Only One Earth - Earthweek Vault

Humanity is spending billions to establish life on the moon and Mars while the technology needed to preserve a habitable climate at home remains far behind the need.

In 1972, delegates gathered in Stockholm for the first United Nations conference devoted to the human environment. Its slogan was simple: “Only One Earth.”

The phrase reflected the perspective of the early space age. Astronauts had recently photographed Earth as a small blue world suspended in darkness, its atmosphere appearing almost impossibly thin. For the first time, much of humanity could see the planet as a single, finite and isolated home.

Fifty-four years later, the message conveyed by that image has become harder to ignore.

The summer of 2026 has brought record heat on land and across the oceans, destructive fires, deadly downpours and disruptions affecting millions. Severe storms across the American Midwest over the past few days spawned tornadoes and unprecedented flash floods that killed residents and left hundreds of thousands without electricity.

No individual disaster can be explained by climate change alone. But a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, increasing the potential for extreme rainfall. Higher temperatures intensify heat waves and dry vegetation, while warmer oceans raise sea levels, damage marine ecosystems and provide more energy and moisture for storms.

The danger is no longer confined to projections of what might happen late in the century. It is unfolding in annual records, emergency declarations, insurance losses and communities repeatedly rebuilding after disasters.

Nearly every nation on the planet joined the Paris climate agreement, and governments have announced targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and to eventually reach net zero. But promises and policies are not the same thing.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that even if countries fully carry out their current pledges, the planet is heading toward 2.3° to 2.5° Celsius (4.1°F to 4.5°F) of warming this century. Policies actually in place point toward about 2.8°C (5°F) of global heating—far beyond the level at which scientists expect increasingly severe and irreversible damage.

On Nov. 24, 1995, Earthweek reported that scientists and government experts meeting in Madrid had formally agreed that global warming was already occurring and could not be explained by natural climatic variations alone.

The item also described opposition from what environmentalists were calling the “Carbon Club”—an alliance of oil companies and other fossil-fuel interests arguing that governments should not restrict emissions until there was absolute scientific certainty about their effects.

That certainty arrived long ago. The delay did not end.

The arguments changed as the evidence became harder to dispute. Warming was first said not to be happening. Then it was said not to be caused by humans. Later, its consequences were portrayed as distant, uncertain or less expensive than preventing them. Today, governments continue approving new fossil-fuel development while promising to reach net zero decades from now.

During these years of climate dithering and denial, carbon dioxide continued accumulating in the atmosphere.

Cutting emissions remains the essential first task, but reductions alone will no longer be enough.

Earthweek was reporting possible ways to draw carbon from the atmosphere as early as May 1990, when scientists proposed stimulating blooms of marine algae that would absorb carbon dioxide. In January 2004, Earthweek reported on research warning that switching to green energy would have to be combined with active removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Later items examined enhanced rock weathering, in which pulverized basalt is spread over farmland to absorb carbon dioxide, and direct-air-capture plants designed to extract the gas and store it underground.

The latest global assessment estimates that such CO2-capture efforts currently remove only about 2 billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. Almost all of that comes from established methods such as reforestation, forest management and storing additional carbon in soils.

Newer methods—including direct-air capture, enhanced rock weathering, converting plant waste into a charcoal-like material that stores carbon and capturing carbon from biomass—remove only about 2 million metric tons annually. That is a minute fraction of the carbon dioxide humanity releases each year.

Removal is neither simple nor risk-free. Forests can burn, stored carbon can leak and direct-air-capture machines require large amounts of energy. Poorly designed projects could consume land and water needed for food production or natural ecosystems.

The lofty and unrealized goal of carbon capture should not become another reason to postpone emissions cuts. It is not a license to continue burning fossil fuels in the hope that machines will one day clean the atmosphere.

Yet developing safe and effective removal methods is now unavoidable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says those new methods will be needed to counterbalance emissions from activities that are extremely difficult to eliminate and, eventually, to reduce the carbon dioxide already accumulated in the atmosphere.

The technological capacity remains nowhere near the required scale.

At the same time, governments and some of the world’s wealthiest individuals are directing immense resources toward establishing a permanent human presence beyond Earth.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX says the first people sent to Mars will lay the foundation for a permanent settlement. Musk has described making humanity a multiplanetary species as protection against a catastrophe that could destroy civilization on Earth.

NASA is planning for an enduring base near the lunar south pole, with habitats, vehicles, power systems and equipment to extract usable resources from the moon. Its proposed 2027 budget assigns about $8.5 billion to exploration systems encompassing Moon-and-Mars transportation, systems development and mission architecture.

China and its international partners plan to also build a basic lunar research station near the moon’s south pole by 2035, followed by a more extensive installation by 2045.

There are sound reasons to explore space. Robotic missions expand scientific knowledge without exposing humans to extraordinary danger. Planetary-defense programs search for asteroids that could threaten Earth.

But neither the moon nor Mars is a plausible refuge from climate change.

Mars has an atmosphere too thin to breathe, is extremely cold and is exposed to intense radiation with no known ecosystem capable of supporting human life. A settlement would therefore depend on supplies transported across millions of miles or on producing its own air, water, food, fuel, shelter and radiation protection.

The moon is closer but no more inviting. Keeping even a small number of people alive there for extended periods would be an immense engineering undertaking.

The ability to sustain a few people on either world would do nothing for the billions facing heat, food insecurity, rising seas and climate-driven displacement on Earth.

It would be unfair to say that those pursuing space exploration have ignored the climate crisis entirely. Musk financed a $100 million competition for carbon-removal technology, and Jeff Bezos has committed $10 billion to the Bezos Earth Fund. Space companies also earn money from commercial services and government contracts, so their resources cannot simply be transferred into a global climate program.

Nor does spending on space directly cause the shortage of resources to battle climate change.

But money, scientific talent, political attention and society’s willingness to accept risk are limited. How those scarce resources are allocated therefore reveals which goals receive priority. Public budgets reveal governments’ priorities, while private investment flows toward ventures expected to generate profits.

Humanity will mobilize billions of dollars and extraordinary engineering talent to keep a handful of people alive in places naturally hostile to life. It has not shown the same urgency in developing systems to remove accumulated carbon dioxide from the only atmosphere that already sustains us.

That is the real contrast—not Earth vs. space, but rescue vs. escape.

The planet itself is not dying. Earth will continue orbiting the sun, and life in some form will almost certainly persist. What is being destabilized is the relatively mild climate, living systems and social infrastructure upon which human civilization depends.

Mars may one day support an outpost. The moon may eventually hold a permanent base. Exploring both may rank among humanity’s greatest adventures.

But a civilization unable to protect its only habitable planet must ask whether settlement of far more hostile worlds should be one of its grandest and best-funded ambitions.

More than half a century after Stockholm, the truth remains unchanged.

There is still only one Earth.

Steve Newman

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service