Will the miracle of human ingenuity defeat climate change?
July 24, 2024 edition of Plan B Post.
Humans. We muck things up. The situation starts to look grim. But then, somehow, at the last minute, we pull through.
The drama is what makes us so interesting.
Sure, the Earth is warming with unexpected speed. And we are moving much too slowly to end our dependence on dirty fossil fuels.
But we humans still have a few tricks up our sleeve.
The latest idea is to simply bury carbon underground. You use an excavator to dig a 20-foot hole and then fill it with chopped trees, branches, and other wood waste. It’s called wood vaulting.
The science behind it is this: when trees grow, they capture carbon from the air. When they die and decompose, they once again release that carbon back into the atmosphere. But – if get sneaky and bury the wood before it decomposes, you just might be able to store the carbon safely away… forever.
The net effect is a reduction in carbon in the atmosphere proportionate to the amount of trees and plant matter you bury.
Will it work? Maybe not. They did find proof of concept in Canada in the form of an ancient red cedar log that last saw the light of day about the time when the Zhou Dynasty rose to power in China and the Olmecs prospered in Mexico. After 3,000 years, this buried log still retained 95% of its carbon. Now, that’s long-term carbon removal.
Even so, there are a host of challenges that need solving. The biggest is making sure your buried carbon doesn’t escape the ground and get back to warming the climate.
There’s a big opportunity to test wood vaulting at scale coming up. The U.S. Forest Service’s plans to reduce fire risk by removing excess vegetation on up to 50 million more acres of lands by 2032.
Wood vaulting that material could remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as all existing forests did last year: 2.2 billion tons.
Whether wood vaulting turns out to be successful or not, it is indicative of the passion and creativity that many of us humans are applying to the challenge of stopping, reversing, and limiting damage from global warming.
That’s why I’m optimistic. I don’t know exactly how we will ultimately beat the climate crisis, but the evidence suggests we will.
Read more about wood vaulting in Kylie Mohr’s story on Grist.
If wood vaulting really isn’t your thing, let me introduce you to Graphyte, the company that wants to bury carbon bricks in the earth. Forever.
“I’m worried about our scale of deployment,” said CEO Barclay Rogers. (That’s his real name.) “I think we need to get serious fast.”
If you’re new to the wonders of geoengineering, the BBC’s Simon King gives a great overview in his article this week. Here’s a thumbnail sketch: the goal of solar radiation management is to make the atmosphere think a massive Philippine volcano has just erupted.
The lobbyist from the group that wants to get paid to put a giant umbrella in space between the earth and the sun says no one in Washington is throwing shade on their idea.
Global surface temperatures hit a new record on the 21st of July. Let’s hope some of these climate solutions start kicking in soon.
In 2024, cloud seeding programs are running in over 10 states across the United States, usually run by Water Conservation departments to manage water levels and agricultural output. Studies report a 10% increase in rain as a result.
In that vein, the new Twisters movie suggests shooting rockets full of diaper gel into a tornado to cause rain.
It’s like the Dallas Buyers Club, but for carbon. The story behind the founding of Frontier, the $1 billion carbon removal buyers group co-founded by Stripe, Alphabet, McKinsey, Meta and Shopify.
And up in Massachusetts, the EPA is considering whether or not to permit researchers to dump industrial quantities of antacid into the ocean off Cape Cod. It’s easy to make fun of this experiment, but I’m all for it. If it proves safe and cost-efficient, this approach could help us store much more carbon in the oceans — where it is less damaging to the climate.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading and keep up the good fight.