"Keep CO2 below 350 ppm, kids"

I ended up in planetary management. It would have seemed strange to me when I was young, to have spent my life thinking on the planetary scale while living mostly at home, grow a lot of food, doing a lot of community events locally.

Maybe it's not strange to you, that's the world we live in now, right? We have to think about the backstory, the drainage basin, literally and metaphorically, of our activities, and how we fit into the planet's systems. We lost the right to depend on that stuff when our numbers as humans grew out of balance with the rest of the world. Now we have to manage it, because the only option was managing it badly or learning to do it well.

"We have to keep atmospheric CO2 below 350 ppm to keep the planet livable for humans."
That's what we learned the hard way, last century. The climate's getting more stable now, and humans are finally learning to think planetary. It's amazing how different the world is now, from how it was then.

Different places do the management different ways, as you might expect. Monitoring happens centrally in most areas and you know you can always check the monitor's website to find out how our emissions are doing at the moment. We all know that our emissions profiles shift while we are making new innovations - we also know we have to be responsible for that and make up any excess. Some people are making a lot of biochar from all their waste and turning it into black earth. Others are worm farming and trapping the NO2 emissions, and you have probably heard about all the other ways people have to fix down unwanted atmospheric gases.

Each nation in the UN is responsible for the emissions it produces and report to the UN each year. Fair shares have arrived - kind of. Some nations trade their quotas out, but the thing we've worked out it that we have to allocate that same carbon emissions and the same carbon responsibility to every nation.

The UN security council has a new role - I understand it used to mostly be about wars? Anyway nowadays it's the security council who are responsible for monitoring any carbon excess and locking it down the the geological cycle. Any nation who doesn't submit carbon accounts or defaults on commitments is subject to immediate sanctions and massive international scandalized attention.

It's an ongoing process. We spent a century and a half burning geological carbon off into the atmosphere, we are still dealing with the backlog. But at least we know how, nowadays, and eventually everyone in power agreed we had to do it.