Deep Decarbonization, Technology & Common Sense

The “big business, evangelical-anti-global-warming and Trump administration climate change denial/marginalization” cabal notwithstanding, you have to be deaf, blind and illiterate not to realize that the acceleration of climate change is fundamentally changing life on planet earth. We all know the drill – from coastal erosion, flooding, wildfires, massive tropical storms, droughts (the once-every-thousand-year events that occur almost annually), etc., etc. We are going to continue to suffer massive losses, from land and wildlife losses to human lives and trillions and trillions of dollars of mounting damages and disruption. You just cannot legislate, deregulate and executive order that mounting and accumulating disaster away. Nature just does not care what people want or believe; she just is. She started with nothing and apparently is not remotely threatened with a do-over.

We may have passed a huge initial tipping point – where even if mankind stopped contributing greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, the cycle of rising carbon gasses will not stop. Once the permafrost (tundra) began melting, it began a vicious cycle that no longer requires man to remain an irresponsible user of fossil fuels. Tundra has trapped millions of years of methane from decomposing plant and animal life. As it melts, that methane (24 times denser than carbon dioxide) is released into the atmosphere by the ton. That additional methane does its thing, building a much more solid heat trap in the upper atmosphere, raising global temperatures, accordingly, melting more tundra and releasing more methane. And so the cycle continues to build on itself. Without human assistance.

The bottom line: it isn’t enough to stop mankind’s seemingly never-ending dumping of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere from the inane continued use of fossil fuels, particularly coal (there is no commercially available “clean coal” process; we just pump the effluents underground for future generations to deal with). We must figure out how to extract greenhouse gasses, whatever their source, from the air to restore at least a trend towards reduced and ultimately negative emissions. That’s a tall order, especially to a nation run by climate change deniers or marginalizers.

But assuming that, in additional to removing fossil fuel emissions, we actually decided to extract those toxic gasses from our planet, what exactly would we do? The focus has to be more on carbon dioxide, where mankind is the principal guilty party, over the release of methane from melting tundra. Adele Peters, writing for the January 31^st FastCompany.com, summarizes some of the alternatives: A new report from the nonprofit World Resources Institute looks at what it would take for the U.S. to be able to remove around 2 gigatons of CO2 from the air each year by 2050. It’s a huge amount, the equivalent of nearly a third of total annual emissions in the country in 2017. But it’s the scale that’s likely necessary to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The report identifies five ways to get there.

TREE RESTORATION Restoring trees on one-third to two-thirds of the suitable land in the country—including degraded areas that aren’t used for farming and urban land—could capture between 180-360 megatons of CO2 a year by 2040, World Resources Institute estimates. The report suggests new policies such as a tax credit or payment program to incentivize landowners to plant and maintain trees in priority areas.

DIRECT AIR CAPTURE The first direct air capture plant opened in 2017, using new technology to suck carbon from the atmosphere. Two other startups in the space also now have plants that are operating, and have attracted investors ranging from Bill Gates and Goldman Sachs to oil companies like Chevron. But to reach the scale that’s needed, the report says that the government should invest to support basic research and development in the field, and add more support to help the industry pioneers scale up. A tax credit of $20 per metric ton of sequestered CO2 already exists, but could be larger. By midcentury, the industry could be removing 1 gigaton of CO2 each year.

AGRICULTURAL SOIL CARBON MANAGEMENT, OR REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE When farmers adopt “regenerative agriculture” practices such as no-till farming and planting cover crops, it can help farm fields store extra carbon in the soil. Some food companies, such as General Mills, are now working with suppliers to get these practices adopted on a wider scale. In some cases, farmers can sell carbon credits when they’ve proven how much CO2 they’ve helped capture. Because research in this area is still new, it still isn’t clear how much efficacy may vary in different regions, but the report calculates that if 10 million acres of farmland adopted this type of management, it could potentially store 100-200 megatons of CO2 a year by 2050.

CARBON MINERALIZATION Certain rocks capture CO2 when they’re exposed to it. Blue Planet, one startup, captures CO2, dissolves it in a solution, and then combines it with rock waste from industry, creating new aggregate that can be used as a building material. Others inject CO2 into concrete. WRI says that these approaches still need more development and that the government should invest in more research, because it isn’t yet clear what’s technically and logistically possible. But carbon mineralization could potentially remove as much as 410 megatons of CO2 a year by 2050.

ENHANCED ROOT CROPS If plant breeders develop new crops with deeper, longer roots, that could potentially also help capture more carbon as the roots reach deep underground. (One crop of this type, called Kernza, already exists, and is used in products like Long Root Pale Ale, a beer that Patagonia markets for its ability to help capture carbon). By 2050, though the report says “estimates remain highly theoretical,” crops like this could potentially remove as much as 185 megatons of CO2 each year.

There are answers. There are paths. What we seem to lack is the leadership and the will to do what must be done. Nature truly does not seem to care what we do. Do we?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly what do we owe to future generations and to those currently suffering from the truly biggest issue: global inaction?