Climate Solutions: Answers Are Everywhere

"Only the resolve is hard to locate" 

There is a tug-of-war between natural climate solutions and the techno-wizardry that got us into this. It needn't be that way, but we’ll need to exchange a paradigm. We began this miniseries describing the underlying realities of the historic moment—climate chaos, peak everything, a gathering storm. Earth has crossed multiple planetary boundaries. This will either be the century of “Too-Little-Too-Late” for humans or the moment when we pivoted and radically transformed ourselves—i.e., The Great Change.

Please forgive me if I draw the sprawling, multidimensional polycrisis focus down to just one issue. It is not an attempt to simplify or a failure to grasp quantum entanglement. It is only because climate is the most existential threat we face, and because solving that may solve most of the others. That said, to solve for climate, one has to alter the entire course of civilization.

Looking at climate, but also system change more generally, we’ve proposed some rules for the game:

• First, do no harm.

• Favor passive systems that once set in motion no longer require human action

• Favor resilience, recognizing that we are in uncharted territory and there will be shocks.

• Favor intrinsically regenerative systems that are part of, and contribute to, larger ecosystems.

• Consider the seventh generation.

This week we are going to be more specific and name some strategies that meet these criteria. Among the solutions we’ll examine:

1. Ethical biomass energy with carbon recovery and storage (eBiCRS);

2. Remineralization and enhanced weathering;

3. Integrated agroforestry, afforestation and reforestation—the biotic pump;

4. Mariculture with carbon recovery and sequestration; and

5. Biochar.

Besides our five key criteria, we’ll need to inquire: Can these scale? Quickly? Can they do it despite social, political and economic handicaps that stand in the way?

Next week, we will shine more light on the top, number-one, elite solution of them all. Maybe you can guess from the list which one that is.

Land Use and Misuse

Humans used coal for heating and cooking as early as 4000 BC. There is an interesting line of research, which we won’t get into here, about whether that—along with land use change—created the late Holocene conditions so favorable to the ascent of man by forestalling the next glacial cycle and opening vast areas to human settlement that had been uninhabitable before fossil energy. There was, of course, a price for extracting fossil sunlight—drawing down our huge Jurassic Trust Fund in just a few centuries while abolishing the sunlight-income budgetary arrangement humans had depended upon for 200,000 years, right up until the latter half of the 19th century.

A few brilliant scientists in that Victorian moment warned it could mean the end of the exceptionally favorable Holocene climate. They proved right, but then, every disaster movie has to start with a scientist being ignored. They teach that in film school and you need to know it to get into the screenwriters’ guild.

The Anthropocene is not a return to the status quo ante pre-Holocene. We have veered way off that chart in a new direction. A Hothouse Earth hell is the course this compass heading leads us to. Whether there is an approximate equilibrium to be found at 5 degrees, 12 degrees, or 18 degrees warmer is largely academic since bipedal, 36°C mammals wouldn’t survive any of those temperature regimes for very long.

Hothouse Earth theorizes a new system equilibrium being reached on a much warmer planet. It is entirely speculative. The Venus Effect is equally likely.

Clipping the Credit Card

If we are now to revert to our daily allowance of sunlight — 430 quintillion joules — we’ll need to work up a leaner budget. The sun emits energy in our direction at a rate of 3.8 x 10²³ (10 to the 23rd power) Watts per second. The Earth intercepts a small fraction of this energy, about 1.7x 10¹⁸ wps. About 60% of this energy reaches the surface, while 40% is reflected back into space or absorbed by the atmosphere. Still, that is a lot of energy being placed at our disposal. Humanity’s current energy consumption, considering food intake and fossil fuel use, is estimated to be about 15 zettaWatts or exajoules per day, or 1.49 x10²². [To calculate the daily energy gain in joules, multiply the power received (in watts) by the number of seconds in a day (86,400), resulting in around 1.49 x 10²² joules.]

Owing to our generous trust fund, accrued over 500 million years, we have recently been spending considerably more than sunlight provides (10²² outlays, including food and forestry, to 10¹⁸ solar coming in). Most science teachers say that we use much less than that, but they don’t factor in land use — they only look at power. Oops. So, to start with, if we want to stop accepting Granddad’s energy and all the strings attached, we’ll need to go on a pretty strict diet.

The diet gets even tougher if we limit it to plants.

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Plants convert the sun’s energy into caloric storage. Net primary productivity is the net difference between photosynthesis and respiration in an ecosystem. Throughout the whole year, rainforests in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia have high net primary productivity. Other regions contribute in the summer months. Not only do plants store solar energy, they also remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In fact, they tick off all five of our new criteria for viability.

Let’s go back to our list of climate solutions.

1. Ethical biomass energy with carbon recovery and storage (eBiCRS)

Bioenergy currently accounts for 7% of global energy consumption but is scaling rapidly as transnational giants like Drax move in to replace natural gas with pelletized firewood, planting genetically modified monocultures in Indonesia to heat and light the East End of London — orangutans be damned. Schemes like Drax’s mean that bioenergy could rise to 18.7% by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency.

I don’t call this ethical, and nor does it remove CO2, since burning merely returns the carbon to the sky as smoke and replanting lags removal by three decades or more. If there are expensive scrubbers installed on those biomass energy generators and the CO2 is piped deep underground, that is called BECCS (Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage). BECCS suffers many of the same problems as biomass burning or “clean coal” CCS systems.

Adding an ethical mandate to each of these systems could, in theory, transform them to eBiCRS (ethical Biomass Carbon Recovery Systems). eBiCRS contemplates restoring regenerative ecosystems — recycling labile carbon in the system — while withholding enough carbon from decay to result in net transfer from the atmosphere back to earth storage (to rebuild the carbon trust fund). But that lowercase “e” I placed in front of the acronym stands for “ethical.” There need to be rules.

My advice: go slow. Pay attention to the first of the five rules.

2. Remineralization and enhanced weathering

One of the ways that nature recovers carbon from the atmosphere following volcanic events, interglaciations, and similar fluxes is by reacting carbon molecules in air or water with minerals that seek carbon. Rock weathering is a prime example, but as you might imagine, it is very slow. Some rocks — the magnesium-rich crystals found in igneous rocks such as serpentine, pyroxine and olivine; volcanic basalts; and limestone, for instance — absorb carbon faster. When glaciers retreat, they grind some of these up, and the atmosphere responds, gradually lowering the temperature so that glaciers reform. If you have 20 to 100 thousand years, this is a proven technology.

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Natural carbon mineralization permanently removes about 0.3 billion metric tons (gigatons or petagrams) of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, which is a little more than Poland’s annual emissions. If we can scale a technique called “enhanced weathering,” 1 to 3 gigatonnes per year could be removed by 2035, and 10 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050 — transporting, fine grinding, and spreading such minerals over the surface of land.

Keen observers will have already noticed the enormous energy required for such an approach. Some in-situ mineralization methods, such as the one applied by Carbfix in Iceland, also require large amounts of water — about 25 tons per ton of CO2 injected. However, there is an energy dividend — the remineralization of agricultural soils produces more and better (more nutrient-dense) food, i.e., calories. Such soils also retain more water and prime the biotic pump, drawing still more CO2 from the atmosphere. Soil rejuvenation ticks all five of the boxes for sustainability. There is a comparable pay-off for marine life when coastal areas, such as mangroves and reefs, are regenerated this way.

Creating concrete is another way carbon mineralization is being used to capture atmospheric CO2 but we’ll discuss that more in a future installment.

3. Integrated agroforestry, afforestation and reforestation

Critics of real trees, as opposed to shiny, patented artificial ones, say that the land required would deprive the world population of 8 going on 12 billion people of food. This is an easily debunked claim. I described how we can replace beef burgers with nearly indistinguishable soyburgers in Soy to the World with a 300x gain in protein output per acre. I have described the superior productivity per acre and extreme weather resilience of permaculture agroforestry in many posts. After much study, the late Frank Michael and I co-authored a 2017 paper, Optimized Potentials for Soil Sequestration of Atmospheric Carbon, showing that a reversal of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is feasible using a socially responsible, economically productive and ecologically restorative agroforestry system we called “Climate Ecoforestry.” This system, if carried to the scale of 300 megahectares (about 1.2 million square miles, or tree-planting an area roughly the size of four Frances or five Spains) every year for the next 25 years could achieve the cumulative storage of 667 PgC (gigatons of carbon) required to bring atmospheric CO2 back to pre-industrial 250 ppm (parts per million). Were nations to collectively reduce fossil fuel emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, the reduction to 250 ppm could be achieved by year 37. In all cases, carbon would be stored in the world’s soils and living biomass and could provide many additional benefits beyond sequestration.

4. Mariculture with carbon recovery and sequestration

One key point in Frank’s and my calculation was that we had to take into account the oceans’ CO2 outgassing feedback because that is where the majority of the industrial legacy has been absorbed and as the air gets cleaner, the oceans are going to give some of that back. In order to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere and keep it out, you need to remove about 3.7 tons of carbon from the ocean at the same time. Photosynthesis can do all that as long as you continuously harvest and set that carbon aside. Otherwise, it just goes back into the cycle. Frank developed a plan he called step-harvest that works equally well for forests and grasslands. Each year the land under management is low-grade harvested or manured through rotational grazing (using a virtuous cycle for standing timber and pastureland), and after extraction of foods, fuels, fibers, and other useful commodities, carbonaceous wastes are pyrolyzed, rendering them as omni-useful biochar that takes a timeout from the atmospheric/oceanic carbon cycle for anywhere from one thousand to 100 million years. I have since gone a step further. I believe we can remove that dissolved ocean carbon by farming on water.

Last week I mentioned duckweed:

Wolffia, also known as duckweed, is the fastest-growing green-leaf plant. Most species of duckweed will double every 2 to 3 days. They replace their biomass 100 times per year. They grow as fast or faster overnight as during the day (absorbing carbon from water). If all global plant biomass (495 GtC) were duckweed, the sequestration potential would be 49,500 GtC/y or 181,500 GtCO2 (182 trillion tons of carbon dioxide). Converting that much duckweed to biochar would return the climate to its pre-industrial 280 ppm in 11 hours. Of course, we are never going to do that, it’s only hypothetical. But now substitute for duckweed all of the useful plants that can be withheld from decay — trees, bamboo, kelp, etc — and not only can we recover the preindustrial atmosphere rapidly but we can provide good livelihoods in the process.

— The Great Change, Tree versus Tree (February 19, 2023)

It is not difficult to see why duckweed has life so much easier than say, an ear of corn. A corn stalk has to stand up to wind, rain, dry weather for weeks on end, soggy soil or floods sometimes, even snow. That’s a lot of work, and it takes a pretty hefty dollop of hemicellulose to do that. Duckweed, by contrast, can just lie on its back, floating around the pool sipping piña colatas through a straw. Is it any wonder it is so fecund?

One of the consequences of human ingenuity in the Age of Discovery was the destruction of the ocean ecosystem. I wrote about that in my book, The Dark Side of the Ocean, with a cover blurb by Captain Paul Watson. That system was more than a vast grocery store for humanity, it held the delicate balance in the carbon and nitrogen cycle upon which both climate and agriculture depend. As we killed the whales, we were killing ourselves.

The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; — even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.

— Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 87

The good news is that by sowing “gulfweed,” we can rebuild the whale population. We can simultaneously harvest a portion of the “weed,” make myriad foodstuffs and other products and transform the waste into biochar. We can already do this at a profit. It just needs to scale.

5. Biochar

Well, we’ve run out of space this week, so we’ll just have to continue here next week when we get around to the main event — the natural climate solution that can scale large enough, fast enough, and already is — to pluck homo from the embrace of extinction.

Next week we will look at where biochar comes from, where it has been going, how it can scale enough to make a difference in our lifetimes, how you can participate, and what needs to happen next.

References

Alley, et al. 2019. Solar Energy Potential and Utilization. Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences open learning.

Bates, S. 2021. Direct Observations Confirm that Humans are Throwing Earth’s Energy Budget off Balance, NASA

Fletcher, Charles, et al. “Earth at risk: An urgent call to end the age of destruction and forge a just and sustainable future.” PNAS nexus 3.4 (2024): pgae106.

Goreau, T.J., 2020. Regenerating Ecosystem Services to Meet United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Nat. Resources and their Ecosystem Services, p.2.

Lambert, Benoit, 2023. Biogeotherapy:Nature-based climate solutions, Life as a geological healing force.

Roy, B.B. 2024. Amount of Solar Energy Hitting Earth Every Second, Day, Week & Year

Steffen, W., Rockström, J., Richardson, K., Lenton, T.M., Folke, C., Liverman, D., Summerhayes, C.P., Barnosky, A.D., Cornell, S.E., Crucifix, M. and Donges, J.F., 2018. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(33), pp.8252–8259.

Trust, et al. 2025 Planetary Solvency — finding our balance with nature, Univ of Exeter, Inst and Faculty of Actuaries.

 

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to bring an immediate cessation to the war. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years and will continue to do so, with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read all about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.

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#RestorationGeneration.

當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。

When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.