The Overshoot Era

Formerly Inevitable & Obvious. Here's why the name changed.

I spent ten years building the carbon removal industry. I co-founded Nori, the first carbon removal marketplace, raised more than $20 million for it, and believed we could scale our way out of the climate problem. I was wrong about the timeline.

Even with aggressive emissions cuts, temperatures don’t come back down on their own for centuries. Carbon removal won’t meaningfully affect global temperature until the second half of this century at the earliest, and we’re approaching tipping points that could destabilize Earth systems before the conventional toolkit has time to work. That in-between stretch, temperatures past the targets while the durable fixes are still decades from mattering, is the overshoot era. This publication is named for it.

That leaves a category of intervention most of the climate world still won’t discuss in public: things that work on a timescale of years rather than decades, including cooling interventions like stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening (what many people still call solar geoengineering), work to protect ice sheets and coral reefs, and efforts to keep systems like the Amazon and the permafrost from tipping over into collapse. I call this category stabilization, and it’s what buys decarbonization and carbon removal the time they need to work.

I write about what the science actually shows on these interventions, what the risks are, and why so few people in mainstream climate will say what they think about them in public. I write about the strange politics of climate intervention, where researchers can’t advocate, advocacy organizations barely exist, and conspiracy theorists are filling the vacuum. And I write about what it takes to build permission space for ideas that sound radical now and will seem obvious in hindsight.

Most weeks I’m talking with the researchers and funders and founders doing this work, and the conversations happening privately in that world run well ahead of the public discourse. This publication brings them into the open.

Why subscribe?

Climate interventions are coming, either through careful preparation or through crisis-driven panic, and whether we’ll have the governance and public trust to do them well depends on work that has to happen now. I think there’s still time to prepare, though not a lot of it.

If you work in climate, clean energy, carbon removal, or an adjacent field, you’ve probably felt the gap between what you know privately and what’s acceptable to say publicly. That gap is what this publication is for.

Everything here is free, and new posts arrive by email when I publish. If the work turns out to be useful for you, a paid subscription covers my time, tools, and the travel to the workshops and conferences most of this reporting comes from.

There's also the podcast, where I talk with the people building this field: The Overshoot Era Podcast.

Start here

Break Glass, Cool Planet is the piece on why I changed my mind about timelines.

How to Learn Everything You Need to Know About Climate Cooling is the guide I point everyone to for the science, the main groups, and the arguments between them.

What It Takes to Make Cooling Interventions Thinkable is about why people who understand the climate problem still don’t arrive at this conclusion, and what it takes for them to get there.

Carbon Removal’s Wrong Turn is where I came from, and why the industry I helped build can’t solve this alone.

Want to reach me? I’m on LinkedIn and X, or reply to any post.