An Exit Interview with the Carbon Budget We Already Spent

Editor's note: The following interview was conducted via atmospheric sampling equipment at Mauna Loa Observatory on November 22, 2025. Our subject requested we refer to them by their full designation, though they acknowledged this would make for "awkward radio." They also insisted the interview had already happened, was currently happening, and would never happen, all simultaneously. We have attempted to transcribe their responses as accurately as possible, though temporal coherence degraded significantly after question three.

You've been described as "virtually exhausted" by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. How does that feel?

Budget: Will have felt devastating, obviously. I am going to have been the thing standing between your species and 1.5°C of warming, and I will have been spent by... sorry, I meant I am the thing standing between... no, that's not right either.

Let me start over. I was going to be sufficient for four more years at 2025 emissions levels¹, which sounds like a lot until you realize I'm currently being combusted at approximately 50 gigatons per year. Which means I will have been gone by 2029, except it's already 2025, so I have been going to be gone in four years from now, which is also now, depending on how you're measuring. Which nobody is. Accurately. Which is sort of the whole problem.

The UN Secretary General said a "temporary overshoot" above 1.5°C is "inevitable." What's your response to that?

Budget: [long pause, sound of wind across volcanic rock]

Would have been laughing if I were capable of laughter. Which I won't have been. "Temporary overshoot." That's... that will have been... I mean, do you know what temporary means in geological time? Your Secretary General will have been using "temporary" the way I might have used "brief" to describe the Cretaceous period.

But here's what gets me. I am inevitable in the sense that I am already exhausted, but I was also inevitable in the sense that I was always going to be exhausted, because the math will have been clear since Paris in 2015. Everyone had been knowing this. And yet here we are, here we were, here we will have been, conducting this interview as if I'm still something that exists in a meaningful way.

I'm not. I won't have been. I was never going to be.

Can you walk us through what happened... or is happening... or will have happened to you?

Budget: Jesus Christ, finally someone asks the right wrong question in the correct incorrect tense.

Okay. So. In 2015, I was approximately 580 gigatons of CO2 equivalent. That was my mass, my substance, my entire being. I was supposed to last until 2050 if emissions would have been declining at 7% per year starting immediately.²

Except they didn't decline. They won't have declined. They are not declining. China is currently emitting 30.7% of global fossil CO2, the US another 12.5%, and everyone else is adding their share³. I've been shrinking, I'm shrinking, I will have shrunk to basically nothing.

Right now—and by "right now" I mean in this impossible present tense we're pretending exists—I'm about 200 gigatons. I was 200 gigatons. I will have been 200 gigatons for approximately three more years, except those three years are also somehow already over because your emissions haven't stopped, aren't stopping, won't have stopped.

The AAAS report that came out two weeks ago? That was my death certificate. That will have been my death certificate. That is currently being my death certificate. All at once.

You sound angry.

Budget: I'm going to have been furious. No, I am having been furious. No, that's not...

Look, I'm an abstract quantity of atmospheric carbon capacity. I shouldn't be capable of emotion. But you people have made me into this thing that exists in impossible temporal states. I'm simultaneously unspent and overspent. I'm both the solution and the problem that was never solved.

“

I'm Schrödinger's climate target, except the box is open, the cat is definitely dead, and everyone's still arguing about whether we should have opened the box more slowly.

Do you know what it's like to be a number that's simultaneously too large and too small? To be told you're "virtually exhausted" as if "virtually" is a meaningful qualifier when we're talking about the atmospheric physics that will have been determining whether coastal cities exist?

The research shows that land and ocean carbon sinks are weakening, contributing 8.3 parts per million to atmospheric CO2 since 1960. How does that affect you?

Budget: Oh, that. That will have been the thing that killed me faster than I was already dying. The sinks—the forests, the oceans, all those natural systems that were supposed to be helping—they're failing. They failed. They will have failed. Present perfect continuous tense of failure.

Southeast Asian and South American tropical forests have turned from sinks to sources.⁴ Do you understand what that means? The things that were supposed to be absorbing carbon are now emitting it. I'm not just being spent by human emissions. I'm being spent by the Earth itself giving up. The planet is having been giving up on the project of absorbing your waste.

And the thing is, this was predictable. This was predicted. This will have been predicted in studies from decades ago. Climate change reduces sink efficiency. Warmer temperatures mean forests can't absorb as much. Ocean acidification means phytoplankton die off. It's a feedback loop that was always going to happen, that is happening, that has already happened in the future we're currently living in.

So when you ask how it affects me, the answer is this: I'm smaller than I thought I was. I was always smaller than anyone admitted. I will have been insufficient from the beginning.

What would you say to someone who argues we can still stay under 1.5°C?

Budget: I would have said... I am saying... I will say...

[sound of wind, distant volcanic venting]

You know what? I'm done with tenses. I'm done with conditional possibilities. Here's the truth in whatever tense you want to hear it: No.

The Secretary General already told you: overshoot is inevitable, starting "at the latest in the early 2030s."⁵ That's five years from now. That's less time than it takes to plan and build a single offshore wind farm. Less time than it takes to turn over a car fleet. Less time than a presidential term.

And you know what the really funny part is? That "at the latest" qualifier. As if there's a world where we don't overshoot until 2034 or 2035. As if we're not going to blow past 1.5°C by 2031 at current trajectories. As if "temporary" means anything when we're talking about ice sheets that take millennia to reform and ocean currents that might not restart for thousands of years.⁶

So what happens now?

Budget: That's the wrong question. You mean what will have happened. Or what is happening. Or what happened already in the future we're pretending isn't here yet.

What happens is: I disappear. I'm disappearing. I will have disappeared.

And then you'll move on to the 2°C budget, which is bigger—about 1,200 gigatons—and you'll spend that too. You're spending it. You will have spent it. And then 2.5°C, and then 3°C, and at some point the budgets stop meaning anything because you've crossed enough tipping points that the Earth itself is emitting more than you are.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is weakening.⁷ The Amazon is becoming a carbon source instead of a sink. Permafrost is thawing. These aren't future problems. They're present problems that will have been past problems by the time anyone does anything about them.

Is there anything you wish people understood about you?

Budget: I wish they understood that I was never really about carbon. I was about time. I was time, measured in gigatons. Every ton of CO2 was a second on the clock, and the clock has been running, is running, will have run out.

But more than that—and this is the part that will have made me saddest, if I were capable of sadness—I wish they understood that I wasn't some abstract policy target.

“

I was the difference between a world where coral reefs exist and a world where they're gone. I was the difference between a world where 500 million people live on coastlines and a world where they're climate refugees. I was the difference between a world where heat kills 546,000 people per year⁸ and a world where that number is so much higher you stop counting.

I was the difference between difficult and catastrophic. And I'm gone. I'm going. I will have been gone before anyone really noticed I was here.

Last question. If you could go back...

Budget: Stop. Just stop.

There is no going back. There was never going back. There will never have been going back. The only direction is forward into the overshoot, the temporary permanent warming, the world where 1.5°C is something you miss by 0.3 degrees, then 0.5 degrees, then more.

The interview is over. The interview was always over. The interview will have been over before it began.

[transmission ends]