world eventually cools off.

Speaker 2: 10:45

Right. Extinct species do not respawn just because the global thermostat clicks back to 1.5.

Speaker 1: 10:50

No, they don't. If a complex marine food web collapses because the ocean acidified too much during the overshoot, dialing back the temperature will not spontaneously bring that web back to life. It is an irreversible loss. You can cool the ocean down, sure, but you're cooling down a graveyard.

Speaker 2: 11:05

That is wow. So going back to my glass ceiling analogy, when the ball finally falls back down through the ceiling, the room isn't the same.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Not at all.

Speaker 2: 11:15

There's shattered glass everywhere. Things have been crushed. You know, the antique vase on the table is in pieces. You can hold the ball again, but the room is fundamentally altered.

Speaker 1: 11:25

That's it. Exactly. And the data actually takes that a step further. Carl Friedrich Schlissner, a senior research scientist quoted in The Nature Future, he states plainly that we are permanently leaving the first best world behind.

Speaker 2: 11:40

The first best world.

Speaker 1: 11:41

The world where we avoided the overshoot altogether. We are now moving into a second or third best world where we must manage the permanent accumulated damages of our insufficient actions.

Speaker 2: 11:53

Because we carry the damage forward.

Speaker 1: 11:54

Right. We can't slide back down the curve and pretend the peak never happened.

Speaker 2: 11:58

Which means the urgency isn't gone just because we missed the goal. The urgency is actually exponentially higher because every tenth of a degree higher we go and every single year we stay up there triggers more of these irreversible shatterings.

Speaker 1: 12:11

That is the absolute core of the management problem. The longer we delay, the more permanent the scarring, which brings us to the monumental task of actually pulling that temperature back down, the decline phase.

Speaker 2: 12:23

Right. Because if bringing the temperature down is an existential imperative to stop these ecosystems from permanently dying off. Right. Well, it requires the entire global economy to drastically change its behavior. We have to hit net zero emissions where we aren't adding any more carbon than we are taking out. And then we have to go net negative. I think we're going to look at the massive multinational companies that drive the global economy. How are they actually doing on this front?

Speaker 1: 12:46

Well, according to an incredibly detailed article in Nature titled Six Roadblocks to Net Zero, the short answer is we are stalling out.

Speaker 2: 12:55

Stalling out.

Speaker 1: 12:56

Yeah. Despite thousands of glossy corporate pledges and press releases, the actual mechanical progress of corporate decarbonization is hitting massive systemic speed bumps.

Speaker 2: 13:07

Why is that?

Speaker 1: 13:08

And what's fascinating here is that it's not simply because companies are, you know, mustache-twirling villains trying to pollute as much as possible. Often it's because the regulatory and standard-setting frameworks we've created to police them are practically paralyzing them.

Speaker 2: 13:24

Okay, we really need to dive into these roadblocks. The nature piece outlines them beautifully, and what I appreciate is that they are written by practitioners.

Speaker 1: 13:33

Right, people who actually do this for a living.

Speaker 2: 13:35

Exactly. People who have actually deployed over a billion dollars in climate capital and worked on these corporate strategies from the inside. They aren't just academics theorizing in a vacuum. They are in the boardrooms.

Speaker 1: 13:46

Yeah, their perspective is crucial.

Speaker 2: 13:48

So the first major roadblock they identify is this concept of perfection over progress.

Speaker 1: 13:55

This is a classic catastrophic case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. The authors highlight how overly precise, incredibly rigid standards are being introduced way too early in the market's development. Too early. Yeah. And instead of forcing companies to do better, these standards are causing companies to freeze up, legally panic, or just abandon their goals altogether.

Speaker 2: 14:17

Now, before we tear into these standard-setting bodies, I want to play devil's advocate for a second.

Speaker 1: 14:22

Go for it.

Speaker 2: 14:22

Because I know why these strict rules exist. Over the past decade, we saw an absolute explosion of greenwashing.

Speaker 1: 14:29

Oh, rambant greenwashing.

Speaker 2: 14:31

A company would buy some incredibly cheap, unverified carbon offsets, like, you know, paying a few bucks to theoretically protect a patch of forest that wasn't actually in danger of being cut down anyway.

Speaker 1: 14:43

Right. Phantom offsets.

Speaker 2: 14:45

Yeah. And then they'd slap a big green carbon neutral leaf on their packaging while continuing to spew toxins. So the strict standards were a necessary immune response to that fraud, right?

Speaker 1: 14:54

Absolutely. The intent behind strict standards is vital, right? to ensure that a claim of net zero actually means a measurable physical reduction of carbon in the atmosphere.

Speaker 2: 15:04

Makes sense.

Speaker 1: 15:04

And the most prominent body enforcing this is the Science-Based Targets Initiative, or SBTI. They basically became the gold standard for corporate climate goals. They function almost like a Supreme Court for corporate emissions.

Speaker 2: 15:16

Okay, so what's the problem?

Speaker 1: 15:18

Well, the nature authors argue that the pendulum has swung so far toward accounting purity that it has severed ties with how markets actually function and scale.

Speaker 2: 15:26

There was a specific data point in the text that blew my mind. The SBTI recently delisted nearly 240 companies.

Speaker 1: 15:34

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:34

They just kicked them off the compliance list. And these weren't little mom and pop shops failing to do their paperwork. These companies represented over $4 trillion in market capitalization.

Speaker 1: 15:46

$4 trillion. I mean, that is a massive structural chunk of the global economy.

Speaker 2: 15:52

And they were delisted because they couldn't meet highly stringent, complex criteria for the corporate net zero standard.

Speaker 1: 15:59

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 16:00

The authors of the paper pointed out that some of these companies were deeply frustrated, claiming they weren't even aware the deadlines for these hyper-specific, constantly evolving criteria were approaching so fast.

Speaker 1: 16:11

To moving target.

Speaker 2: 16:12

It's like, imagine you have a toddler and you want them to learn to run a marathon.

Speaker 1: 16:16

Okay.

Speaker 2: 16:17

But instead of letting them stumble around the living room, you know, pull themselves up on the couch and learn to walk at their own pace, you demand they run a perfect six-minute mile on day one. And when they stumble, you punish them, you kick them out of the house, and tell the whole neighborhood they're a failure. As a result, the toddler just sits down and refuses to walk at all.

Speaker 1: 16:38

That's a brutal analogy, but it's very accurate. The authors draw a historical parallel here that makes this exact point, looking back at the early days of renewable energy.

Speaker 2: 16:48

Oh yeah, the 2010s.

Speaker 1: 16:50

Back then, if a corporation wanted to support green energy, they bought what were called unbundled renewable energy credits, or RECs.

Speaker 2: 16:58

Right. How did those work exactly?

Speaker 1: 17:00

Essentially, a wind farm in Texas would generate megawatt hours of clean electricity and put it on the local grid. They would also generate a credit for the green attribute of that power. A tech company in California could buy that credit and claim they were powered by wind, even though the actual electrons flowing into their California servers were still coming from a local natural gas plant.

Speaker 2: 17:22

Right, which sounds a bit like a loophole. I mean, the wind power wasn't actually powering their building.

Speaker 1: 17:26

Under today's hyper strict standards, those old unbundled RECs are heavily criticized. They weren't perfect. They didn't have total geographic or temporal matching. But. But, and this is the vital point the nature authors make, that imperfect, slightly messy action is exactly what successfully kickstarted the wind and solar market.

Speaker 2: 17:46

Because it moved money.

Speaker 1: 17:47

Yes, it got the ball rolling. Corporate buyers injected massive amounts of capital into developers. They learned, they iterated, and the market scaled up, driving down the cost of renewables by 70%. Wow. If we had demanded absolute perfect localized accounting from day one of the solar industry, it might never have gotten off the ground.

Speaker 2: 18:07

So by demanding perfect net zero accounting today, we are killing the momentum. We're starving the infant industry before it can walk.

Speaker 1: 18:15

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 18:16

Okay, that leads into the second major roadblock the authors identify, which they call the scope three distraction. And this one sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare.

Speaker 1: 18:24

Oh, it really is. To understand the magnitude of this distraction, we need to define the scopes of emissions as laid out by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Scope 1 and Scope 2 are a company's direct emissions.

Speaker 2: 18:37

The stuff they actually have their hands on.

Speaker 1: 18:39

Right. The physical exhaust from the delivery trucks they own and operate. The natural gas burned in their own on-site furnaces. The electricity they purchase from the utility to keep the lights on in their headquarters.

Speaker 2: 18:50

Stuff they actually have the power to change.

Speaker 1: 18:52

Yes. They can purchase electric trucks. They can install solar panels on their factory roof. It's quantifiable and it's controllable.

Speaker 2: 19:00

Right. But then there's scope three.

Speaker 1: 19:02

Scope three encompasses indirect value chain emissions. This includes the emissions of the suppliers they buy raw materials from all the way upstream and the emissions generated by the end consumers using their products all the way downstream.

Speaker 2: 19:15

Let's ground this. Say I run a medium-sized company that makes coffee makers.

Speaker 1: 19:19

Okay, you make coffee makers.

Speaker 2: 19:20

My scope one is the natural gas heating my assembly plant. My scope two is the electricity running the assembly line. What is my scope three?

Speaker 1: 19:28

Your scope three is the carbon emitted by the mining company in Australia digging up the bauxite for the aluminum in your hitting element. Okay. It's the diesel fuel burned by the container ship transporting the plastic from China. It's the methane emitted by the landfill when your cardboard packaging is thrown away.

Speaker 2: 19:47

Wow. Okay.

Speaker 1: 19:47

And most significantly, it is the electricity used by every single customer in the world plugging your coffee mater into their kitchen wall over the next five to 10 years.

Speaker 2: 19:57

I have to track all of that. How on earth do I measure the electricity mix of a kitchen in Tokyo versus a kitchen in Toronto for a product I sold three years ago?

Speaker 1: 20:07

The reality is you can't. Measuring scope three is a nightmare of uncertainty. The Nature piece points out that the most common way companies derive their Scope 3 emissions isn't by physically measuring anything at all.

Speaker 2: 20:19

So what are they doing?

Speaker 1: 20:20

It's an accounting proxy. They just multiply broad financial spending categories like, say, marketing expenses or purchase goods by generic global emission factors provided in a database.

Speaker 2: 20:32

That's just a guess.

Speaker 1: 20:33

It lacks both accuracy and precision.

Speaker 2: 20:35

It's a giant blurry spreadsheet guess. And yet the regulatory bodies are demanding companies take responsibility for this blurry guess and somehow reduce it.

Speaker 1: 20:44

And it is causing immense friction in the system. An SBTI survey from 2024 showed that difficulties with Scope 3 were the single biggest complaint for 54% of firms.

Speaker 2: 20:55

Over half.

Speaker 1: 20:56

Yeah. They are drowning in the accounting of it. They are hiring armies of consultants to guess at their supply chain emissions rather than spending that money on actual decarbonization.

Speaker 2: 21:06

Which defeats the purpose.

Speaker 1: 21:07

Completely. And the data shows it's a failing strategy. In 2022, only 7% of consumer companies were on track for their Scope 3 targets.

Speaker 2: 21:16

Only 7%.

Speaker 1: 21:17

Right. By comparison, 18% were on track for their Scope 1 and 2 targets.

Speaker 2: 21:21

Which, I mean, is still alarmingly low, but it's more than double the success weight. So what does this actually mean for the climate? By forcing companies to obsess over these massive, nebulous Scope 3 emissions that they barely control and can barely measure, we are distracting them from cleaning up their own direct operations. We are telling a guy whose house is on fire to go worry about the fire safety rating of his neighbor's toaster.

Speaker 1: 21:45

That's a great way to put it.

Speaker 2: 21:46

The authors argue we need to let companies simplify. Let them relentlessly focus on their direct emissions first.

Speaker 1: 21:53

It's a question of systemic efficiency. If every single company in the world aggressively tackled their own scope one and two emissions, then by definition, everyone's scope three emissions would organically disappear.

Speaker 2: 22:06

Oh, because everything is connected.

Speaker 1: 22:07

Right, because one company's scope three upstream supplier is just another company's scope one direct operation. It is a much more pragmatic, achievable approach to moving the needle than asking everyone to police each other's supply chains through guesswork.

Speaker 2: 22:22

Okay, let's move to the next roadblock the nature authors identify, which centers around this idea of inflexible reduction versus removal. And this directly sets up the back half of our deep dive today. It's about the mandated ratio for corporate net zero pledges.

Speaker 1: 22:36

Right. Under the current rigid standards, specifically the SBTI's corporate net zero standard, companies are told they must physically reduce their own emissions by 90 percent or more before they are legally allowed to use carbon removal technologies to offset the remaining 10 percent.

Speaker 2: 22:52

OK, let me make sure I understand this. It means a company isn't allowed to just buy their way out of polluting by paying someone else to suck carbon out of the air. Correct. They have to physically stop the pollution at the source first, which honestly sounds totally fair and ethical. We don't want an oil company to just keep pumping oil and claim they are net zero because they bought some carbon capture credits. We want them to actually change their business model.

Speaker 1: 23:16

Ethically, that framework makes perfect sense. It prioritizes the hard work of deep decarbonization over the easy way out.

Speaker 2: 23:22

Right.

Speaker 1: 23:23

But as the authors argue, it completely ignores how free markets actually scale new technologies. To achieve the decline phase of our overshoot, to pull the Earth out of that 1.7 degree peak, the IPCC makes it very clear we will need massive global scale carbon removal.

Speaker 2: 23:39

Because we have to physically pull the carbon down?

Speaker 1: 23:41

Right. We are talking about physically pulling billions of tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year. That requires an entirely new multi-trillion dollar industrial sector.

Speaker 2: 23:52

A sector that right now barely exists.

Speaker 1: 23:55

Precisely. It is an infant industry. And how do you build a multi-trillion dollar sector from scratch? You need early massive investment. You need revenue streams. Right. If companies are told by the SBTI that they aren't allowed to count carbon removal purchases toward their net zero goals right now because they haven't hit their 90% internal reduction target yet, then those companies simply won't fund carbon removal projects today.

Speaker 2: 24:21

I mean, why would a CEO authorize spending $50 million on direct air capture if the regulators tell her it doesn't count toward her company's climate pledge.

Speaker 1: 24:30

She wouldn't.

Speaker 2: 24:31

She has shareholders to answer to.

Speaker 1: 24:32

She absolutely won't. And without that early corporate funding, the carbon removal technologies will never get cheap enough or large enough to actually save us during the decline phase of the overshoot.

Speaker 2: 24:42

So we're basically shooting ourselves in the foot.

Speaker 1: 24:43

We are starving the exact safety net we will desperately need in 30 years, all in the name of strict accounting purity today. The authors advocate for a market-driven approach that allows flexibility, let companies invest in removal now to get the technology off the ground, just as they did with those early messy solar credits.

Speaker 2: 25:04

Okay, this is the perfect pivot.

Speaker 1: 25:05

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 25:06

Because you just called carbon removal the safety net.

Speaker 1: 25:08

Yes.

Speaker 2: 25:09

To achieve this net negative world we keep talking about, to pull the earth out of an overshoot, we literally have to build a global industry dedicated to scrubbing the sky. We are talking about carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. Things like direct air capture machines, which are essentially giant fans sucking in air and chemically separating the carbon and bioenergy.

Speaker 1: 25:31

And this is where we run into a harsh economic reality check.

Speaker 2: 25:35

Let's talk about that because the piece from MIT Technology Review is incredibly sobering. We just established that this technology is the literal safety net for human civilization. Without it, the ball never comes down from the ceiling. So you would think this would be a booming gold rush industry, right? Investors should be lining up around the block.

Speaker 1: 25:52

You would assume so, given the existential necessity of it. But the data tells a completely different and deeply concerning story. The sector is actually experiencing a significant market bust.

Speaker 2: 26:02

A bust. Before it's even really started.

Speaker 1: 26:05

Yes. MIT Tech Review reports that major businesses in the space have recently shut down operations entirely. Let's look at the physical reality of what we are trying to build. There is a notable facility in Iceland, the Mammoth Plant, run by a company called Climeworks.

Speaker 2: 26:21

I've seen pictures of this. It looks wild.

Speaker 1: 26:23

It is an engineering marvel. They use geothermal energy to power enormous fans that draw in ambient air. The air passes over a solid sorbent filter that chemically binds with the CO2. Once the filter is full, they heat it up, release the pure CO2, mix it with water, and inject it deep underground into basalt rock where it mineralizes and turns to stone.

Speaker 2: 26:45

That sounds like science fiction, turning thin air into stone. It's exactly what we need.

Speaker 1: 26:49

It is exactly what we need. But across the broader industry, the market signals are flashing red. Last year, purchases from direct air capture projects fell by nearly 16 percent. In total, they account for just 8 percent of all carbon removal transactions to date. Startups are downsizing, venture capital is drying up, and the industry is nowhere near the billion ton benchmark they need to hit to make a dent in the overshoot.

Speaker 2: 27:14

I just, I need to pause here and I want you, the listener, to really ponder this contradiction.

Speaker 1: 27:20

Yeah, it's a big one.

Speaker 2: 27:21

If this technology is the absolute prerequisite for surviving the overshoot age, why is the industry going broke? How can something so infinitely valuable to our survival be failing as a business?

Speaker 1: 27:33

Because of a fatal underlying economic court of carbon removal in a free market system. And it is vital we understand this mechanic. Carbon removal, as the MIT article so eloquently puts it, is an atmospheric cleanup job.

Speaker 2: 27:44

Okay, what does that mean economically?

Speaker 1: 27:46

Think about what a traditional energy company does. A solar farm or a coal plant. They produce energy. Electricity is a product that every single human being, business, and hospital physically needs to function. And they will eagerly pay for it.

Speaker 2: 28:03

It runs the global economy.

Speaker 1: 28:04

Right. A barrel of oil powers a truck. Carbon removal produces absolutely nothing of the sort.

Speaker 2: 28:11

It just produces a slightly less dangerous sky?

Speaker 1: 28:13

Exactly. It provides a collective societal good. It averts future climate damages. But it produces no service, no consumable widget, no tangible product that any individual company actually needs to operate its business today.

Speaker 2: 28:26

Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 28:27

If a shipping company buys a ton of carbon removal, their ships don't run any faster, their profit margins don't improve.

Speaker 2: 28:33

So the only reason a company buys carbon removal right now is basically out of the goodness of their heart or for public relations.

Speaker 1: 28:40

Pretty much. They're motivated by sincere climate concern or pressure from their employees or activist investors demanding a net zero pledge. But as the article notes, corporate do-goodism has a ceiling.

Speaker 2: 28:52

Of course it does.

Speaker 1: 28:53

When times get tough, when inflation bites, or when shareholders demand higher quarterly profits, a company isn't going to keep voluntarily paying $500 a ton to scrub an invisible gas out of the atmosphere just to be a good global citizen.

Speaker 2: 29:07

They'll just cut that budget first.

Speaker 1: 29:09

Exactly. The free market, left to its own devices, will never scale an industry whose only product is an averted crisis. There is no natural demand curve for waste management.

Speaker 2: 29:20

OK, so if the free market won't voluntarily pay for it, who will? How do we fix this structural failure?

Speaker 1: 29:27

The consensus among observers, including those cited in the MIT piece, is that there is only one viable path forward. Structural government intervention.

Speaker 2: 29:36

Policy.

Speaker 1: 29:37

Private sector voluntary purchases will never get us to billions of tons. It has to be policy. Governments have to either pay for the cleanup themselves using massive amounts of taxpayer money, or they have to legally force polluters to pay for it as a condition of operating.

Speaker 2: 29:51

And are any governments actually stepping up and doing that?

Speaker 1: 29:53

We are seeing the very beginnings of it. For instance, the European Commission is currently proposing to integrate domestic carbon removal into its emissions trading system, the EU ETS, after the year 2030.

Speaker 2: 30:05

Okay.

Speaker 1: 30:06

Now, to be clear, we are discussing these policies purely as mechanical levers for market adoption, not endorsing any specific political framework. But mechanically speaking, we need to understand how cap and trade programs like the EU ETS actually work.

Speaker 2: 30:21

Let's break that down. How does the EU ETS function today before they add carbon removal to it?

Speaker 1: 30:28

So the government sets a cap on the total amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted by all the factories, power plants and airlines operating within the system.

Speaker 2: 30:36

And that cap goes down over time.

Speaker 1: 30:37

Yes, this cap is lowered over time to ensure total emissions fall. Within that cap, companies buy or receive allowances, which are essentially permits to emit one ton of CO2. If a steel plant emits more than their allowances permit, they face massive fines. If they reduce their emissions, they can keep their spare allowances to cover future needs or sell them to another company that is struggling to cut emissions.

Speaker 2: 30:59

So it puts a literal price tag on pollution. The less you pollute, the less you pay. The more you pollute, you have to go to the market and buy an allowance from someone else.

Speaker 1: 31:09

Exactly. And the price of that allowance fluctuates based on supply and demand. Right now, by integrating carbon removal into the system, the EU would be fundamentally altering the math. They would essentially be creating a legally mandated artificial market demand for direct air capture.

Speaker 2: 31:26

How does that work? If I'm a factory that can't cut its emissions fast enough, instead of buying an allowance from a cleaner factory, I can pay a direct air capture plant to suck my ton of carbon out of the air.

Speaker 1: 31:37

That's the mechanism. A polluter who cannot reduce their own emissions would be legally forced by the government to pay a facility like the mammoth plant in Iceland to scrub an equivalent amount of carbon from the sky to zero out their ledger.

Speaker 2: 31:51

It turns a voluntary charity purchase into a mandatory cost of doing business.

Speaker 1: 31:55

It creates inescapable demand.

Speaker 2: 31:57

But I imagine that's going to be incredibly controversial because right now an EU allowance might cost, say, 80 or 90 euros. But direct air capture costs something like 500 or 600 euros a ton. If you force companies to buy DA to cover their emissions, you are drastically increasing the cost of producing steel or flying a plane or heating a home.

Speaker 1: 32:21

And that economic ripple effect is exactly why these policies are so difficult to implement. the cost will ultimately be passed down to the consumer. But without that kind of ruthless structural policy integration worldwide, the carbon removal safety net simply will not be there to catch us when the overshoot peaks. The industry will collapse before it reaches the

Speaker 2: 32:40

scale required. Which is a terrifying prospect. Because if we combine everything we've talked about so far, if we are moving too slowly on corporate reduction due to rigid rules and scope three nightmares, and if the carbon removal industry is going broke because of this free market quirk, then the timeline for our decline phase stretches out indefinitely.

Speaker 1: 32:59

It does.

Speaker 2: 32:59

The ball stays stuck up in the ceiling for a very, very long time.

Speaker 1: 33:02

Decades, perhaps a century, the magnitude of the overshoot goes higher and the duration lasts longer.

Speaker 2: 33:08

Which brings us to a really difficult pivot, because if we are going to be living inside this overshoot for the rest of our lives, the conversation has to shift. We can't just talk about fixing the sky anymore. We have to talk about surviving on the ground.

Speaker 1: 33:22

That is the harsh, pragmatic reality we are moving into. We are witnessing a profound shift in the academic and policy communities. How so? For 30 years, the focus of climate economics has been almost exclusively on mitigation, how to stop the warming, how to price carbon, how to transition to wind and solar. But as the Nature Climate Change editorial points out, the field is now rapidly and somewhat frantically shifting its focus to adaptation.

Speaker 2: 33:49

What does that actually look like for an economist? It's not just building higher seawalls.

Speaker 1: 33:52

Oh, no, it is much more granular and pervasive than that. It means moving away from simply modeling future emissions curves and instead modeling the localized economic impacts of living in a 1.7 degree world day in and day out.

Speaker 2: 34:06

So daily life impacts.

Speaker 1: 34:07

They are having to calculate the economic cost of failing crop yields in the global south as rain patterns permanently shift. They are mapping the geographic spread of vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever as the tropics expand into previously temperate zones and calculating the strain on health care systems. Wow. They are quantifying the thousands of labor hours that will be lost in construction and agriculture simply because it will be too lethally hot for a human being to work outside in the afternoon.

Speaker 2: 34:36

It's the economics of triage. We're moving from preventative medicine to emergency room surgery.

Speaker 1: 34:42

That's a very accurate way to frame it. And as we plan this triage, a massive glaring ethical crisis is emerging. And it centers right back on how we plan to achieve our carbon removal in the first place.

Speaker 2: 34:53

This is the justice dilemma.

Speaker 1: 34:54

Yes. The nature feature explores what they call the land use paradox. And it introduces a deeply unsettling justice dilemma that we have to look at objectively.

Speaker 2: 35:03

Let's unpack this paradox. We've talked about direct air capture, the giant fans, but those are currently incredibly expensive and energy intensive. There's another method, right?

Speaker 1: 35:14

Yes. The most widely modeled large scale method for carbon removal in the IPCC scenarios. The one that actually makes the math work on paper to get us out of the overshoot is something called BECCS.

Speaker 2: 35:27

BCCS.

Speaker 1: 35:28

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.

Speaker 2: 35:31

Okay, walk me through the physical mechanics of BECCS. How does it work?

Speaker 1: 35:36

In theory, it's a brilliant biological hack. You use the Earth's natural carbon cycle against itself. You grow massive crops like switchgrass or fast-growing willow trees. Okay. As these plants grow, they naturally suck carbon out of the air through photosynthesis to build their stalks and leaves. Then you harvest those crops, transport them to a facility, and burn them in a specialized power plant to generate electricity.

Speaker 2: 35:59

It doesn't burning them just put the carbon right back?

Speaker 1: 36:02

Right. But, and this is the key, you capture the carbon out of the smokestack before it escapes into the atmosphere, and you bury it deep underground, just like the mammoth plant does. Oh. So you get energy to power the grid, and you reduce total atmospheric carbon because the carbon the plant sucked up is now locked underground, net negative. Exactly. It sounds like a silver bullet. But there is a massive physical catch. What's the catch? space to pull billions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere using plants, you need an

Speaker 2: 36:32

incomprehensible amount of land to grow those plants. How much land are we talking about?

Speaker 1: 36:36

Some models suggest that to meet our mid-century removal targets using BECCS, we would need an area the size of India, or perhaps even larger, dedicated entirely to

Speaker 2: 36:46

bioenergy crops. An area the size of India. Yeah. Just for switchgrass. And here is where the paradox

Speaker 1: 36:51

and the tragedy strikes, where is that land going to come from?

Speaker 2: 36:56

Well, we're using most of it already, right?

Speaker 1: 36:58

Exactly. We are already utilizing most of the planet's arable land to feed a global population of 8 billion people. As Christopher Tresos points out in the Nature piece, this massive requirement for new agricultural land almost inevitably overlaps with two things, the world's remaining biodiversity hotspots and indigenous territories.

Speaker 2: 37:17

Wait, let me make sure I'm hearing this right. To save the climate, to hit our net negative goals and pull the temperature back down.

Speaker 1: 37:24

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 37:24

We might have to bulldoze the exact same biodiverse lands, the forests and savannas, that we were trying to protect from climate change in the first place.

Speaker 1: 37:32

It is a devastating irony. We risk replacing complex ancient ecosystems with massive sterile monoculture plantations of bioenergy crops just to scrub the carbon out of the sky.

Speaker 2: 37:44

And who is doing the bulldozing? Because I'm guessing the people who live on that land in the global south aren't the ones demanding millions of acres of switchgrass? Who actually gives up their land so the global north can hit its corporate net zero targets?

Speaker 1: 37:58

That is the core of the justice dilemma. Tresos calls this compound risk.

Speaker 2: 38:01

Compound risk.

Speaker 1: 38:02

The most vulnerable populations on earth face a dual threat. First, they face the brutal direct impacts of the climate overshoot itself, the droughts, the floods, the extreme heat waves, a crisis they historically did almost nothing to cause. And second, they face the risk of losing their ancestral lands, their water rights, and their agricultural livelihoods, to the massive geoengineering projects deployed by the historical emitters to clean up the mess.

Speaker 2: 38:26

So they pay twice.

Speaker 1: 38:28

We risk creating a deeply unjust transition where the physical and social costs of the overshoot recovery are borne by the poorest, while the wealthy historical emitters dictate the terms and claim the accounting victories.

Speaker 2: 38:40

It sounds like environmental colonialism under the guise of climate rescue. We broke the sky, and now we're going to take your land to fix it.

Speaker 1: 38:48

It is a profoundly difficult ethical terrain. And as the IPCC chair Jim Ski noted in the sources, these aren't just academic modeling decisions. The choices we make about land use, carbon removal, and adaptation are going to shape the human condition for decades. Overshoot is not just a scientific problem. It is a societal reckoning.

Speaker 2: 39:08

OK, this has been a heavy, heavy journey today.

Speaker 1: 39:10

It has.

Speaker 2: 39:10

We've covered a tremendous amount of ground. Let's try to pull all of this together. We started with a line in the sand, that 1.5 degree threshold, and the realization that we are blowing right past it into the overshoot age.

Speaker 1: 39:23

Right.

Speaker 2: 39:23

We've learned that this isn't just a thermostat we can casually turn down without consequences. The peak warming will leave permanent, irreversible scars on the Earth's ecosystems. Extinct species do not return. Shattered glass doesn't reassemble itself.

Speaker 1: 39:38

And we explored why our current machinery for managing this crisis is stalling. Corporate net zero pledges are bogged down by demands for absolute perfection and unmanageable scope three accounting. These rigid frameworks are preventing the pragmatic, messy, iterative progress we actually need to get the market moving.

Speaker 2: 39:55

And the ultimate safety net carbon removal is struggling to survive in a free market that refuses to pay for a product it can't physically consume. It requires governments to step in and structurally force the cleanup through policies like cap and trade. All while the proposed biological solutions threaten to displace the world's most vulnerable people and bulldoze biodiversity.

Speaker 1: 40:16

If there is a core takeaway for you, the listener, it is this. You are living through the most critical, delicate phase of human history right now.

Speaker 2: 40:26

No pressure.

Speaker 1: 40:26

But the narrative has to shift from we fail to stop it to every fraction of a degree matters. The severity of the overshoot, how high that ball goes and how long it stays up there, dictates the world you and your children will inhabit for the next century. There is no passive observing anymore.

Speaker 2: 40:44

We have to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in our corporate and personal climate goals. We have to demand structural government policies that price carbon and fund removal rather than relying on the fickle charity of corporate public relations. And we have to prepare for the losses that are already mathematically locked in. We do. And I want to leave you with one final lingering thought to mull over, a question that builds on everything we've unpacked today. We know that bringing the temperature back down requires us to take out a massive carbon loan from the Earth, promising to clean it up later with future technology. We're banking on these massive direct air capture plans. But what happens if the technological machinery we build to pay that debt back, the giant carbon removal plants, the vast geoengineering networks, ends up being owned, patented, and monopolized by the exact same massive multinational fossil fuel industries that caused the warming in the first place?

Speaker 1: 41:37

That is the question.

Speaker 2: 41:38

They have the engineering expertise. They have the deep pockets. Will we have saved the climate only to realize we've permanently handed over ownership of the sky? Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. We'll see you next time. Heliox is produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleakley. It features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers curated under their creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals. Thanks for listening today. Four recurring narratives underlie every episode. boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren't just philosophical musings, but frameworks for understanding our modern world. We hope you continue exploring our other episodes, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles at helioxpodcast.substack.com.