The Earth's savings account, part II

(This follows on from an earlier note, The Earth's Savings Account, if you'd like the full first half, you can find it here: jeroenwats.com/notes/the-earths-savings-account)

Breathe out right now. The carbon leaving your lungs drifts a few metres, and somewhere nearby, a leaf pulls it in, the first step in it eventually becoming wood.

Now that's the oldest transaction on the planet, running since long before anyone was around to notice it.

That cycle was never the problem. The problem is what happened on both sides of it at once, without anyone realising they were pulling on the same ledger twice.

I've already written about one side of it. The earth spent three hundred million years banking sunlight underground as coal, oil, and gas. We spent the last hundred years withdrawing nearly all of it.

Here's the part that makes it worse, happening in the exact same window. The thing built to absorb the carbon we breathe out and burn, forests, was being cleared at a speed nothing before it had matched. From the end of the last ice age to the year 1900, ten thousand years, humanity cleared roughly half of every forest we've ever removed. In the hundred years after 1900, we matched that entire ten thousand year total again.

Picture that side by side. We opened the tap on carbon that took three hundred million years to fill, and in the same narrow window, we cut down a huge share of the one thing built to catch it. Two forces, pulling the same rope in the same direction, at a speed neither side was designed for.

Here's the part worth sitting with, though. Since the 1980s, the rate of deforestation has actually slowed. Not reversed, but slowed, because enough people decided it mattered enough to act on. The numbers bent, at least a little, on purpose.

That's really what a savings account teaches you either way. Spend faster than you save, and the balance runs out. Slow the spending down in time, and it doesn't have to. We've already proven the second one is possible. What's left is whether we do it fast enough, on both sides of the ledger, before the choice disappears entirely.