I originally named this Substack Inevitable & Obvious after advice I gave a friend in the summer of 2024 who was deciding whether to join an early-stage startup. I told him that I only want to work on something if it feels inevitable, meaning it's going to happen and someone is going to build it, so it might as well be me, and if it's obvious, meaning the solution to the problem is so plain to me that I can't stop thinking about it. That heuristic became the name of the newsletter.
At first, I wrote about startup stuff: my experience at Nori and winding things down there, board governance, and lessons for early-stage founders. Then I wrote a piece with Nick van Osdol about why carbon removal won’t reach gigatonne scale, out of frustration that the industry had grown while its actual atmospheric impact stayed negligible. The response was strong! I got asked to speak during San Francisco Climate Week, and I kept writing about climate since that turned out to be what people wanted to read from me. Soon I was writing about climate interventions and my own path into the field. All the while I kept the branding because it was just easier.
But after some time writing about this space, I’m no longer just the new guy showing up and asking beginner questions. I’ve been sharing my opinions on how I think this field should evolve, and that invites feedback from people who have been working on this much longer than I have and who have more expertise in it, and some of that feedback has been that the name Inevitable & Obvious isn’t really a good look here. To be more specific, the inevitability framing is a known problem in the governance conversation around solar geoengineering: when someone declares that deployment is coming, they’re foreclosing the public’s choice before any deliberation has actually happened, and a guy with a tech background putting the word Inevitable on the masthead reads to a lot of people as exactly that. The name predates any of my climate writing, but that doesn’t really matter, because nobody reading it for the first time knows that. I think this is valid and useful feedback. I would like to continue learning from and collaborating with the experts in this field, and changing a name is a pretty small thing to do in exchange for that.
Now, I want to be clear: I do believe we have to respond to the catastrophic risks that come with unabated warming. And I think one of the better options on the table for that is planetary-scale cooling. That frankly does seem obvious to me. However, the way in which we do it, the timing of it, who actually deploys it, and how those decisions get made, none of that is obvious, and it most certainly is not inevitable, because we don’t really know how we’re going to get to that point. There are a lot of unknowns, and that invites a lot of risk.
There’s also a more practical reason. When people come across this newsletter for the first time, Inevitable & Obvious doesn’t tell them anything about what it’s about, and I would really like to make this subject matter easier to understand. My objective is to bring more people into the field, get them educated on this, and find ways for new skill sets and experiences to contribute to solving these very thorny problems.
So putting all that together, I decided it was time for a new name that better reflects what this newsletter is about, and that name is The Overshoot Era. There's disagreement in the literature over the details, but overshoot means exceeding a temperature threshold. In this case, it means global warming going past 1.5℃, the more ambitious of the Paris Agreement's two targets.1
We've already exceeded 1.5℃ at least temporarily, and forecasters expect we'll cross that threshold again this year and next with the extra-strong El Niño that is now upon us. We're at the start of a new era in climate change, and you're going to hear the word overshoot a lot more as the planet heats up. I just don't see a path where we hold 1.5 anymore, and this newsletter is about what we do next.
The Overshoot Era is me working through what I can contribute to a field that exists to buy time while decarbonization and carbon removal finish the job. I share what I'm learning from the people researching and building this stuff, my opinions on how the field could and should evolve, and enough synthesis to show what's actually going on. The questions I keep coming back to are how we bring the temperature down as quickly as is safely possible, how we keep important Earth systems from crossing their tipping points, and how we preserve society's capacity to solve climate change. Those are the things I read about and ask my podcast guests about, and then I tell you what I think.
Some housekeeping: The Overshoot Era is the new name for both the newsletter and the podcast. The website is https://overshootera.com/. You don’t need to do anything on your end. Emails will still show up in your inbox the same, the podcast feed remains the same, old links will redirect to the new domain, and the whole archive is still here. Lastly, a hat tip to Charlotte DeWald at Arctic Stabilization Initiative for the name suggestion, thank you!
I hope you like this direction. If you have thoughts or feedback, leave them in the comments or email me. All posts here are free, no matter what. If this is useful to you, please subscribe, share it with your colleagues, and consider a paid subscription. The money helps, and paid subscriptions also push this publication up Substack’s Rising list, which is where new readers find it. If you value my work, that’s the best way to put it in front of more people. I appreciate you coming along for this ride.
There was a good paper published earlier this year on the use of the word (and its confusing definition in the IPCC glossary) that I recommend if you’re curious, titled Practical guidance towards consistent use of overshoot terminology.
Appropriate name for the times. The fallacy of overshoot plans is p'ing in the wind and expecting to stay dry.