The Earth’s carbon cycle is a delicate system, long in balance before human industrial activity began to disrupt it. This natural system regulates the flow of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans, soil, and biosphere. For most of Earth’s history, it maintained a relatively stable climate, allowing life to flourish. But since the onset of the fossil-fuel age, we have been injecting vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere at a rate far beyond what natural systems can absorb. The result has been a buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, rising temperatures, and cascading impacts on ecosystems, weather systems, and sea levels.
To restore this balance, we need to dramatically reduce carbon emissions while also enhancing carbon sequestration through natural and technological means. But conventional economic and political frameworks have failed to incentivize this transition at the scale and speed required. This is why we must now look beyond traditional tools and consider radical innovations in both finance and climate intervention.
The Promise of the Global Carbon Reward
One of the most visionary proposals for addressing this crisis is the Global Carbon Reward (GCR), a concept developed by Delton Chen. Between 2015 and 2019, I had the opportunity to work with Delton and co-author Joel van der Beek on the foundational papers that introduced this idea. Our work, subsequently cited by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel The Ministry for the Future, proposed a global incentive system to reward verifiable carbon mitigation.
At the heart of the GCR is the Carbon Coin—a form of money issued not for producing goods or services, but for removing or avoiding greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than punishing carbon polluters through taxes or cap-and-trade schemes, the GCR would pay carbon savers. The concept is funded by “Carbon Quantitative Easing” (CQE), in which central banks create money to buy Carbon Coins from verified mitigation providers. This introduces a direct, transparent economic incentive for carbon removal and sustainable practices.
Delton’s work received accolades from institutions like MIT’s Climate CoLab and has gained increasing attention from climate economists and systems theorists. The idea is bold: transform the financial system itself to align with the regeneration of the biosphere. Instead of extracting value from nature, we would reward those who restore and protect it.
The Challenge: Unrealized Potential
Despite its promise, the GCR has yet to be adopted at scale. The barriers are not technical but political and institutional. Financial conservatism, entrenched fossil fuel interests, and the inertia of existing economic paradigms have slowed progress. Governments continue to subsidize carbon-intensive industries while carbon prices remain too low to drive deep transformation. Without bold action, the GCR and other innovative proposals remain hypothetical.
Geoengineering as a Last Resort?
Because the needed emissions reductions and removals are not occurring fast enough, some scientists, including Dr. Mike MacCracken, have argued that we must begin seriously researching solar radiation management (SRM) and other geoengineering approaches. These include technologies to reflect a small portion of sunlight back into space to cool the planet temporarily.
In interviews and writings, Dr. MacCracken emphasizes that while geoengineering is controversial and carries significant risks, it may be necessary to reduce the rate of warming in the near term, buying time for carbon removal strategies like the GCR to take hold. He warns that stabilizing global temperatures at 2.5 to 3°C above preindustrial levels is not viable; we are on a dangerous path toward ecological breakdown, and all serious options must be considered.
SRM is not a substitute for emissions reduction. It does not address ocean acidification or remove carbon from the atmosphere. But in a world where mitigation is stalling and tipping points loom, it may be the least bad option. The key is to approach such interventions with humility, transparency, and global cooperation.
A Systems-Based Approach to Climate Restoration
What unites proposals like the Global Carbon Reward and the cautious exploration of geoengineering is the recognition that we need a new systems paradigm—one that values planetary health and long-term human flourishing over short-term profit. This means redesigning our economic frameworks, rethinking what we reward, and aligning human activity with the Earth’s capacity to sustain life.
We have the knowledge. We have the tools. What we lack is the courage and coordination to act. The carbon balance will not be restored through incremental adjustments to a broken system. It requires a transformation as radical as any scientific revolution—a shift not only in policy, but in worldview.
We must reward what restores, and refuse to profit from what destroys. We must learn to see the Earth not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living system to be healed.
Only then can we hope to restore the carbon balance—and with it, the future of life on Earth.