The only drawback with getting an Earth Day only once a year is that we still need 365 Earth Days a year. We will never accept just one Breathing Day a year. On another side, it has been effective in creating a focal point.

The UK government opted today to announce a very welcome strengthening of its climate commitments to a 78% reduction from 1990 levels by 2035, under the Climate Change Committee's recommendations. And maybe the urge to make an Earth Day announcement offered an added push to make things work. (It's irrelevant that the news had spilled so terribly earlier that the official statement had to be pushed back.)

President Biden also selected today and tomorrow for his Leaders’ Summit on Climate to invite world leaders to take a close look at what needs to be done in their respective residential neighborhoods.

It's also obviously not a mistake that the International Energy Agency chooses this week to create a framework, with a stark forecast that carbon dioxide emissions will rise by the second-largest amount ever in 2021, almost returning us to pre-Covid levels.

When you consider that the earth is still under the Covid pressure this year, it is obvious that we have not yet succeeded in transforming the carbon wave. Anyone gazing down on Earth from Mars would believe that, while humans had experienced a pandemic, they had not yet observed climate change. I am not publishing this for upsetting others, but because knowing our lack of success teaches us a lot about what is needed to be addressed in our climate crisis, and what will not suffice.

Person, enterprise, and organization efforts can never be sufficient on their own because they will be overwhelmed by rebound results. In other terms, as we pinch carbon in just a few locations at a moment, the carbon somewhere else seems to increase in retaliation. This is such an important topic (and one that I have written extensively about in my books), but it is so widely misunderstood.

It is important because it illustrates why, after all of the talk and intervention from so many individuals, businesses, and nations, global carbon emissions continue to rise just exactly as we would have expected they will without human knowledge of the climate crisis. If we understand the system dynamics, it becomes crystal clear that we need to make a global system-level adjustment. We must find a way to hold the petrol on the earth all at the same time, not just in a handful or even the lot of nations.

This is why the upcoming Cop26 is so important. Regardless of how difficult it can be, we must have global treaties in place to prevent carbon from flowing out somewhere as the leading countries manage to curb emissions. Does this render citizen, company, and national intervention ineffective? Certainly not. It does reveal a great deal about the type of intervention. It reminds us that, while reducing our carbon footprint is still significant, the impact we have on the planet around us is more important. We must work together to effect structural change. Cop26 is a critical tool for this.