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The Overshoot Age: We've Already Crossed the Line — Now What?
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🎙️Available for Broadcast: https://exchange.prx.org/group_accounts/253118-heliox_where_evidence_meets_empathy
In 2024, global temperatures exceeded the 1.5-degree Celsius Paris Agreement threshold for the first time as a full calendar year average. The line humanity spent three decades racing toward is now in the rearview mirror. Scientists call what comes next the overshoot age — and it demands a completely different conversation.
In this episode, hosts Michelle Bruecher and Scott Bleakley explore:
- Why "exceed and decline" has replaced the old single-target paradigm — and why the path down is fundamentally different from the path up
- The irreversibility problem: why cooling a graveyard isn't the same as preventing one
- Six roadblocks to corporate net zero, drawn from practitioners who've deployed over a billion dollars in climate capital — including the SBTI's delisting of $4 trillion in companies and the Scope 3 accounting crisis
- Why the carbon removal industry — the declared safety net for the decline phase — is going broke in a free market that refuses to pay for an averted crisis
- The BECCS land use paradox: the most widely modeled carbon removal solution requires land the size of India, almost certainly overlapping indigenous territories in the Global South
References:
Climate u-turn? What happens if we exceed 1.5°C and then go back
Implications of overshoot for climate mitigation strategies
The hard road back from overshoot
This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy
Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.
Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.
We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.
Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.
We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.
Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.
Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
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