High-Energy
Repair.
A hundred-year program to return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels through engineering.
The climate movement has spent fifty years asking how much we should sacrifice. That was the wrong question. The right question is how much energy we need to repair the atmosphere by engineering: clean, abundant, cheap. The answer turns out to be a lot, and entirely within reach.
Solar is the cheapest electricity in human history. Hyperscalers are pouring hundreds of billions into nuclear and grid buildout. Fracking technology is being repurposed to scale enhanced geothermal. The cost curves crossed while the policy debate was still arguing about carbon taxes.
What that crossover unlocks is a sequenced, hundred-year program built on four pillars. Make energy abundant. Drive new emissions to zero. Remove the legacy stock. Harden what we have already built for the warming we have already locked in.
Each phase depends on the one before it. The economics of each phase are already known. This page tracks the work.
Abundant
Clean Energy.
Two curves
In 2024, the levelized cost of utility-scale solar fell below fossil fuels for the first time in human history. The curve has not flattened. Manufactured energy costs fall with cumulative production. Extractive energy costs rise as the easy reserves are worked through. Two curves crossing, on opposite trajectories, with no plausible mechanism to reverse either.
The unlock
Below two cents per kilowatt-hour, the economic logic of most industrial processes inverts. Synthesizing hydrocarbons becomes cheaper than drilling for them. Pulling CO2 from air becomes cheaper than letting it accumulate. Desalinating seawater becomes cheaper than rationing fresh water. The pillar is about what cheap electricity makes affordable on the other side.
Reasons for conviction
Hyperscalers are funding R&D in new manufactured energy at absorptive capacity: fission, fusion, advanced geothermal. Aggregate spend on new energy production now exceeds fossil fuel industry spend on new production. The cost curve does not bend without that capital. The capital is here.
Net Zero
Emissions.
The split
Roughly sixty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from burning fuel: electricity and heat (30%), vehicles (14%), industrial furnaces (~8%), and buildings (6%). The remaining forty percent are non-combustion. Chemical and biological processes that release CO2 and methane without anyone lighting a match: land use changes (~22%), agriculture and livestock (12%), process reactions like limestone calcination (~5%), and waste decomposition (3%).
The bridge
The combustion sixty percent falls as Pillar 1 cheapens electricity and electrification eats fossil substitutes directly. The non-combustion forty percent is harder. Cement chemistry, fertilizer synthesis, and synthetic fuels move only when green hydrogen is cheap, which means electrolyzers running on Pillar 1 electricity. Agriculture, livestock, and waste need biological and chemical paths of their own. Land use needs policy and restoration. The toolkit exists. The economics arrive in sequence.
Reasons for conviction
Every combustion category has a substitution path with a closing cost gap. EVs reach price parity in the United States around 2027. Heat pumps already dominate new construction in cold climates. Green hydrogen breaks even with grey at roughly $1.50 per kilogram, achievable below two-cent electricity. The technology stack exists. The remaining work is buildout speed.
Carbon
Removal.
The stock
Net zero stops the bathtub from filling. It does not drain it. Roughly 3,200 gigatons of legacy CO2 sit in the atmosphere today. We have to remove about 2,000 gigatons to return to pre-industrial chemistry. Natural absorption (oceans, soils, vegetation) sets a floor. Engineered removal sets the trajectory.
The portfolio
The math requires roughly 30 gigatons per year of combined removal by the 2060s, sustained for a half-century. No single method delivers that scale. Direct air capture is the most expensive, most scalable, most rule-of-thumb-friendly path: today $400 to $1,000 per ton, falling toward $100 at two-cent electricity. Enhanced rock weathering and ocean alkalinity are cheaper per ton today but cap out at smaller scale. Biomass burial sits between. The portfolio carries the load.
Reasons for conviction
The market is forming on the demand side. Frontier (Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, McKinsey) has committed over $1 billion to advance market commitments. Microsoft has signed multi-gigaton offtakes. The 45Q tax credit pays up to $180 per ton for engineered removal. Revealed willingness to pay is the foundation any commodity needs. It exists.
Infrastructure
Resilience.
Locked in
The warming through 2050 is already in the system. Sea-level rise, hydrology shifts, heat domes, lengthened wildfire seasons, water table changes. The first three pillars determine how much worse it gets after 2050. The fourth pillar determines whether the civilization running the first three pillars holds together while it does the work.
The hardening
Water systems for PFAS, drought, and contamination. Cold chain for food security in regions where the differential to ambient temperature is widening. Waste systems for legacy contamination and methane capture. Grid resilience for the higher-variance climate already here. The work is mostly retrofit, mostly capital-intensive, mostly underfunded relative to the asset base it is protecting.
Reasons for conviction
Insurance markets are repricing climate risk faster than policy is. Swiss Re forecasts a global insurance protection gap above $180 billion by 2030. Where insurance withdraws, capital follows toward hardening. Florida's homeowner insurance crisis is the first inning of a market mechanism that will finance Pillar 4 whether or not federal policy keeps pace.
The four pillars are not predictions. They are a map.
The trajectory bends because founders, investors, and operators choose to bend it, financed by markets that have finally caught up to the physics. This page exists because the work is too distributed and too important to track only inside policy decks and analyst briefings. We publish the indicators here so anyone serious about the next century can see them.