written 18 June 2023
published 25 June 2023
As Fox News informs their viewers that the opaque, orange air poses "no threat to health", and Republican "leadership" sinks deeper into performance drama rather than actual policy making, the real world continues to heat up.
Just this week, temperatures across Siberia were over 100° F with intense wildfires, and all of central Asia had triple digit heat. Extreme heat in Bangladesh harmed workers and depressed tourism. Antarctic winter sea-ice is at record lows as the Weddell Sea warmed five times faster than the rest of the ocean.
Texas experienced softball sized hail, tornados, and 110° F with a potentially lethal heat index of 120°F, pushing electrical power to capacity, while high water temperatures and low oxygen are killing fish in the Gulf of Mexico. In Florida, 17 inches of rain caused flash floods and Louisiana sustained 100 mph winds. AIG joined State Farm and Allstate in refusing to sell new homeowners' insurance policies in certain areas around the country. A habitable planet for our children requires we not only decarbonize the economy as soon as possible, but begin removing 1,000 billion tons of CO2 already in the atmosphere.
I have been discussing "Climate Restoration", by Fiekowsky and Douglis, which describes 4 systems which can get us back to 300 ppm by 2050. Timely, effective solutions must sequester carbon for more than a century, already exist as demonstration projects capable of being scaled up to removing at least 25 billion tons annually, and be funded within current economic structures by providing marketable materials. Last week I described the first system, synthetic limestone, which uses processes inspired by natural geochemistry. The second system engages living systems, specifically seaweed.
While 97 percent of oil is burned almost immediately, the rest provides valuable feed stock to manufacture textiles, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, fertilizers, lotions, cosmetics, plastics, and dyes, to name a few. Seaweed is a viable alternative, without the problems of pollution, atmospheric carbon dioxide, drilling, mining, planting, fertilizers, or even clearing the land. Seaweed can pull carbon out of the air 10 times faster than trees. Trees use carbon slowly and release it back when they rot, or burn. Dead seaweed sequesters carbon for centuries when it falls to the ocean floor.
Until recently, most global coastlines had extensive kelp forests, the fastest growing plants on Earth. Anchored on the coastal seabed, thriving on nutrient rich oceanic upwellings, they nourish and shelter a rich biodiversity of species. Sometimes called the rainforest of the ocean, they support massive schools of fish, crustaceans, mollusks, sea birds, seals, otters, and other mammals: the most productive fisheries on the planet. However, oceanic warming and acidification have disturbed ecological balances, wind patterns, and upwelling currents, devastating 95 percent of kelp forests.
In 2008, Dr. Brian von Herzen founded Climate Foundation to investigate and promote Marine Permaculture, sustainable marine cultivation, needing no reseeding, fertilization, or even much tending. A permaculture kelp forests needs only a structure for stalks to attach to and a pump to bring up deep water to simulate a natural upwelling. A Marine Permaculture Array is a light lattice of tubing which can drop 15 feet below the surface to avoid hurricanes, confirmed by surviving a category 5 hurricane off the Philippines in 2021. A pump brings water up from several hundred feet, using energy that is solar, wind, or wave generated. These arrays can be anchored near land to help revive a trouble kelp forest within easy access of a local community. They can also be towed to the open ocean, anchored deep enough to avoid ship traffic, where they can scale in size without limit.
Climate Foundation's first demonstration projects have been about 100 square yards, constructed in the Philippines, successfully generating a healthy marine ecosystem. The next near-term goals are 1,000 square yards, and then 10,000 square yards, at which point the array becomes economically sustainable. This size will cost about $4M, and generate about $1M per year from sale of sea food and seaweed resource for the diverse products mentioned above. Half the kelp would be sunk to the ocean floor as sequestered carbon.
The annual global sea food market is $200B, and the annual seaweed market is $15B. Seaweed based animal food supplements can eliminate the methane in cow burps and reduce the use of antibiotics in chickens. When Marine Permaculture Arrays are scaled up, gigatons of carbon can be sequestered each year.
