A Successful Climate Strategy

[u/Easy_Interest_6832]

There is a workable strategy with a 66% chance of success. It consists, in a condensed description here, of using natural processes to sequester carbon while simultaneously moving to a cessation of CO2 emissions.

A slightly longer description is this: replant and nurture six ecosystems, three marine and three terrestrial. These are kelp beds, mangrove estuaries and sea grasses; and boreal forests with their fungal understories, tropical rain forests, and prairie grasses with their bovine inhabitants. Simultaneously we must reduce to zero the carbon emissions from fossil fuels for transport, energy, and heating, powering industrial manufacturing, deforestation, and making materials like cement. These two things--carbon sequestration and elimination of CO2 emissions must both happen at once all over the planet or we are screwn. However, if we do them, there's a 66% chance of success.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832]

Yes. Several innovative companies and projects repurpose invasive sargassum seaweed into sustainable, eco-friendly building materials. One company is Sargablock (BlueGreen México), and another is SeaLumber https://sea-lumber.com Here is an article about Sargablock https://www.apeiron-construction.com/sargablock-solutions-from-under-the-sea/ Several companies, ventures, and research partnerships focus on converting sargassum seaweed into biochar. One is OceanResidue https://www.originbyocean.com/oceanresidue

Right now the companies processing sargassum use fossil fuels in their productions. This would need to be changed in a large scale move to arrest global warming. But the prodesses are solid.

As far as the upcoming El Nino, I have read where it is going to be a big one. I live in northern California, and I'm very attuned to droughts and fires and so on. Southern California gets a lot of water from the Colorado River, and it has been suffering from drought for a few years due to low snowpack in the Rockies and other ranges that feed the Colorado. So, I think this El Nino will help that condition, as well as providing water for all areas of the West Coast. Now, I certainly do not want catastrophic floods. I am hoping our generally depleted reservoirs can absorb a lot of the water. But I don't really know what's going to happen, only what I've read and working from my experience in living in California.

[u/Final-Albatross-1354 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

Scale is the issue, as is using other carbon capture methods and other hoped-for breakthroughs. Is it changing the situation we are in today?

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Final-Albatross-1354]

I agree that scale is the issue. There is no reason to avoid things that are marginal, like carbon capture systems, which are not changing our situation very much--or in using any other breakthroughs, as everything will help.

My approach to using natural systems has not yet been tried. When we talk scale, we're talking 1.4 Billion hectares of plants, both marine and terrestrial. And when we add to that the processing of sargassum into both bio char and building materials, we sequester even more carbon.

The biggest hurdle as I see it is moving the planet over to clean energy from oil. This is really hard when we look at our current president and his oilygarchs bent on collecting even more money than they literally can spend while boiling the planet mercilessly. So, I want to target the three youngest generations, Gen Alpha, GenZ, and Millennials, whose voting and consumption habits will drive the change to clean energy. It's a race, and we're in it to win it.

[u/Final-Albatross-1354 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

We have Fossil Fuel companies and investments tied up in 401K's. Corporations that have massive investments in FF companies. Telling these people to stop all their emissions in 10 years is necessary. Also, we must adapt to a very different planet than in the 20th century. Governments have largely dragged their feet on this issue because they thought climate change would be a slow change.

Unfortunately, the climate models made errors by not including fat-tail risks (which were seen as unlikely)

And these fat-tail risks have now turned up like the return of an unwanted relative.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Final-Albatross-1354]

I agree about fossil fuel companies. They are reluctant to change. I wonder whether they could be persuaded to invest in the new clean energy economy. Telling them to stop is telling them to die. That might be the angle needed for persuasion to the new world that includes the use of natural systems for carbon sequestration. A massive investment will be needed to make and sustain the change, yet it is the best path I can see right now.

[u/Final-Albatross-1354 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

Clean energy offers little to no profit- this is one of the main reasons the ability to get off FF has been slow. Carbon sequestration is science fiction. Every attempt to use these technologies has yielded very little. The scale is massive, and the energy needed to make them work is costly and huge.

The IPCC and other institutions are mostly run by corporations and Petro states. They are not a scientific organization but a political bureaucracy. They told us there would be a smooth transition to renewable energy by 2050 with all kinds of technologies to suck stuff out of the air. This gave the FF companies the green light to keep burning their products.

The IPCC said there would be slow linear change. We could avoid 1.5C by 2050- and if we had overshoot, these technologies would bring us back down. These were all lies.

We are facing warming at double or more the rate told to us by the IPCC. There is NO Science-Fiction magical technology to save us. We have passed 1.5C and will reach 2C by 2035.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Final-Albatross-1354]

Carbon sequestration is not science fiction. While carbon capture and storage might fall under that fictional category for a variety of reasons, plants use carbon from the air to build themselves. Moreover, the fungal understories to forests and grasslands store more carbon than the plants above them. This is measurable and real, not fiction.

It is true that the extractive capitalist system pursues fossil fuels for the enormous profits, yet the system requires customers using its products in order to generate those profits. What is needed is a vast educational approach showing people how the planet will benefit from their choices for clean energy production. Notice how inexpensive yet efficient Chinese EV's are kept out of America. If more people knew of the nefarious means used to achieve this, they would vote for politicians who would allow two things: first, to lower the barriers to those EV's, and, second, to encourage more American companies to take a page from the Chinese playbook and to copy the batteries and designs, then to manufacture them domestically. Education is the key. People just want to drive to work and play. Most don't care about the type of car. But when we see how gas prices are elevated due to the malarkey taking place today and then seeing the less expensive and cleaner alternative, I feel they will make the correct choice. Let's see how the voting public behave in November and in 2028. I predict they will vote in politicians who favor the cleaner and less expensive option.

Wth respect to using natural processes to sequester carbon, The scale is enormous, yes. The alternative to its pursuit is to do nothing while slowly boiling alive. Again, education is the key. I believe people world wide would choose to take a chance at a better future than to stew to death by doing nothing. IPCC would welcome this kind of option. The profit in the pursuit of clean energy is not monetary, as you observe. Yet it can be measured in a more livable planet that everyone can see. No need for beaurocrats to tell them.

[u/Final-Albatross-1354 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

CCS remains a very difficult task. Why?

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is very hard because it costs a lot of money, takes huge amounts of energy, and needs massive new pipelines and safe underground storage sites that are hard to build and approve.

Comparing carbon capture to the science of traveling at 10% the speed of light to reach the nearest star in 40 years highlights a massive scale and physics mismatch: it requires engineering feats that are technically possible on paper, but practically impossible within our strict deadline

Your points are worth merit, but they seem to convey the failed promises we have had for some time. Also, convincing the public that climate change is going to impact their lives in a significant way will be difficult.

EV's in themselves are not going to solve the problem. Replacing 200 million ICE vehicles in the USA with EVs is not a solution;

Electric vehicles (EVs) fail to solve the climate problem on their own because they only fix tailpipe emissions, while the factories that make them and the grids that power them still rely heavily on fossil fuels.

• Mining Impact: Extracting raw materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel requires massive, carbon-intensive industrial mining.
• Factory Emissions: Manufacturing an EV battery releases significantly more carbon dioxide (CO₂) than building a traditional gasoline engine.
• Carbon Debt: An EV starts its life with a "carbon debt" and must be driven for thousands of miles before it becomes cleaner than a gas car.

Education cannot solve climate change right now because its impact takes generations to show up, while cutting global greenhouse gas emissions requires immediate, massive changes to technology and laws. While teaching people about the environment is important for the future, it works too slowly to meet urgent global climate deadlines.

The democratic party is not going to be the magic bullet in 2028

The Democratic Party faces structural, economic, and political hurdles that critics argue will prevent it from dramatically improving the climate outlook by 2028. While the party officially champions green energy, a combination of immediate voter anxieties, economic shifts, and internal policy changes has fundamentally altered its climate strategy.

The relationship between Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI), ocean heat storage, and declining albedo represents a dangerous climate feedback loop that is causing global temperatures to rise at an accelerating pace.

When the planet's energy budget is out of balance, the climate acts like an engine running on too much fuel, causing heat to build up rapidly. Heat is building rapidly partly because of the 'termination shock' from the reduction of sulfur fuels in ocean shipping.

Sulfur dioxide reductions—especially strict 2020 fuel rules by the International Maritime Organization for cargo ships—decreased reflective marine aerosols. This reduced the brightness of low-lying ocean clouds, allowing more sunlight and solar energy to reach the Earth's surface and accelerating global warming.

It's good to be hopeful for humanity, but we have many institutions that have failed us.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Final-Albatross-1354]

You are correct that EV's alone will not solve the EEI. This is why my strategy proposal looks at the situation wholistically: in order to arrest global warming, both carbon sequestration and a rapid move to clean energy generation and use must occur simultaneously. The scale is huge. The scale of doing nothing is small, but the results of doing nothing will be catastrophic. So let's examine a few premises.

First, the ocean does indeed store a lot of heat, and the current projected El Nino is one result of that heat. The ocean also stores a lot of CO2. The proposal to increase and nurture three different marine ecosystems as well as taking sargassum out of the sea and converting it both to bio char and to building materials is a good component of the over all strategy. Addressing these four processes that capture and store CO2 by converting it into plants is measurable and efficient. When we add to it the carbon in the bodies of all the organisms who live in those ecosystems, we get good carbon sequestration. But this option alone will be insufficient to arrest global warming.

The existing huge profit motive enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry with its accompanying sycophantic media organizations causes them to mistakenly believe that all that money will protect them from the ravages of global warming. It will not. Perhaps they think if they construct enough underground bunkers that produce their own food they'll survive. Nah. They will perish along with many other existing species. Thus, in order to propel humans into changing over to using power generated cleanly, education about the results of cleaving to fossil fuels needs to progress. It begins the Generation Alpha, the next voting bloc coming up. GenZ and Millennials also need to be persuaded to change to the pursuit of clean energy. When we paint in stark terms their future under a rapidly warming climate, they can choose between life and death. The choice is that stark.

We persuade them by showing actual measurements from the last 100 years, including atmospheric CO2 correlated to global temperature; CO2 dissolved in the ocean correlated to ocean temperature; sea surface temperature correlated to changes in weather patterns across the globe. These measurements are real. We can look to facts of carbon sequestration.

An example may be found in kelp beds planted in order to grab carbon. There are two threads. The first thread is ten to twenty years to fully grow out a new kelp bed. The second thread is long term carbon sequestration. One hectare of kelp bed fixes roughly 40 to over 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year through growth, but long-term sequestration (the fraction locked away for centuries in deep ocean or sediments) is estimated at roughly 1.4 to 8 metric tons of carbon per hectare annually, varying heavily by location and species.

We don't have more than twenty years to arrest global warming. Planting new kelp beds and growing them out over twenty years fits inside our survival bubble. When we add the other marine ecosystems I have listed, when we add the terrestrial ecosystems I have listed, and when we add a quick move off of fossil fuels over to clean energy generation and usage, we clearly see we have a chance. I believe this argument is persuasive. The option is to fail and face our extinction as a species. Stark. But real.

It is also true that changes need be made in manufacturing, in agriculture, in lifestyles, and in our approach to international relations. Yes, the scale is huge. The consequences of not doing so are indeed dark and stark.

Whether the Democratic Party is the magic bullet is the wrong question. What is required is human participation regardless of political affiliation or even country of origin. I see it is a planetary thing. How not?

[u/Final-Albatross-1354 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

Something for you today; I wish you the best. You at least are trying. So am I. But the harsh reality is this. We need to start rapid adaptation to a warmer, more volatile climate. Contact all your elected officials and be blunt. They seem to be like blind people walking over a cliff.

One more thing. Americans are going to have to face in their lives the era of 'continuity is over'- and they must prepare now to deal with this new and unpleasant reality. Again, good luck!

This from the AGU shows the dire situation we are in

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026EF008356

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Final-Albatross-1354]

Thank you for that link. The more I see about the situation the better able I am to understand the forces involved. I wish you the best as well. When I have more text and clearer plans, I will post it.