Pessimistic Climate Outcomes Are Hard to Reconcile
My youngest daughter wants to be a starship captain when she grows up. I don’t know if she’ll get there, but I know this: we definitely won’t be launching interstellar ships if we’re busy relearning how to grow corn.
We have 8 billion people on this planet. More humans than ever before. More potential than ever before. More minds that could be solving problems we haven’t even imagined yet. But not if they’re fighting over calories. Not if the world’s attention is consumed by crises we could have prevented.
Here’s a confession that will make some of my colleagues uncomfortable: I decided a long time ago that I’m going to arrest climate change within the boundaries of capitalism.
Not despite capitalism. Within it.
I made this decision because trying to break capitalism first means I’m going to fail. And I intend to succeed.
The Math Nobody Wants to Do
Look, I get the appeal of the “tear it all down” approach. Capitalism created this mess, so capitalism must go. It’s a clean narrative. It feels righteous.
But here’s what I’ve learned from 15 years in the trenches of energy policy: we don’t have time for a revolution. The IPCC gives us until 2030 to make serious changes. Do you know how long it takes to fundamentally restructure an economic system? Longer than that. A lot longer.
So while well-meaning people argue about whether markets are inherently extractive, I’m over here trying to make sure buildings don’t use 40% of global emissions anymore. While think pieces debate post-growth economics, I’m working with utilities to figure out how to keep the lights on when everyone plugs in their electric car at 6pm.
This isn’t me saying capitalism is great. This is me saying I have to work with what exists if I want to accomplish anything before I die.
The Dirty Secret About Federal Policy
Here’s something else that will annoy people across the political spectrum: the federal government has never really set the direction for US energy policy. And we’re making progress anyway.
The US doesn’t even have a grid. We have a bunch of different grids scattered across the country that barely talk to each other. We have local control over energy resources. State-level permitting. One president puts solar panels on the White House roof, the next one takes them off. Meanwhile, every year the share of renewable energy grows. Because it makes financial sense.
I remember the despair I felt when Obama’s Clean Power Plan got torn down. The industry was looking at it like it was going to save us all. It failed. Didn’t pass. Didn’t get enacted.
We’ve been in and out of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Accords. Guess what? It doesn’t matter as much as you think.
The climate industry is millions of people. We all know what we need to do. All throughout the US, jurisdictions are passing good legislation. We have climate funds, greenhouse gas accounting requirements, corporate investment requirements enforceable through the World Bank because of international stakeholders.
Yes, we have federal chaos. But the work keeps getting done.
The Food Security Math
When I talk about the stakes, I’m talking about food. And when you look at the numbers, you see why the old climate trajectory pointed toward catastrophe.
Three crops feed the world. Rice, wheat, and maize provide 42% of all human calories consumed directly, and closer to 60% when you count the grain fed to livestock. These three grains are the primary food source for 4 billion people. Rice alone feeds 3.5 billion, nearly half of humanity. Add potatoes, cassava, and soybeans, and you’re looking at 75% of global calories coming from just six crops.
That’s not food security. That’s a house of cards.
What Temperature Does to Yields
Here’s what the crop science shows. For every 1°C of global warming, without adaptation measures:
- Wheat yields drop 6%
- Maize yields drop 7.4%
- Rice yields drop 3.2%
These aren’t hypotheticals. These are measured relationships from decades of agricultural data, confirmed across multiple climate models in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report.
Now do the math across different warming scenarios:
| Scenario | Warming | Wheat | Maize | Rice |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current trajectory (SSP2-4.5) | 2.1-3.5°C | -12 to -21% | -15 to -26% | -6 to -11% |
| Old trajectory (RCP8.5) | 4.3-5.7°C | -26 to -34% | -32 to -42% | -14 to -18% |
| Worst case + heat extremes | 5°C+ | Up to -50% | Up to -60% | Up to -40% |
The worst-case row isn’t the average—it’s what happens when you add heat waves, droughts, and flooding events on top of gradual warming. In the old RCP8.5 trajectory, those extremes become routine.
What Crop Failure Actually Does to Civilization
The question isn’t whether people starve. It’s what happens to societies when food systems break.
History gives us the thresholds:
- Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852): ~40% crop loss. One million dead. One million fled. Population fell 20-25%. The political and cultural aftershocks shaped a century of Irish history.
- Russia 2010: A single heat wave cut wheat yields by 33%. Global wheat prices doubled. Food price spikes contributed to the political instability that became the Arab Spring.
- Syrian drought (2006-2010): Multi-year agricultural failure drove 1.5 million internal refugees into cities already strained by Iraqi refugees. By 2011, the country was at war.
Notice the pattern. A 30-40% regional crop failure doesn’t just kill people in that region. It creates refugees. It destabilizes governments. It triggers conflicts that spill across borders and consume the attention of the entire international community for decades.
Now look at the yield table again. Under the old RCP8.5 trajectory, we were heading for 32-42% maize losses and 26-34% wheat losses globally, not regionally. At 4°C warming, the probability of synchronized crop failures across the world’s top four maize-producing regions rises from near-zero today to 86% (Tigchelaar et al., PNAS 2018).
That’s not one Ireland. That’s not one Syria. That’s multiple breadbaskets failing in the same years, in a world of 9.7 billion people, where only 8% of rice enters international trade and there’s no global buffer to absorb the shock.
The IPCC projected 600 million to 3 billion additional people facing hunger risk under that trajectory. But here’s what those numbers actually mean: we wouldn’t be deliberating about economic systems or contemplating human potential. We’d be managing refugee crises. Rationing food. Watching democracies buckle under the strain of populations that have lost faith in institutions that couldn’t keep them fed.
That’s the 50% scenario. Not half the world starving to death. Half the world caught up in cascading crises triggered by food system failures—displacement, conflict, political collapse—while the other half scrambles to respond.
And here’s what makes it tragic: we have 8 billion people on this planet. More humans than ever before. More potential than ever before. More minds that could be solving problems we haven’t even imagined yet, building things we can’t yet conceive. But not if they’re fighting over calories. Not if the world’s attention is consumed by refugee crises and food riots and the slow collapse of institutions that couldn’t keep people fed.
The old trajectory wasn’t just pointing toward suffering. It was pointing toward waste. The waste of human potential on a scale we’ve never seen—billions of people trapped solving problems we solved centuries ago, instead of building the future. How unbearably boring. How completely unnecessary.
That was the trajectory. That’s what we bent away from.
The Geography of Vulnerability
Here’s where it gets concerning:
Rice (738 million tonnes/year): 90% is grown in Asia, concentrated in monsoon-dependent river deltas. China and India alone produce over half the world’s rice. These are among the most climate-vulnerable regions on Earth—threatened by changing monsoon patterns, sea level rise in coastal deltas, and heat stress during critical flowering periods. Only 8% of rice is traded internationally. If Asian rice production fails, there is no global market to compensate.
Wheat (671 million tonnes/year): Grown primarily in temperate zones—China, India, Russia, the US, France. Wheat is particularly vulnerable to heat waves during grain-fill and to shifting precipitation patterns. The 2010 Russian heat wave cut their wheat harvest by a third and triggered global price spikes that contributed to political instability across North Africa.
Maize (873 million tonnes/year): The US produces 40% of the world’s maize, with China and Brazil as other major producers. Maize is extremely sensitive to drought and heat during pollination. A single bad year in the US Corn Belt affects global food prices.
Roots and tubers: Over one billion people in developing nations depend on cassava, yams, sweet potatoes, and taro. Cassava alone is the basic food source for 500 million people. In sub-Saharan Africa, roots and tubers provide 40% of calories for half the population. Nigeria produces 70% of the world’s yams—that’s not diversification, that’s a single point of failure.
| Crop | Annual Production | People Dependent | Primary Growing Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rice | 738M tonnes | ~3.5 billion | Asia (90%) |
| Wheat | 671M tonnes | ~2.5 billion | Temperate zones |
| Maize | 873M tonnes | ~1.5 billion | Americas, China |
| Cassava | 269M tonnes | ~500 million | Tropical Africa, SE Asia |
| Potatoes | 365M tonnes | ~1 billion | Global |
| Yams | 60M tonnes | ~300 million | West Africa (70%) |
This is the geography of vulnerability. When the crops that feed half of humanity are concentrated in climate-sensitive regions where adaptation infrastructure is weakest, and international trade can’t substitute for regional failures, you understand why the old trajectory pointed toward catastrophe.
We Bent the Curve
Here’s what the doom-and-gloom crowd doesn’t mention: we changed the trajectory.
In the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2021-2022), the expected warming pathway shifted from the old RCP8.5 “business as usual” toward SSP2-4.5. That’s still bad—2.1 to 3.5°C of warming—but it’s the difference between mass starvation and manageable crisis. The difference between 32-42% maize losses and 15-26%. The difference between synchronized breadbasket failures and regional challenges we can adapt to.
Look at that table again. We moved from the bottom row toward the middle one. Policy did that. Work did that. Millions of people making incremental changes to how we generate power, build buildings, and grow food.
We are no longer on the trajectory where half the world’s food systems collapse. We’ve bent the curve. Not enough—we still have enormous work ahead—but the worst-case scenarios are no longer the expected outcome.
We still have a lot of work to do. But we obviously know how to do this work. We do it every day.
What Actually Matters
The climate fight isn’t about who’s in the White House or which bill passes. It’s about millions of people doing the work. Engineers fixing the duck curve problem with solar storage. Policy people changing how wind turbine payments are structured so farmers can actually live with them. Building scientists making HVAC systems that don’t waste half their energy. Crop scientists developing new heat-tolerant varieties. (There were over 12,000 new wheat varieties registered last year alone. The adaptation is happening.)
You want to know my leadership philosophy? Work plus optimism equals outcomes. Not work plus outcomes equals optimism. You don’t wait until you see proof something will work before you believe it will work. You decide it’s going to work, and then you make decisions from that place.
I decided I was going to arrest climate change within capitalism because that’s the system we have. That’s the timeline we have. That’s the tools we have.
Call it pragmatism. Call it selling out. I call it doing the math.
The work is what matters. Not the purity of your ideology. Not whether you won the argument about economic systems. The work.
And the work is working.