The Earth Will Not Heal Itself

We get used to the way our bodies heal after an injury or illness. Get a deep cut on your finger, and in a day or two the wound will close. A few weeks later you will hardly be able to see the damage. Get a bad cold, the flu, or in most cases even Covid, and you will usually be back to normal in a month or less. We do not always heal, of course, but those are sad exceptions to the much more common experience of rapid self-healing.

We are so familiar with rapid healing that we project that onto the Earth — assuming that our planet will be as good as our bodies are when it comes to self-healing. That is very far from true. The Earth, today, is quite ill. It will eventually recover, but the process will be so painfully slow, that it will seem, for centuries, as if it is not healing at all.

In the last 50 years we have poured a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, from burning fossil fuels like oil and gas and coal, violently distorting the balance in the protective blanket that surrounds the Earth. The CO2 levels are higher now than they have been for 3 million years. Scientists all over the world have done their best to raise the warning, forecasting deadly droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, extreme heat and cold, the disruption of vital ocean currents, species extinctions, and eventually devastating sea level rise. They predict, as the effects intensify, the greatest natural threats that civilization has ever seen — incalculable economic losses, and unimaginable suffering.

Even if we completely stop adding any more CO2, the dangers will not go away. It will take centuries — even millennia — for the climate to reset itself back to the conditions that protected humanity so well over our entire history. Flywheel effects will ensure that climate disruptions will continue to intensify for decades, even after we stop adding more greenhouse gases.

The saddest thing is that we are not "stopping" at all— we continue to add even more CO2 and methane to the atmosphere. Emissions in 2024 were at record levels. It is as if we are doing all we can to make the patient's illness worse. The current administration's mantra is "drill baby drill." It has dismantled virtually all the policies that were designed to reduce emissions. Tax credits for electric vehicles and solar installations have been eliminated; vehicle efficiency standards have been decimated; offshore wind generation projects have been scuttled (or face the threat of being blocked). We are ramping up to take greenhouse gas emissions to even higher levels.

Imagine you are responsible for a loved one with diabetes, but you decide — because it is somehow "good for business" — to give them a diet brimming with sugary beverages, sweets, and desserts. This is precisely what we are doing with the climate, and it could not be more wrong.