The Complete Framework: How We Actually Solve This
- Lori Guetre
- Mar 7
- 13 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
We know how to solve climate change.
Not "kind of." Not "maybe, if everything goes perfectly." We know. The science is settled, the engineering solutions exist, the economics are validated, and the pathway is visible from here to the finish line. Every layer of the solution - from the physics of the atmosphere to the label on your grocery shelf - is understood and within reach.
What we've been missing is not a breakthrough. It's a complete picture. A way of seeing all the layers at once, understanding how they connect, and knowing where each of us fits.
That's what this post is about. We'll walk through the framework that holds everything together. Some of this will be familiar. Some of it may be new. All of it is real, and all of it is already within human capability.
Grab a coffee. Let's go.
1. The Problem: Breaching Planetary Boundaries
Let's start with the honest version of where we are.
Scientists have identified nine Planetary Boundaries - the conditions within which human civilization has always existed and thrived. Think of them as the guardrails of a habitable planet. Right now, we've pushed through six of them. Six of nine guardrails, gone.
We are, right now, outside the safe operating space for humanity. That's the honest starting point. But here's what follows immediately from that: we know exactly what "back inside the safe zone" looks like. We have a target. We have a map. We have tools.
That matters more than most people realize. Because once you understand the map, you can see that this isn’t the first time humanity has faced a global environmental challenge and fixed it. We’ve done this before - with the ozone layer, with acid rain, with leaded gasoline. When we set clear rules and use the tools we already have, global systems heal.
Climate is the same kind of engineering challenge, just applied to carbon dioxide. It is the most urgent, measurable, and tractable of the six. It's also the gateway - if we get climate right, we also help to bring others back into safe territory. So that's where we focus.
One of the most persistent misconceptions about climate change is that it's primarily an industrial problem - something that happens in factories and power plants and oil fields, far from our daily lives. It's not. Or rather, it's not only that.
When you trace every tonne of global emissions from its source to its final use, a different picture emerges. About 81% of global emissions end up directly serving personal consumption: the food we eat, the way we get around, the energy that heats and cools our homes, the products we buy. The other 19% serves shared systems - government, infrastructure, things we consume collectively.
This isn't an accusation. It's a systems observation. Producers emit on our behalf, and those emissions are embedded invisibly in the prices we pay. We're not doing this on purpose - we've simply never been given a clear view of the system. But understanding that 81% means something important: the solution isn't only about cleaning up industrial processes. It has to include the consumer side. The demand side. Us.
That's not a burden. It's actually good news - and the next three steps explain why.
2. Technical Feasibility: We Have the Tools
Here's the part that young people most need to hear, and the part that we haven't explained very well.
By "doing our best," we can abate almost everything.
Goldman Sachs has published their Carbonomics research (2019–2023) – a rigorous and iterative analysis of what it costs to decarbonize each sector of the global economy. They use something called a Marginal Abatement Cost Curve, or MACC: a ranked list of every available solution, from cheapest to most expensive, showing how much emissions each one eliminates. The picture is remarkably consistent across their five iterations: the vast majority of global emissions can be abated with tools that already exist, at costs that are already competitive or falling fast.
The last 10–15% is genuinely hard. Aviation. Shipping. Some industrial processes. Cement. These are the sectors where electrification alone isn't enough - where we need what's called permanent Carbon Dioxide Removal, or CDR: technology that either pulls CO₂ directly from the atmosphere and stores it permanently underground or permanently removes it on geological timescales through another science-aligned pathway. CDR is no longer speculative. It exists. It's being deployed. It's expensive today, but costs are falling along a familiar curve.
The solutions exist across every sector. This is a solvable engineering challenge, not an open question.
3. Economic Feasibility: We Can Afford It
The total bill for getting to Geo Zero (Geological Net Zero - reducing emissions everywhere we can and permanently removing the rest) is about 4.5% of global GDP per year if we include CDR as the backstop for the hard-to-abate sectors. That number is expected to continue falling as we deploy today's solutions and keep innovating. And we should expect that number to rise - steeply and dangerously - if we don't deploy CDR and leave those last sectors unresolved. So the economics actually argue strongly for building the complete solution set today, not just the easy parts.
4.5% of global GDP per year sounds large, but it's comparable to what we already spend on many discretionary parts of modern life. And when you zoom in to the product level, the picture gets even clearer:
A cup of coffee: ~2.7% more.
An iPhone: ~1.6% more.
A pint of beer: ~1% more.
For most everyday products, the cost of making them completely clean is in the range of 1–3%. It's a budgeting choice - one that leaves plenty of room for living well. Capital is ready too: pension funds, patient investors, and infrastructure financiers are waiting for the policy signals that connect them to the demand that net zero law has already created. The money isn't the constraint. The plumbing is.
4. Social Feasibility: The Will is Already There
Here's something that might surprise you.
Polls consistently show that the majority of people in most countries support meaningful climate action. Not a slim majority - a strong one. You are almost certainly not alone in caring about this. Your neighbours probably care. Your colleagues probably care. The person ahead of you in the grocery line probably cares.
So why does it feel like nobody is doing anything?
Because caring privately and acting visibly are different things. And because politicians don't respond to what people actually believe - they respond to what they think people believe. When the majority stays quiet, even a vocal minority can convince governments that the public is indifferent or opposed. The signal gets distorted. Action stalls. And the quiet majority looks around, sees no one else moving, and waits a little longer.
Social scientists have a term for it - pluralistic ignorance - and it's one of the most powerful brakes on sustainable action. Not denial. Not indifference. Just everyone waiting for everyone else to go first.
Sociologist Erica Chenoweth studied hundreds of social movements and found something remarkable: when roughly 3.5% of a population participates visibly in a cause, it almost always achieves its goal. Not because of pressure alone - but because visible participation changes what politicians believe is politically safe. It corrects the signal.
The bridge doesn't need to manufacture support that doesn't exist. It needs to make the support that already exists legible - to the people who hold it, to each other, and to the decision-makers who are waiting for permission to act. Possible by Design is trying to help make the supermajority visible to itself.
5. The Target: Geological Net Zero, Planetary Boundaries Test
Here's a step that often gets skipped, and it matters.
Before we can say "here's the mechanism to fix it," we need to be precise about what "fixed" actually means. And the answer isn't just "net zero CO₂ by 2050." That's a milestone, not a destination.
The destination is returning to safe operating space within all of the planetary boundaries. For climate specifically, that means - as Oxford physicist Myles Allen and his colleagues have rigorously demonstrated - that every tonne of carbon dioxide we release from geological storage (fossil fuels) must eventually be returned to geological storage. Not absorbed by forests. Not offset by hopeful accounting. Actually, physically, permanently returned underground or otherwise locked away.
This is called Geological Net Zero. It's a stricter definition than what most people mean when they say "net zero" or "carbon neutral", and it has an important implication: we need our forests to remain vibrant and healthy for many reasons, but we can't count on forests to do the carbon disposal work for us. We have to build the disposal infrastructure. The good news is that the infrastructure exists and can be scaled. The mandate just needs to be clear.
But there's a second dimension to this test that matters just as much: solutions must not solve one boundary problem by breaking another. For instance, some carbon "offset" projects have been criticized for planting monoculture crops that deplete fresh water, harm biodiversity, add air and water pollution through pesticides and agrochemicals, and displace entire communities. Not to mention that while temporary carbon storage in the active biosphere can be helpful, temporary storage does not get us to Geo Zero. The climate accounting must be sound and a solution that tries to help with one boundary while straining others (or causing other problems) isn't actually a solution.
This is why the Planetary Boundaries framework, taken as a whole, is a necessary test for every proposed solution. Not just "does it reduce carbon?" but "does it do so without pushing us further outside safe operating space elsewhere?" That's the standard. It rules out shortcuts. And it happens to point strongly toward the most elegant solutions - geological storage, efficiency, genuine decarbonization - rather than large-scale biological or chemical interventions that carry their own boundary risks.
This step - the Planetary Boundaries test - is the frame that makes everything else honest. It tells us what we're actually aiming at, and it rules out both accounting tricks and unintended consequences.
6. The Outcome: Living Well in a Sustainable World
Here's where we're going.
Geological Net Zero. Every tonne of CO₂ released from underground is matched by a tonne returned underground or locked away. Emissions carry the full honest cost of responsible disposal. The ramp has completed, the technology has scaled, the costs have fallen.
People are living well - not despite the transition, but partly because of it. The decarbonized economy turns out to be cleaner, quieter, healthier, and in many cases cheaper than the one it replaced. Not because people sacrificed, but because good design won.
The planetary boundaries trend back toward safe operating space. Not overnight. Not without significant effort and decades building the infrastructure we need. But on a trajectory that's visible and real.
That's not a fantasy. It's an engineering plan, with every layer already in place, waiting to be connected.
That's the complete picture - the six-step framework from diagnosis to destination. The bridge, if you will, from where we are to Solid Ground.
Author's Note: This post was written in early 2026, while we were still working out the full system - stewing on the mechanisms, the gaps, the roles, and why good intentions alone keep falling short. The sections that follow go deeper on some of those ideas: the mechanism that makes the price tell the truth, the consumer signal that makes choices visible, the human dimension of despair and agency, and the roles that every actor plays.
What emerged from all that thinking was the Agency Architecture - a complete system that takes the Framework all the way to action. The Five Air Gaps explains why, with all this technology and awareness, the system keeps working against us. And the Milestone Map gives every actor group - governments, producers, builders, scientists, and the rest of us - a specific lane and a sequence. If this post is where the picture came into focus, the Architecture is where it became a plan.
You're invited to keep reading some of that background thinking below or skip straight to the Architecture.
The Mechanism: Making the Price Tell the Truth
Now we get to the part that, when understood, often produces a slow nod and then a frustrated "...why aren't we already doing this?"
Markets are extraordinary tools for allocating resources efficiently - but only when prices are honest. Right now, the price of almost every product in the global economy is dishonest in one specific way: it doesn't include the small incremental cost of disposing of the greenhouse gas emissions that product generates.
We're all, collectively, dumping greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere the way a factory might once have dumped waste into a river - when nobody was watching and because nobody made them pay for cleanup. The good news? We can clean it up and still live well – indeed most products will cost about 2% more once we fix that. The challenge? We've done a terrible job of explaining this small, incremental cost.
The fix is elegant in principle: load the cost of responsible greenhouse gas disposal into the price of the product. Not as a tax that goes into general revenue. As a literal mandate - producers must account for and publish the climate footprint of their products, and ultimately, residual emissions must be abated through permanent CDR so that products are genuinely leaving no greenhouse gas pollution behind.
Here's the key design feature that makes this work without causing economic chaos: the decarbonization mandate ramps up gradually. Start at a modest fraction of full decarbonization today and increase predictably to 100% by 2045–2050. This gives producers time to decarbonize their supply chains competitively, rather than absorbing a sudden cost shock. It gives consumers time to adjust. And critically, it lets market competition drive solution costs down faster than the ramp rises - which is exactly what happened with solar, with EVs, with every viable technology that got the right market signal.
Governments need to open all pathways and set standards that work - letting producers compete on who can decarbonize most efficiently. Add Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms - CBAMs - to ensure that imports from countries without equivalent pricing don't undercut producers who are playing by the rules.
This is the policy framework that everything else hangs on. It's not radical. It's not punishing. It's honest accounting, applied consistently, with a timeline that gives everyone room to adapt.
Visible Signal: Climate Footprint Labels
Here's where it gets personal - and where any country could have a first-mover opportunity today.
The mechanism described above operates primarily at the producer and policy level. It will shift supply chains. It will drive investment. It will work. But it does something else too, or rather, it can do something else if we design it right: it can make the climate cost of our choices visible at the moment we make them.
Climate footprint labels.
Just as nutritional labels changed how people understood what they were eating - not by telling people what to do, but by giving them honest information - climate footprint labels give consumers a legible signal at point of purchase. They activate the consumer side of the responsibility equation. They create competitive pressure on producers. And they empower the supermajority - when people can see the impact of their choices, they feel like participants rather than spectators.
This is not a heavy regulatory lift - it's a disclosure requirement, the kind of thing countries have done successfully before. The EU has mandatory carbon footprint requirements for electric vehicle batteries and the EU and China are already moving toward mandatory climate footprint labelling. Footprint calculation methodologies already exist, but the rules are far from being final; every country can join and lead. And being first on a standard that the whole world will eventually adopt has real economic and reputational value.
The Human Dimension: From Despair to Agency
I want to be direct about something that doesn't get said enough.
We have left young people - many people - with a burden they never asked for and no tools to put the burden down.
Climate anxiety and grief are real, clinically recognized, and growing. My sister Debbie has spent her career as a counselling psychology professor watching this unfold in her students - not just anxiety about the future, but a particular kind of despair that comes from caring deeply about something that feels completely outside your control.
That despair is rational in its origin. The problem is real. The stakes are real. The inaction is real. When you understand all of that and feel powerless to change any of it, despair is a reasonable response.
And yet - the tools exist. The pathway is clear. Your choices, your voice, and your vote matter in ways that are quantifiable and real.
Possible by Design's support to mental health isn't to ask people to cope with a problem that can't be solved. It's to help dissolve the source of the despair by showing people the complete picture, giving them real tools, and connecting them to a community of people who are already acting - helping to restore a sense of agency and possibility.
If you've ever wondered why, with all the technology and all the awareness and all the summits, it still feels stuck - we've written about that too - it's the second part of the Agency Architecture. The Five Air Gaps names exactly what's been broken in the system - and why even well-intentioned individual action hasn't been enough on its own. It's not a moral failure. It's a systems failure. And systems failures have systems fixes.
The Roles: Everyone Has One
One of the things I appreciate most about the complete framework is that it has a place for everyone. There's no one left out, and everyone is carrying their share.
Scientists keep refining the data, tightening the models, and holding the line on intellectual honesty. Without them we're navigating blind. Myles Allen, Johan Rockström, and hundreds of others are doing this work every day.
Builders and innovators deploy solutions at speed - the solar panels, the heat pumps, the carbon removal projects, the cleaner materials. Their job is to drive costs down the learning curve fast while the policy ramp rises.
Producers compete on decarbonization because it's priced into survival. They're not the villains here - they respond to price signals like every other economic actor. Empower consumers with knowledge and climate footprint labels, give the producers the right signal with a predictable ramp and an open field of solutions, and they will innovate.
Governments open all pathways, require honest accounting, set the ramp, and ensure global accounting isn't gamed. This is not small government versus big government - it's government doing what only government can do: setting the rules of the game so markets can run efficiently.
The Rest of Us - and this is where we all come in - understand our part, make visible choices, demand the policy, hold the line, and give each other permission to act. We are not powerless. We are the demand side. We are the voters. We are the social proof. We are, in aggregate, the most powerful force in this system.
These aren't just personal sustainable decisions and actions. They're votes in a running referendum on what kind of world we want. They help correct the signal. They help give our politicians the green light to make smart policy choices.
You don't need to be loud. You just need to be quietly visible in a way that works best for you.
These roles are mapped in much more detail - with specific actions, sequenced across three phases - in the Milestone Map, part of the Agency Architecture. Together, the three reports form a complete system: the Framework, the Five Air Gaps, and the Milestone Map. You can find all three here.
Why This Matters Right Now
We have, for the first time, a complete picture. Not just the problem, not just some of the solutions, but the whole architecture - from planetary boundaries to grocery shelves to the social permission layer that makes all of it politically viable.
That's what Possible by Design is here to connect. Not to build every layer - the scientists, the builders, the policymakers, the producers are already working on their pieces. But to make the whole thing visible, legible, and actionable for every person who says: "I care. I have five minutes. What can I do?"
The answer is clearer than it's ever been. And as Dr. Hannah Ritchie has noted, we are the first generation with the tools to solve for both sustainability and human wellbeing at the same time.
Let's do this.
Possible by Design is a Canadian nonprofit helping individuals, companies, and governments understand and act on the complete climate picture. This post is the initial foundation for the Agency Architecture - a three-part series that shows the complete system from diagnosis to action. The Framework, the Five Air Gaps, and the Milestone Map are available now - start at the Agency Architecture page.
