‘A Repair Manual for the Planet’: What Would It Take to Restore Our Atmosphere?

In a final chapter of his new book, climate scientist Rob Jackson profiles several individuals he considers to be climate heroes.

One is Rose Abramoff, a fellow scientist who recently encouraged Jackson to join her and other scientists engaged in actions of civil disobedience on climate issues. Abramoff, for example, chained herself to a gate at the White House in the spring of 2022 in an attempt to get President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency. 

Jackson, a professor of earth science at Stanford University, one of the top five most-cited climate and environmental scientists in the world and the author of more than 400 peer-reviewed publications, demurred.

“I’m not, obviously, chaining myself to gates, at least yet,” said Jackson, whose book “Into the Clear Blue Sky” will be released on July 30. However, he added that he does see an increasing need for scientists to engage society on climate change, something he does to great effect in this captivating and thought-provoking new book.  

Jackson chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of hundreds of scientists who track greenhouse gas emissions and communicate science to the public and policymakers.  Through his research and policy activities, Jackson’s work has helped reduce millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions and improved human health, safety, and air and water quality.

In “Into the Clear Blue Sky,” he says reducing emissions is no longer enough. He outlines a new goal, something he calls “atmospheric restoration.” It’s a path that he says is borne out of frustration and includes some uncomfortable choices, but also offers hope.  

Jackson, a gifted storyteller, poet and former Guggenheim fellow, recently spoke with Inside Climate News about his new book. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Tell me about “Into the Clear Blue Sky”

I think of it as a repair manual for the planet. Maybe a how-to guide for restoring our health and our air in a journey from climate despair to climate repair. I spent decades tracking greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in my role as chair of the Global Carbon Project. And watching years of climate inaction roll by, I went looking for hope and optimism and solutions. My motivation for researching and writing this book was to try and provide reasons of hope for myself and for other people.

You start by recounting a visit you made to the Vatican Museum and the recently restored Sistine Chapel. Your book calls for a similar restoration, a restoration of the atmosphere. What do you mean by that?

By restoring the atmosphere, I mean returning greenhouse gas concentrations to pre-industrial levels. That’s something we could do within a decade or two for methane, if we were able to wave a magic wand and stop emissions today. In contrast, if we could wave that magic wand for carbon dioxide, the atmosphere would remain filled with a trillion tons of carbon pollution for thousands of years. So, I emphasize methane in the book because I believe it’s the strongest lever we have to make a difference for short-term temperatures over the next decade or two.

It helps me to think about restoring the atmosphere as a motivating factor beyond arbitrary temperature thresholds. I don’t think people understand what 1.5 or 2 degrees C [the amount to limit warming above pre-industrial temperatures agreed to under the Paris climate agreement] means, or why it really matters. It doesn’t seem to motivate people. It’s an abstract target. I believe the idea of returning the atmosphere to health is a more powerful narrative.

What is it about methane, in particular, that makes it such a strong lever?

It’s potent. Pound for pound, it’s 90 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth two decades after its release. Its concentrations have also risen much faster than carbon dioxide. It’s also neglected compared to CO2. Carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas. But methane is a strong second and the first major methane agreement, the Global Methane Pledge, was only signed just two years ago. And then finally, it’s what I call malleable. Methane leaves the atmosphere in only a decade. This shorter lifetime means that if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities—and that’s a big if, we’re talking about emissions from agriculture, waste and fossil fuels—we could restore methane concentrations to pre-industrial levels in only a decade. Doing so would save us half a degree C of warming and could happen in our lifetime.

You seem to really wrestle in this book, and over the course of your career, with whether we need to not only reduce emissions of CO2 and methane, but also start removing these greenhouse gases from the air.  Can you tell me a bit more about your thinking on this and how it has changed over the years?

My thinking has changed over the years partly because of how long we’ve waited to reduce emissions. I still think the best place to start is to reduce emissions today. Nothing in the world of drawdown—reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere—is more important than lowering greenhouse gas emissions today. However, we’ve loaded the atmosphere with more than 2 trillion tons of carbon dioxide pollution, and that pollution is not going anywhere for millennia. If it’s a dangerous level today, and the evidence suggests that it already is a dangerous level, then we have no choice [but] to at least try to remove some of that carbon dioxide from the air. It’s not the best way to proceed. It’s more expensive. So, I talk about drawdown technologies reluctantly, but I feel that we’ve left ourselves no choice but to talk about them seriously.

You write, “I’m frustrated writing about ‘drawdown’ technologies because we shouldn’t need them. I’ve watched years of climate inaction roll by like floats in a parade. When will the victory parade finally begin?” It’s not something you like, but feel that because of our failures, we now need to consider?

I do, and it’s true for methane too. Methane is even harder than carbon dioxide to remove from the atmosphere and frankly, methane removal may not turn out to be feasible or cost effective. We don’t know that yet, but I also have come to believe that all of us have our favorite climate solutions. We’ll all have to support some climate solutions that we’re not crazy about if we’re to restore the atmosphere and maintain a livable climate on Earth.

Some people hate nuclear power. If you take nuclear power off the list, you have to do a lot more of something else. You have to harvest trees and biomass [combined with carbon capture and storage] over large areas; you need more solar panels; you need more natural gas plants with carbon capture and storage. The more things we take off the list because of our own personal preferences, the fewer arrows we have in our quiver.

A concern with carbon capture is that it will give a pass to continuing emissions. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

There are many concerns about removal technologies. One concern is that if companies and people and societies believe, “Well, we can just fix the problem later,” we’ll have less incentive to fix it today, when it would be cheaper and more effective to do so. People call this the “moral hazard” problem. If you provide an option that says, “Don’t worry about it now, we’ll take care of it later,” and you suggest to people that there’s a credible technology that may or may not pan out, then there’s strong incentive to just let things slide another year, another decade, or, heaven forbid, another century.

How have you squared that quandary?

Everyone squares it differently, and I have come to believe that because we have procrastinated so much to reduce emissions, that we need to do some removals to maintain a safe and livable climate. What people don’t talk about, and what I didn’t talk about enough in this book, is how expensive that is. It’s one thing to have a spreadsheet that says, “In year 2030, we will try and remove 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” But very few people take the next step and say, “If that is $100 or $500 a ton, who pays for the $100 billion or half a trillion dollars a year that this would require, when society won’t pay for emissions reductions to start with?” That issue, to me, is perhaps the bigger problem, even bigger than the technological limitations of removals.

As a climate scientist, you know better than most anyone the challenges and the missed opportunities that we’ve had in the fight against climate change, and yet this book comes across as rather hopeful. Are you hopeful? Can we, as you write in your book, wipe “centuries of fossil fuels from our lives, one car, one cow, one coal plant at a time”?

I am hopeful. The first assignment in every class I teach is to ask students to go home and find things that are better in the world today than they were 50 years ago. And the list is long: life expectancy, childhood mortality, reductions in lead levels in the blood of children in the U.S. because we phased out leaded gasoline. It’s the hundreds of thousands of lives we save every year from the bipartisan Clean Air Act. Optimism and hope are muscles we have to exercise. I try to exercise them myself. I try to help my students exercise them too. I don’t want to pretend that solving the climate problem is easy or that we’re even close to anything like restoring the atmosphere. We’re not. But I can’t help but hope.

Towards the end of your book, you write about Rose Abramoff, and how she encouraged you to join her in actions of civil disobedience. When she and others chained themselves to a gate at the White House in 2022, they didn’t succeed in getting President Biden to declare a climate emergency, but soon after he did authorize the Defense Production Act to help speed the clean energy transition. What role should scientists play in climate advocacy, and how has your thinking on this changed over the years?

Well, several things have changed over the years. I have seen decades of missed opportunities. I’m older than I was, so I’m closer to the end of my career and the risk for me to speak out is less now. I feel more of an obligation or responsibility to speak out. I support what Rose does. I’m not, obviously, chaining myself to gates, at least yet, but I do think there’s an opportunity for scientists to engage. But I also think we do need some distance. I tell my students, we do research to get the answer, not to get the answer we want. I try to be very careful counseling my students not to put our thumbs on the scale for everything that we measure.

Any final thoughts?

If I could change one thing today, I would love everyone to see the climate problem as an opportunity for making us healthier and allowing us to live longer lives. Every major climate solution has benefits for our health, for other species and habitats. Particulate pollution from cars and coal still kills 100,000 Americans a year through heart and lung disease in spite of the progress we’ve made in improving our air quality. Worldwide it’s 10 million people. That’s more people than are murdered, die in traffic accidents and drown, combined. Globally, one in five of all deaths is attributable to burning fossil fuels. That’s 10 million people dying senselessly every year when cleaner fuels are available. I would love to help people see the link between climate action today and longer, healthier lives.