Andrew Revkin

I did a conversation recently with Johan Rockström, who's a famed sustainability scientist in Stockholm.

Actually, Potsdam now.

And he's come up with the idea of planetary boundaries.

There's lots of things he has said that I, as a journalist, I'm still looking into about that.

Planetary boundaries?

Yeah, that there are limits to what Earth can absorb in human... Our use of water, phosphorus, our carbon dioxide loading in the atmosphere.

There are these tipping... There are these boundaries.

If we cross them, we're in a hot zone, a danger zone.

He's an interesting thinker.

But on this point, last year at the Glasgow Climate Talks, he gave a very important talk about the equity thing here.

That you... He basically laid out a landscape...

saying the rich nations of the world need to greatly ramp up their reduction of emissions or what they're gonna pay poor countries to do to allow poor countries, some of which have fossil resources like in Africa,

to have the carbon space, to own whatever space or time is left to be able to develop their fossil fuels as a fundamental right.

Because also, they are starting from this little baseline.

Ghana hasn't contributed squat to the global warming problem in terms of emissions.

Ghana has natural gas.

And right now, this month, environmental groups are

outside the World Bank today, actually tonight, saying this was on their list of dirty projects.

World Bank should stop financing Ghana's right to get gas out of the ground to develop its economy, get its people less poor, make them more productive, innovative parts of humanity.

To me, that's really reprehensible.