By restricting its own cleaner oil production, California now imports 80% of its oil. Its refineries require a specific 'heavy crude' that matches oil from Iraq and South America. This has led to the perverse outcome of expanding oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest to fuel California's cars, increasing global emissions.

Stratospheric aerosol injection doesn't remove CO2; it only masks its warming effects, requiring constant replenishment. If the program is stopped for any reason (e.g., political instability), decades of suppressed warming would be unleashed rapidly. This creates a perpetual technological commitment with immense risk.

Tech billionaire Bill Gates supports a radical concept called solar radiation management: releasing aerosols to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. This moves the idea of a "sun visor for Earth" from science fiction to a seriously considered, albeit controversial, last-resort solution for climate tipping points.

The concept of solar geoengineering originated from a 2006 proposal by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen. He foresaw that reducing health-harming sulfur pollution would eliminate its planet-cooling side effect and suggested intentionally placing reflective particles high in the atmosphere to replicate the cooling with fewer health risks.

Unlike traditional environmental issues where nations can "free ride" by not participating, solar geoengineering allows any single actor to unilaterally increase the cooling effect. However, no single actor can unilaterally reduce it, creating a dangerous governance lock-in where the world may be forced to accept the level desired by the most aggressive nation.

A study on a Chinese policy providing free coal heating north of the Huai River, but not south, created a natural experiment. This revealed that the resulting increase in particulate pollution caused residents in the north to live, on average, five years less than their southern counterparts.

After holding a consensus view for 30 years, climate scientists revised the "equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter." This change reduced the probability of extreme temperature increases (e.g., 4-5°C) for a given amount of CO2, recalibrating end-of-century projections towards a less catastrophic, though still severe, path.

When sustainable investors starve "brown" (high-emission) companies of capital, those firms become capital-constrained, which can lead them to increase emissions. Meanwhile, investing more in already-green firms has little impact on their already-low emissions. The net result of this common ESG strategy could be an overall increase in pollution.

Despite an increase in extreme weather events like hurricanes, the average wind speed on land has dropped significantly. This counterintuitive phenomenon, known as "global terrestrial stilling," is likely caused by global warming reducing the temperature differential between the poles and the equator, which is the primary driver of wind.