Welcome to the Climate Restoration Newsletter!

We are restoring a pre-industrial climate by 2050

Welcome to the Climate Restoration newsletter. I'm delighted you're here. This means that you, like me, want to leave our children and future generations a living planet with a climate that enables humanity to thrive.

In future posts, you'll get a deep dive into how we are starting to restore a historically safe, pre-industrial climate; how to inspire policymakers and activists and scientists to adopt the new paradigm of climate restoration; and ways you can help.

My climate restoration journey

I'm Peter Fiekowsky, a physicist, entrepreneur, and activist. My early activism was with RESULTS—a citizens' lobby group that prompted significant, measurable progress in world vaccination and child survival rates from the 1990s through the first decade of the 2000s. Then around 2010, I noticed that the positive trends were slowing and even reversing.

As you'll come to know, all my work is driven by data, and the data said the underlying reason for the negative turnaround was climate change—which was leading to unpredictable seasons, "natural" disasters, and related crop failures.

So I started to wonder...How can we restore a climate in which humanity and Earth’s current ecosystems can flourish? And do it quickly enough to matter for our children?

It turns out that our international climate goals, set back in the 1980s and early '90s, don't say anything about restoring a climate that's proven safe for humanity. They were all about "stabilizing" greenhouse gas levels, and excluding "human interference" in the climate. (They still are.)

Because of these agreed-on goals, the United Nations, national governments, environmental groups, and climate scientists were all focused on stabilizing emissions—now called "net zero." Ideas about intentionally repairing our atmosphere were called "geoengineering" and virtually taboo, since they were considered "interference" in climate systems. (In many settings, they still are.)

Figuring it out: We can do this!

Bucking the conventional wisdom that said net-zero was about all we could do, I set off on a years-long quest to figure out how we actually can bring back the pre-industrial climate in our lifetime. The findings led me to found the new field of climate restoration, and then—with a hard-working team—the climate restoration movement.

Climate restoration is an idea whose time has come. Over the past 30 years, forward-looking scientists and entrepreneurs have figured out how we can do it by enhancing processes that Mother Nature has used to regulate CO2 for millions of years. We can implement them safely, swiftly, and inexpensively. Far from being more difficult and costly than the energy transition-- it turns out they'll cost about 1/1000 of the move to clean energy.

In these posts, you'll hear about:

• Where climate restoration is rapidly advancing

• The ethical dilemma that has held up progress toward restoring a safe climate for decades—and how this is finally changing!

• Why reaching net-zero is necessary—and how climate restoration approaches can get us there decades before 2050

• The most effective pathways to climate restoration

• Why most carbon-dioxide-removal businesses aren't designed to restore the climate—and how to distinguish those that are

• Must-see events on climate restoration

• Ways that you can help shift the climate paradigm toward climate restoration

• And much more!

Thank you for showing up!

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And stay tuned— we WILL restore the climate!