If you’ve deleted Twitter this month, I wouldn’t blame you. 99% of my feed has stuck to predictable format: a viral attack on Elon, unfailingly followed by an unrelated but typically irreverent Tweet by his truly, then commentary on aptly-named Bankman-Fried. Rinse and repeat. But this Tweet actually got my gears turning:

After reading this, my mind jumped to climate change. (Btw, OKR stands for “Objectives and Key Results” and are a popular organizational goal-setting framework.)

We’re on the heels of COP27, the United Nation’s annual conference to review the closest thing earth has to climate change OKRs—the Paris Agreement goals. And like how Charley suggests that OKR planning stalls meaningful action, some COP27 participants felt that the conference had also missed the point:

“I have never seen anything like this. We’ve reduced the whole thing into a grand spectacle”…

Researchers and activists attending the talks for the first time described disbelief as government negotiators spent days going back and forth over single words in the document.

Nature.com

As a former Product Manager at Atlassian, I get it. Planning cycles are fraught with slowdowns. What I’d add is that OKRs only shine if everyone deeply understands the priorities and factors those into more local decisions (like, does shopping Black Friday climate-conscious move the needle?).

I’ll take a stab at that latter challenge. I’ll summarize earth’s OKRs, our general plan of attack, and status and offer an easy way to get on board.

Objective: prevent a climate disaster

Key Result: limit warming to 2, ideally 1.5, degrees Celsius by 2050

Great! A goal that has top-level buy-in (on paper, at least). This was signed into history by 194 parties in the 2015 Paris Agreement. You might remember this making the news when former US President Trump infamously withdrew us and when now-POTUS Biden signed us back on. It isn’t the first of its kind—the 1987 Montreal Protocol successfully reduced ozone-depleting chemicals by 98% relative to 1990 baseline levels—though arguably the most ambitious.

To achieve this 1.5 degree goal, we need to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and halve our emissions by 2030.

By net zero, we mean that {earth’s GHG emissions} – {GHG removals} = 0. We’re starting from ~50 billion tons.

The two parts of that equation are our two levers:

This is the bucket we’re familiar with, covering technologies like solar, electric vehicles, and alternative meat. But now there’s so much more. Go ahead, spark your imagination:

• Alternative aviation fuels like Air Company’s and Twelve’s, harnessing processed CO2

• Methane-reducing cattle feed additives like Alga Biosciences and Symbrosia

• Point capture solutions like Remora’s carbon scrubber for semi-trucks

• Consumer products that make everyday lower-emissions choices easy, like Revel’s all-electric ride share fleet, Thousand Fell’s 100% recyclable sneakers, Eclipse’s dairy-free ice cream, GridRewards’ load-shifting app, and WildGrid’s solar onboarding

Note: I’m building a product to help you shop climate-conscious. I’d love to have you join the pilot 👉 sign up at regulars.earth.

Carbon removal technologies blew my mind. That said, while they might sound like a magical “undo” button for global warming, it’s important to note that many of them aren’t yet economical or even carbon neutral.

• Plant-based direct air capture like Running Tide’s carbon-absorbing kelp buoys, and Living Carbon’s faster-growing trees

• Mineral-based direct air capture like Heirloom’s carbon mineralization rocks

• Chemical direct air capture like Climeworks and Carbon Engineering’s carbon-capture plants

By the way, removal credits are different from offset credits. The latter basically ask someone else to emit fewer to compensate for little to no change from the buyer.

How do we know the impact of our work? We need to build carbon accounting and markets. This is the infrastructure to measure, reduce, and report emissions as well as verify and trade carbon credits (1 credit = 1 ton of CO_2 equivalent).

• Corporate carbon accounting platforms like Watershed and Persefoni

• API for transaction-level emissions data + offsets like Patch, EcoCart, and GreenStory

• Nature-based solutions management platforms like Pachama and Cecil

We also need to adapt to the warming we are already experiencing. This is the set of initiatives that help people / cities / nations adjust effects of climate change.

• Flood disaster response tools like Cloud to Street

• Wildfire management solutions like Pano

• (I’d love to see solutions that support lower- and middle-income countries)

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We’ve made great progress, but to be blunt, we’re off-track for 1.5 degrees by 2050. Both levers are failing. Let me share one data point that really stuck with me. This is from Dr. Leah Stokes, a renowned climate and energy policy expert:

The fossil fuel infrastructure we already have—pipelines, power plants, and oil wells, fracking operations, even things like our furnace in our basement and our cars in our driveway… if it keeps going along… until it’s depreciated… it will belch out too much carbon to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

My Climate Journey podcast — Leah Stokes, A Matter of Degrees (28:45)

Check out Bill Gates’ breakdown of the sources of global carbon emissions in his pragmatic book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster:

To explain how emissions get categorized, let’s walk through an example, like the gasoline that’s used for a passenger vehicle. That gasoline produces emissions two ways: during the extraction and refinement as well as during the actual combustion for driving. The former is counted with “making things” and the latter in “getting around.”

This way of breaking down emissions from one “source” is important because it demonstrates the way ownership of emissions transfers and therefore the complexity of carbon accounting. T