Index
Can Purse Strings Pull The Emergency Brakes?
24 February 2026
Peter Coffee
There’s a common challenge of “gotcha” math that asks some version of, “If someone drives for half a mile at thirty miles per hour, what speed during the next half-mile will make their average sixty mph?” The no-math-needed answer is that the first half-mile has already taken a minute: no time remains to finish a one-minute mile, no finite speed can get it done. That’s becoming the math of climate-change tipping points, requiring intensified attention to our remaining options to prevent them – as observed by Jonathan Foley, analyzing imminent threats of critical thresholds for global temperature rise at Project Drawdown:
We need to stabilize and cut emissions by roughly 50% by the early 2030s – but we are falling behind. To get back on track, we need “Emergency Brake” measures to reduce emissions as quickly as possible. “Emergency Brake” measures must be ready to go now, without delay. They can’t wait for new infrastructure to be built. They can’t wait for new technology to be developed. And they can’t wait for nature to accumulate carbon in trees and soils.
Foley continues: “To start, I would focus on deforestation, fugitive emissions of methane from fossil fuels, and ‘black carbon’ emissions from dirty cookstoves, biomass burning, and other sources.” Coincidentally, last week’s note here addressed fugitive methane—and the note on 6 January addressed deforestation, so perhaps we’ve been looking at some of the right levers to pull.
As Foley observed, though, there’s not enough time to address things on a time scale of infrastructure overhaul (let alone massive transformation) – nor can we wait for nature to do the job alone. What can make things happen quickly is human behavior change – and if you want to see people change their behavior quickly, reframe the situation from “you should care about this, because it’s going to matter someday” to “this is costing you money right now.”
Usefully, just this week, the New York Times looked at climate through the lens of “Is climate change making inflation worse?” – and yes, it is, which perhaps might get people to eat less beef, and adjust their clothing choices rather than relying on their furnace and their air conditioner to maintain one comfortable year-round temperature. Unlike some things, these and other changes could happen on a time scale of pulling the emergency brake, rather than just lightening our foot on the accelerator pedal.
The beef connection is obvious, as in you-can-see-it-from-space: “beef has driven about 120 million acres of forest destruction globally between 2001 and 2022, an area larger than the state of California,” notes Benji Jones at Vox, in a comment this week on a newly published paper in the journal Nature Food. Beef production devastates more than four times the area that’s directly affected by any other single food.
That Nature Food paper also warns, though, that
Our findings indicate that while global efforts to curb deforestation appropriately focus on cattle meat, oil palm, rubber, soya, cocoa and coffee, global monitoring efforts have largely overlooked staple crops such as rice, maize and cassava. Given their substantial contribution to deforestation and carbon emissions, balancing food security with forest and climate conservation will require greater attention to these.
So, not enough to eat more tofu.
The heating-and-cooling connection needs more rigor to measure, since finger-in-the-wind analysis might balance a need for more air conditioning in the summers against less heating during the winters. Here in the Seattle area, for example, local news reported yesterday that the past three months have averaged more than 4ºF warmer than what’s considered normal, so isn’t that lowering the carbon footprint? The Climate Portal at MIT has looked at that trade-off, though, and found that “heating creates much more climate pollution than air conditioning, but emissions from air conditioning are rising faster: cooling could soon eclipse heating as a climate change contributor.” It’s about human behavior again:
MIT scientists have studied this issue with colleagues in Portugal. “This is definitely one of these countries where people traditionally don’t cool – it’s in the Mediterranean, and it’s at a sweet spot where it’s cool enough at night,” says Christoph Reinhart, MIT professor and director of the building technology program. “That is changing rapidly.” And once people have air conditioning, he adds, they typically use it all the time to stay comfortable, and not just on the most extreme days when they can’t live without it.
I’ve previously mentioned a Drucker-et-al. observation that there is no right way to do the wrong thing, and perhaps there’s opportunity here for an original corollary: there’s no fast-enough way to do what’s been left undone for too long. The pocketbook connection, here and now, may be what’s needed to pull the emergency-brake handles that can make things change in single-digits years.