The remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C (50% probability) was ~250 GtCO₂ as of January 2023, equivalent to ~6 years of emissions at current levels.
On the record
Claims
Claims this paper currently holds about the world — sourced, statused, and open to revision.
10 notes · 28 claims · 17 wikilinks
Open claims
The USA has emitted ~400 billion tonnes CO₂ since 1751, approximately 25% of all historical emissions.
ClearSpace-1, led by OHB SE with Swiss firm ClearSpace, will be the first mission to remove an actual, unprepared, uncooperative piece of space debris, rendezvousing with and deorbiting ESA's PROBA-1 satellite (launched 2001, ~95 kg) using…
Binding debris rules remain partial: ESA's Zero Debris Approach target (2030) binds only ESA and partners, while the industry-wide Zero Debris Charter is non-binding, signed by 19 countries and over 150 entities.
James Boyle's "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain" (2003) argues that intellectual property expansion in the digital age parallels the historical enclosure of English common land, fencing off the "intan…
Khattar & Kostakis (2026, Internet Policy Review) argue that large-scale AI extraction from digital commons (e.g., Wikipedia) constitutes a form of enclosure: contributions are absorbed into proprietary models with no value returning to th…
Markets with strong network effects tend to "tip" toward a single dominant player, resulting in natural monopolies — provided users value network effects over differentiation and face high switching costs.
The Microsoft "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy used network effects to displace open standards by adding proprietary extensions that fragment the commons.
Matthew Green (Johns Hopkins cryptographer) argues that AI-driven vulnerability finding will exhaust remotely exploitable software bugs within ~2 years, leaving law enforcement and intelligence agencies unable to hack into devices for the …
The UK's sewer system is still based on Joseph Bazalgette's Victorian design from the 1850s-60s, built in response to the Great Stink of 1858 — and in summer 2026, weeks of temperatures exceeding 30C with minimal rainfall have produced a c…
Prof Barbara Evans (Leeds) calls the sewer network a "giant intestine" and says the system is "at the extreme of what it can cope with," recommending separation of grey water from black water as Sweden and Germany have begun doing — "we ha…
Space surveillance networks track about 40,000 objects, roughly 11,000 of them active payloads, but debris objects larger than 1 cm — large enough to cause catastrophic damage — are estimated at over 1.2 million.
Around 550 km altitude, the band preferred by communication constellations, the density of threatening debris is now the same order of magnitude as the density of active satellites.
Fragmentation is outrunning natural cleanup: in 2024 several major fragmentation events plus many smaller ones added at least 3,000 tracked objects in a single year, and even with no additional launches debris would keep growing because fr…
Over 50,000 objects larger than 10 cm are estimated to orbit, versus the roughly 40,000 actually tracked by surveillance networks.
The UK's sewer system is still based on Joseph Bazalgette's Victorian design from the 1850s-60s, built in response to the Great Stink of 1858 — and in summer 2026, weeks of temperatures exceeding 30°C with minimal rainfall have produced a …
Prof Barbara Evans (Leeds) calls the sewer network a "giant intestine" and says the system is "at the extreme of what the system can cope with," recommending separation of grey water from black water as Sweden and Germany have begun doing …
Matthew Green (Johns Hopkins cryptographer) argues that AI-driven vulnerability finding will exhaust remotely exploitable software bugs within ~2 years, leaving law enforcement and intelligence agencies unable to hack into devices for the …
China published its 15th five-year plan for the coal industry, via the NDRC, on 14 Aug 2026 — Carbon Brief's same-day Q&A reads it against climate action.
SpaceNews opinion (Smith, 14 Aug 2026): as launch costs fall and mass stops being the binding constraint, spacecraft design's bottleneck moves to power, heat, surface area, stowed volume and delivery time — i.e., the metric a program must …
Scientists predict the peak of the current El Niño will occur between October and December — the end of the Amazon dry season, when rivers are at their lowest and undergrowth most likely to be tinder-dry — the worst possible timing for the…
Spain's environment ministry opened an investigation after 'Toñi', the matriarch of the Iberian orca pod known for jostling and ramming boats, was seen in the Strait of Gibraltar with dorsal-fin wounds the ministry describes as 'consistent…
The UK prime minister on Friday acknowledged for the first time that the climate crisis is behind hundreds of wildfires across parts of the UK, while being criticised for moving to cut electric-vehicle sales targets and accept North Sea dr…
The UN COPUOS Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines, endorsed by the General Assembly in 2007, remain the primary international framework — non-binding.
The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) published original Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines in 2007 and updated them in 2025 — still voluntary.
ESA's internal Space Debris Mitigation Policy was most recently updated 3 February 2026 — binding only for ESA and cooperating partners.
The compendium lists national mechanisms from over 40 countries (Algeria through Uruguay), updated as recently as January 2026 (Brazil, Cyprus, France, Türkiye, Uruguay), showing active national lawmaking but no unified regime.
The 1968 Rescue Agreement requires returning foreign space objects found in territory — the only binding treaty touching debris, and it concerns recovery rather than prevention.
Filed with
Loose notes
- Carbon budget as contested commons
- ClearSpace-1 / active debris removal
- Digital commons and platform enclosure
- Going dark, AI bug hunting, and law enforcement
- London sewers, climate
- Orbital commons / Kessler syndrome
- Scaled: debris-vs-tracked numbers 2024
- Today-news intake
- UNOOSA Space Debris Mitigation Standards Compendium
- Welcome to The Survey