We managed to heat up an entire planet. Without a plan, without a budget, mostly without meaning to. Imagine what we can do on purpose.
The point of return
On 21 October the UN Environment Programme published its new Emissions Gap Report. After "decades of insufficient climate action", a temporary breach of 1.5°C is now inevitable. Emissions totalled 58.4 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2025, about the same as the year before, and current policies point to about 2.8°C this century. Every tenth of a degree costs lives, harvests and species. We will not pretend otherwise.
But UNEP called its report The point of return. The task now is to keep the overshoot small and "establish a credible return path to 1.5C by the end of the century". In the lowest-overshoot pathway, emissions fall 18% by 2030 and 45% by 2035, CO2 reaches net zero around 2050, and warming peaks at 1.7 to 1.8°C. Coming back down from there takes "an ambitious and sustainable scale-up of CO2 removal".
The missing curve
The graphs in this week's coverage show only the curve that has to come down. The curve that has to come up is rarely drawn beside it; on most emissions charts, removals sit below zero, as a minus.
So we drew it.
Grey is carbon going into the air. Green is carbon going back into life: into soil, timber, rock and sea. Today the green line stands at about 2.2 billion tonnes a year, almost all of it from planting and regrowing forests. To bring warming back to 1.5°C it has to reach about 8.8 billion tonnes by 2050, according to the latest State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report. Where the lines cross, CO2 emissions reach net zero and warming stops rising, as long as methane and the other gases fall too. That is the point of return. Where green rises above grey, the planet starts to cool again.
Made of people, not tonnes
The grey line belongs to an economy that digs carbon up and burns it. The green line belongs to whoever puts it back. They are not making sacrifices. They are building the economy that comes next.
The farmer. Living soil drinks a cloudburst and still holds water when the drought comes. Across 12,376 county-years of US maize, places with more organic matter in their soil lost less harvest in drought; under severe drought, each extra percentage point of organic matter came with crop insurance payouts more than a third lower (Kane et al., 2021). With what UNEP calls a "super" El Niño under way, bringing floods to some regions and drought to others, that is no detail. This summer, while the land around it dried out, the food forest at Ketelbroek stayed green. And farmers like Eric Litjens already earn from the carbon their trees store.
The builder. Insulation of hemp, wood fibre or straw cuts the gas bill like any good insulation, and keeps carbon in the walls for as long as the house stands. Wood and clay on the inside help keep humidity in the healthy range (Wood & Wellbeing, 2026). And the hemp or straw comes from a farm: a new crop to sell.
The innovator. Crushed olivine that binds CO2 as it weathers. Seaweed that feeds people and takes excess nutrients out of coastal water. Both are young: how much carbon they store, and for how long, still has to be proven in the field, and a tonne should only be sold once it is.
All of us. When energy prices exploded in 2022, a roof full of solar panels was a shield. Not long ago they were a rarity; today about 3 million Dutch homes have them (CBS).
The old economy burns ancient life. The next one grows new life.
Mad as hell
Europe needs that next economy now. Since mid-September, hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of cities, from Paris and Lille to Madrid, Lisbon, Milan and Naples, have taken to the streets over rents, bills, school cuts and the cost of living (ABC News). Prices across Europe jumped with the energy shock of 2022 and never came back down, and wages did not keep up (Al Jazeera).
It is the cry from the 1976 film Network, shouted out of a window: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" People are right to be angry. Anger is energy, and a burning town hall wastes it. In the film, the network turned that anger into ratings. We would rather turn it into something that lasts: a roof that makes its own power, a field that holds its own water, a wall that keeps carbon in and the gas bill down. That is the revolution worth having. Not tearing the old economy down, but building past it, by the very people it keeps squeezing.
We have done this before
It takes a remarkable species to change the climate of a planet, and the same species can change it back. The world phased out nearly 99% of the chemicals that were destroying the ozone layer, which is now on track to return to 1980 levels around 2040 over most of the world and around 2066 over Antarctica. UNEP's report itself notes that renewable capacity grew three times more than projected in 2015. Even AI, often cast as the enemy, causes well under 1% of global emissions: all the world's data centres together account for about half a percent of energy-related CO2 (IEA). What it does show is how fast people can share a new idea and build on it.
Both feet on the ground
None of this replaces cutting emissions. The grey line has to fall steeply: UNEP's pathway almost halves emissions within ten years. Removals are not a licence to keep emitting. They are the second half of the job, and the only way back down.
And removals have to be real: they have to stay put, be measured, and be good for the life around them. Our own part is the least romantic one, the bookkeeping. With Oncra we build open methods to count what farmers and builders bring back, so that they get paid for it and anyone can check the count.
A decision, not a forecast
The green line is not a forecast. Forecasts describe what will happen to us. This line describes what we will do: it is a decision, and we make it together. Seen from far enough away, it is evolution taking its next step: a species that changed a planet without meaning to, learning to make it more alive on purpose.
We put the full repair job at about 1,500 billion tonnes of CO2, roughly what all the world's plants hold today. Shared by ten billion people, that is 150 tonnes each, about five truckloads. Seems doable.
Farmer, builder, innovator or investor: are you already pulling the green line up, or do you want to? Come build it with us. And if you want to help fund the early work no market pays for yet, join the network.
Sources: ABC News and Al Jazeera on the protests and the cost of living (October 2026). UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2026, "The point of return", as reported by Carbon Brief (21 October 2026). State of Carbon Dioxide Removal, third edition (June 2026). Global Carbon Budget. Kane et al., Environmental Research Letters 16, 044018 (2021). WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2022. IEA, Energy and AI (2025). CBS, solar installations, end of 2025 (provisional). Wood & Wellbeing, ORGA architect for Built by Nature (2026).