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The Climate Problem

There is a dangerous fantasy in current climate discourse: the idea that if we just stop emitting today, the problem goes away. This is physically impossible

  • The Atmospheric Sewer: We have roughly 900 gigatons of legacy CO2 already displaced in our atmosphere. This is "legacy carbon"—the industrial waste of the last two centuries artificially turned from solid to gas..
     

  • The Red Herring: Even if we hit zero emissions tomorrow, that "carbon pile-up" stays there for hundreds or thousands of years. It doesn't dissipate; it just sits there, continuing to overheat the planet. This is not the place to put our energies.
     

  • The Target: We have reached a point where we must artificially remove about 781 gigatons of CO2 just to return to the safe paleo-geologic level of 350 ppm.
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  • The Clock: With 7 years before climate change becomes self-perpetuating our only chance is to upscale Direct Atmospheric Carbon Removal. Komor for Governor will begin this work on day one creating jobs and revenue from recovered CO2 in the process.

The Death Spiral: Self-Perpetuating Feedbacks

 Because we haven't addressed the legacy carbon, the planet has begun to take over the job of heating itself. The planet is intensifying a Black Swan Matrix of self-perpetuating feedback loops where the more the planet warms, the more it forces itself to warm through various mechanisms

  • Arctic Methane: As the Arctic thaws, it unseals a prehistoric vault of methane—a gas 80× more potent than CO2. More heat → more melt → more methane → more heat.
     

  • Ocean Failure: Warming oceans are losing their physical capacity to absorb CO2 and dying coral reefs can no longer buffer ocean chemistry.
     

  • Forest Failure: Once reliable carbon "sinks," our forests are being transformed by drought and wildfire into massive carbon "sources."
     

  • Soil Microbes: Billions of microbes are waking in warming soil, metabolizing organic matter and releasing a global, invisible exhaust pipe of carbon.
     

  • AMOC Collapse: The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is stalling. Melting ice floods the North Atlantic with freshwater, stopping the "deep convection" that drives global currents. This causes sea levels to "pile up" along the U.S. East Coast and destabilizes monsoons worldwide.

The 450 ppm Threshold: The Point of No Return

This isn't just a linear rise in temperature; it is an epochal shift. The 450 ppm threshold is the paleo-geologic "Point of No Return." In every instance Earth has reached it, an Epoch has ended and a mass extinction followed

  • Carrying Capacity: Crossing 450 ppm means the Earth rapidly loses its ability to support human life. We are looking at a drop from 8 billion people to roughly 2–3 billion within a century.
     

  • Loss of Agency: Once the Earth becomes the primary driver of disruption, humans will no longer have the ability to repair the climate. The system will be moving too fast for us to catch
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  • So we have to move fast, but if reducing our carbon footprint only works in the past and the future what can Coloradans do NOW?

                                                   VOTE!                                                                                    ​​

  • "It can be anyone who understands the problem, but Colorado must have a Governor willing to begin the work of removing carbon from the atmosphere using proven technology and the workforce that is Colorado's pride. I can show you how climate change underlies, in one way or another, most of the problems we are facing today. If you ask this year’s other candidates for Governor if they can stop the 110 degree heat. If they can make it rain on our crops. If they can build back the snowpack. If they can stop the wildfires and lower the wind. If they can bring back the animals. They can’t — all they have is expensive plans to try and slow the damage.

 

       Ask my team and I and the answer is loud and clear: Yes! We can fix climate change and you will feel the progress     — not in one year, but definitely in five years and soon enough to save your children. Direct Atmospheric Carbon         Removal is working all over the world. What’s missing is leadership willing to scale it intelligently and pair it with the right infrastructure. Your vote is all it takes to make Colorado a model for climate recovery. The choice is simple: manage decline or build the systems that reverse it.”

                                                                                                                                               — Christian Komor

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