Politics & Power Quote by Donella Meadows

“Tricky” is Meadows doing double duty: she’s naming a genuine scientific headache while quietly indicting the way power turns complexity into cover. Carbon accounting really is a messy business. Forests breathe; soils store and release; fires, pests, droughts, and logging can flip a “sink” into a source. Measurements depend on models, baselines, and time horizons. You can’t treat a forest like a static bank account when it’s more like a volatile portfolio.

Then comes the sting: “especially when politicians do it.” Meadows isn’t dunking on elected officials for being bad at math; she’s pointing to incentives. Political carbon math gets engineered for reassurance and credit-taking. It favors numbers that are legible, celebratory, and budget-friendly, even when the underlying system is nonlinear and uncertain. The subtext is classic Meadows: systems don’t just produce outcomes; they produce stories people want to hear. “We offset it” is a story. “We changed the economic rules driving emissions” is a fight.

The line lands because it compresses an entire critique of policy theater into a dry aside. Meadows, a systems thinker, understood that measurement is a lever: what you count determines what you can claim, trade, or postpone. In climate politics, quantifying absorption can become a permission structure for continued extraction, dressed up as stewardship. Her intent is less to sneer than to warn: when the accounting is hard, the easiest thing to manufacture isn’t accuracy. It’s ambiguity with a press release.