Climate Crisis: Reversing the Carbon Cycle

Back to writing about the climate crisis. Today is the beginning of a week of action by Extinction Rebellion – they are pushing for carbon neutrality by 2025. As promised before I will start looking at solutions. Following my post on greenhouse gases, it is pretty clear that there are fundamentally only two types of solutions: emit fewer greenhouse gases and recapture existing one from the air. I will write more about both of these, but today want to introduce a basic idea of reversing the carbon cycle.

What do I mean by this? Well, for the last 200 years or so we have been digging up hydrocarbons from the ground, mostly in the form or coal and oil and have been burning them while at the same time cutting back on forests.

We now need to do the exact opposite. That means we need to aggressively grow biomass which removes carbon from the atmosphere. We then need to make sure that the captured carbon is either stored back in the soil (for instance in the form of biochar) or is used in our materials supply chain (for example by creating plant based packaging material). One key insight in this context is that we now need less land than ever before to grow our food supply and can in fact cut down on that land use aggressively by building out vertical farming. The freed up land needs to be used for reforestation and for even more aggressive biomass growing (e.g. grasses that can grow up to 15 feet in a single season).

As the picture above shows, the other area where we can work on biomass are the oceans. This is tricky for many reasons that I will get into but because the oceans are vast could make a huge difference in reversing the carbon cycle. I will dig into each of these ideas in more detail in upcoming posts.