The scientific debate over iron fertilization started over 35 years ago. A fair amount of both lab and field research into this question has been conducted over those years, but virtually all of the biological oceanographers I’ve met remain pretty skeptical it would work as intended.
Diatoms are only one of many types of phytoplankton (microscopic algae) in the ocean, and all of them need iron and will vigorously compete for it; but those other types will essentially be “weeds” that will take root in the imagined diatom farm, consuming fertilizer, but not sinking out nearly as well, because they lack the heavy silica frustule.
It’s also relevant to know that tiny things sink very slowly (on the order of centimeters per hour), even when they are significantly heavier than water, which gives bacteria lots of time to gobble up the organic carbon you hope to sequester and convert it back to CO2 near the ocean surface. Keep in mind, the bottom of the ocean averages several kilometers deep, so that is a very long trip down for a dead diatom (months to years) whereas bacteria can consume the carbon in hours to days.
But the greatest potential objection is the ecological one. All life on Earth ultimately depends on the health of the oceans, which are 71% of the surface of our planet. The scale of ecological change needed to produce the desired level of carbon sequestration (assuming that part even worked) would be by far the largest scale ecological modification of the planet ever undertaken by humans. It would dwarf all agriculture, logging, and urban development by an order of magnitude.
We have no idea what the unintended consequences of all that would be, but there most assuredly would be many of them. The projected sea level rise of the next few hundred years due to climate change could be a minor annoyance compared to the long lasting impacts of runaway ecological changes triggered by something at this scale. We only have one Earth, and this would be an enormous experiment that could cause sudden shifts in global ecosystems leading to mass extinctions and other irreversible harms. It could also be fine, but the only way to find out for sure would be to do it to our one and only planet and find out.
Or that’s the widely shared concern among the people who study these ecosystems: that the medicine (the impacts of irreversibly messing with the ecosystem of 71% of the surface of the planet) could be worse than the disease (CO2 driven climate change).
For some approachable info on the genesis of this debate, you should really read about John Martin. These are not new ideas, people,have been debating them for literally decades. NASA has an informative intro here:
I mean, there isn't anything in your reasoning I disagree with. I just think these are all very good reasons to support increased research into these techniques. "We have no idea what would happen" is a reason to go and find out, no?
Also, *no shit* we all depend on healthy oceans to survive. At the moment we're acificying the oceans on a genuinely shocking scale. That won't stop until carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere fall. The more concerned you are about ocean health, the more open you should be to proposals that would stop acidification quickly.
While I’m not one to argue against more scientific research, this question is hardly some under-investigated backwater. In the decades since John Martin’s “…I’ll give you an ice age” provocation, many whole scientific careers (and significant parts of scores of others) have been spent on it. And my clear understanding is that the people closest to the science have become more skeptical of the viability of this approach, not less, as the data has come in over the years.
I’m heartened that you don’t disagree with my logic because it represents, to the best of my ability to cogently summarize, the current scientific consensus on this topic. I think what triggered my response in the first place is the “One Weird Trick” framing of the scientifically dubious possibility of iron fertilization of the oceans on the scale and timeframe you suggest could be achievable being The Answer to CO2 induced climate change.
Agricultural fertilizer runoff from land into the sea is considered a serious environmental pollutant for good reason, it causes destructive shifts in the impacted ecosystems, we know this. Open ocean ecosystems far from land are not some vast disconnected marine desert wasteland that we can suddenly modify however we want with impunity. It’s not impossible that “more research” could lead to some amount of iron fertilization being safely introduced through a responsible and gradual controlled process as one part of a much wider global response to climate change. We should absolutely continue to pursue the science that would support such an effort if that’s where the research leads.
But what I find most dangerous are calls to begin doing this now, ASAP, on as large of a scale as possible, because of the emergency of climate change. There are startups that want funding to do this immediately so they can sell carbon credit offsets to polluters to keep polluting. There are biotech startups that want to genetically engineer diatoms and release them into the environment to enhance their carbon sequestration potential. And on and on. Such human engineered interventions in ecosystems to solve other human caused problems have a frankly piss-poor record of turning out as intended, and for much simpler problems on much smaller scales than this.
I’m sorry to have to say it, but there almost certainly isn’t going to be “One Weird Trick” for solving human caused CO2 induced climate change. And so as always, we should be properly skeptical of people selling silver bullets solutions to vexingly complicated problems.
Trust me, I wish it all could come true. And of course there are Oceanographers who see potential and would like resources to continue to study it further. And I’m not opposed to that, so long as we proceed responsibly.
But as Mike Pesca is fond of saying: “there are no solutions to difficult problems, only tradeoffs.”
Think for a moment about why OIF is potentially so much cheaper at CO2 capture than the alternative technologies you outline in your piece. Is it because diatoms are just that naturally awesome in and of themselves? (They are, but that’s not the reason…).
Now let’s think for a moment about why fossil fuels have historically been such a cheap source of energy. Is it because coal, oil and gas are just that naturally awesome? In the past, many would have argued, yes, yes it is. (And some still do…)
But I submit, the real reasons are essentially the same. Both are cheap, not because the naturally occurring thing (fossil fuels, diatoms) is awesome, but because exploiting it to our benefit shifts much of the true cost to an externality accrued against a global commons. The atmosphere and open oceans respectively.
Diatoms are already out there doing their thing and have been for tens of million of years. The ancestors of today’s diatoms were responsible for sequestering much the carbon we’ve been burning for the last century in the form of oil and gas. And one way or another, when humanity ultimately stops increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentrations at unsustainable rates, if nothing else changes it will be diatoms that will eventually, naturally sop much of it back up and lock it away again, but on a geological time scale. But of course geological timescales won’t do to save us from the accumulated externalized costs of cheap fossil fuels.
So the question is do we risk accruing another massive environmental externality to “solve” our current one? Because to “hurry up” a geological timescale process to such an extent that we could conceivably “pay back” our debt to the atmosphere (and acidified surface ocean) in a matter of a few decades would without a doubt accrue a new externality in the form of suddenly, massively altering the biology of much of the surface of the planet to an extent that dwarfs anything we’ve done in the past.
Like the creeping rise of CO2 concentrations, a radical alteration of the open ocean ecosystem initially would be largely invisible and therefore intangible to the vast majority of people, which is an excellent place to exploit (and profit) from an externality accrued against a global commons! And again, if the oceans were just some vast disconnected place that could absorb all of our externalized costs, without consequences ultimately coming back to us, that would be great. But we’re hopefully much smarter now and know that isn’t true.
So let’s get concrete for a minute and return to the idea that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
What about the health of the Oceans would we be willing to trade to stave off the human costs of climate change? Would the extinction of most marine mammals and many seabird species be worth it? Would the destruction of the human edibility of most seafood and the economic viability of global marine fisheries be worth it?
Let me introduce you to Domoic Acid (DA), a potent neurotoxin that bioaccumulates in the marine food web and affects the brains of mammals and birds. It’s nasty stuff. High concentrations of DA can be produced by some species of diatoms under bloom conditions. That is, specifically the kind of conditions that OIF aims to induce across vast stretches of the global ocean to achieve its intended effect. DA is specifically known to be produced by diatoms of the genus Pseudo-nitzschia (P-n for short, among others), and open ocean P-n species have been among those demonstrated to bloom in large numbers in response to iron fertilization experiments conducted in the open North Pacific.
Would the ocean become one giant neurotoxic P-n stew due to OIF? Probably not? But it might! It’s virtually guaranteed to be a major issue to some extent, and that would be very bad.
Is a problem with Domoic acid accumulation and toxicity in marine food webs likely to be the only, or even the worst unintended consequence of all of this? Almost certainly not, it’s just one reasonably well understood risk. There are likely to be many others that we may only learn about when it’s nearly too late, or we are too dependent on the path we’ve chosen to turn back. Does this sound familiar?
So yes, large scale OIF has the potential to be much cheaper, but only if you don’t count all of externalized costs, most of which will likely be incalculable until much of the damage may already be baked into the ecosystem. I’ve seen this movie before and don’t like how it ends.
Anyway, thanks for your article and keeping the conversation civil and constructive. I enjoy reading your work and believe it’s important that we keep looking for ways to reduce and mitigate the impacts of our civilization on the planet. Optimism about the future and pushing back against both defeatism and radically unworkable proposals is important work. Keep at it.
I mean yes, going from the state of knowledge today to a full-scale global OIF implementation with no intermediate steps would be totally insane. But of course nobody is ever going to call for that, because nobody is that crazy.
You roll out a trial, you monitor it, you evaluate it, and if it seems to be promising you roll out another trial. If domoic acid is a problem, you try to figure out why, and you reformulate your program.
You do this iteratively, like a reasonable person, and monitor and recalibrate at each step. You refine the process, learn from mistakes, correct along the way. And if at some point you pick up on ecosystem impacts that are unacceptable you scale back, or stop.
What you don't do is decide that the results will be bad before you have proper data to show that. That's not science, that's ideology.
What you want is something that turns the extracted CO2 into something useful like, say alcohols or methane. Then it can replace fossil fuels in all the places where we use them today and we stop using the fossil fuels
Greenpeace supported Ocean Iron Fertilisation twenty years ago on scientific grounds, but then the accountants observed that their donor base were adamantly hostile on religious grounds so the support was withdrawn, and Greenpeace led the demonisation of the 2012 Haida Salmon project in Canada. Speculative risks can only be assessed by field testing, but the environmental NGOs arranged for the UN through the London Protocol and the Convention on Biological Diversity to place an effective moratorium on field tests except in locations where OIF would not work. The whole topic is an immensely corrupt scandal with government policy driven by renewable energy rent seeking and neo-communist green ideology. Forget the left and seek support on the political right.
I asked the marine biologist friend about the idea of eating CO2 to sequester it and I got a firmly negative response. Basically anything that eats carbon is itself made out of carbon, and at some point it dies or fails and adds to the problem.
I’d be interested in a discussion of what average Joe environmentalist thinks of this idea. I’d wager a good many of them would balk at the notion of doing anything that can have any impact on any ecosystem whatsoever. I’m thinking here of groups like the Sierra Club.
If they’re not in favor of doing this, it’ll make it much harder to ever get this idea funded or carried out at scale.
There's definitely a base-level unthinking NIMBYism to a lot of the mainstream environmental movement but I wonder how monolithic it is anymore. The Paris Agreement actively calls on parties to develop greenhouse gas sinks, of which this is obviously one. I'm thinking if it's properly explained, there's a good chance you could peel off at least enough support from greens to make this viable.
The key is to ramp up slowly, address the concerns one by one, and show the ecological benefits too.
Remember phytoplankton are at one end of the food chain that whales are on the other end of. You're really talking about...stocking the salad bar whales feed at! Is that really something Greenpeace wants to come out against?
I wouldn't be surprised if Greenpeace et al came out against it, regardless of benefits to whales or the climate or whatever else. A lot of these groups seem to be focusing hard on de-growth, and the sorts of remedies you're proposing here suggest de-growth isn't actually the only way to address carbon emissions.
I suspect they see it like we see the sale of indulgences by the catholic church... That it's "morally wrong" (in a deontological-sense) to create the CO2 in the first place, so attempts to justify these "evil acts", later on, are themselves reprehensible.
But yes, hopefully these groups get sidelined and lose influence.
You won't carry the greens as a block, but I think it's possible to peel off some portion of the movement. Maybe. Not sure how big a portion, but a portion.
Quico, I find this really fascinating, and would like to discuss with environmental law professor colleagues. (I started in environmental law, went to the Rio Conference, but now do mostly global political economy. And art!) Can you suggest papers, etc.? dwestbro@buffalo.edu
The scientific debate over iron fertilization started over 35 years ago. A fair amount of both lab and field research into this question has been conducted over those years, but virtually all of the biological oceanographers I’ve met remain pretty skeptical it would work as intended.
Diatoms are only one of many types of phytoplankton (microscopic algae) in the ocean, and all of them need iron and will vigorously compete for it; but those other types will essentially be “weeds” that will take root in the imagined diatom farm, consuming fertilizer, but not sinking out nearly as well, because they lack the heavy silica frustule.
It’s also relevant to know that tiny things sink very slowly (on the order of centimeters per hour), even when they are significantly heavier than water, which gives bacteria lots of time to gobble up the organic carbon you hope to sequester and convert it back to CO2 near the ocean surface. Keep in mind, the bottom of the ocean averages several kilometers deep, so that is a very long trip down for a dead diatom (months to years) whereas bacteria can consume the carbon in hours to days.
But the greatest potential objection is the ecological one. All life on Earth ultimately depends on the health of the oceans, which are 71% of the surface of our planet. The scale of ecological change needed to produce the desired level of carbon sequestration (assuming that part even worked) would be by far the largest scale ecological modification of the planet ever undertaken by humans. It would dwarf all agriculture, logging, and urban development by an order of magnitude.
We have no idea what the unintended consequences of all that would be, but there most assuredly would be many of them. The projected sea level rise of the next few hundred years due to climate change could be a minor annoyance compared to the long lasting impacts of runaway ecological changes triggered by something at this scale. We only have one Earth, and this would be an enormous experiment that could cause sudden shifts in global ecosystems leading to mass extinctions and other irreversible harms. It could also be fine, but the only way to find out for sure would be to do it to our one and only planet and find out.
Or that’s the widely shared concern among the people who study these ecosystems: that the medicine (the impacts of irreversibly messing with the ecosystem of 71% of the surface of the planet) could be worse than the disease (CO2 driven climate change).
For some approachable info on the genesis of this debate, you should really read about John Martin. These are not new ideas, people,have been debating them for literally decades. NASA has an informative intro here:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Martin
I mean, there isn't anything in your reasoning I disagree with. I just think these are all very good reasons to support increased research into these techniques. "We have no idea what would happen" is a reason to go and find out, no?
Also, *no shit* we all depend on healthy oceans to survive. At the moment we're acificying the oceans on a genuinely shocking scale. That won't stop until carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere fall. The more concerned you are about ocean health, the more open you should be to proposals that would stop acidification quickly.
While I’m not one to argue against more scientific research, this question is hardly some under-investigated backwater. In the decades since John Martin’s “…I’ll give you an ice age” provocation, many whole scientific careers (and significant parts of scores of others) have been spent on it. And my clear understanding is that the people closest to the science have become more skeptical of the viability of this approach, not less, as the data has come in over the years.
I’m heartened that you don’t disagree with my logic because it represents, to the best of my ability to cogently summarize, the current scientific consensus on this topic. I think what triggered my response in the first place is the “One Weird Trick” framing of the scientifically dubious possibility of iron fertilization of the oceans on the scale and timeframe you suggest could be achievable being The Answer to CO2 induced climate change.
Agricultural fertilizer runoff from land into the sea is considered a serious environmental pollutant for good reason, it causes destructive shifts in the impacted ecosystems, we know this. Open ocean ecosystems far from land are not some vast disconnected marine desert wasteland that we can suddenly modify however we want with impunity. It’s not impossible that “more research” could lead to some amount of iron fertilization being safely introduced through a responsible and gradual controlled process as one part of a much wider global response to climate change. We should absolutely continue to pursue the science that would support such an effort if that’s where the research leads.
But what I find most dangerous are calls to begin doing this now, ASAP, on as large of a scale as possible, because of the emergency of climate change. There are startups that want funding to do this immediately so they can sell carbon credit offsets to polluters to keep polluting. There are biotech startups that want to genetically engineer diatoms and release them into the environment to enhance their carbon sequestration potential. And on and on. Such human engineered interventions in ecosystems to solve other human caused problems have a frankly piss-poor record of turning out as intended, and for much simpler problems on much smaller scales than this.
I’m sorry to have to say it, but there almost certainly isn’t going to be “One Weird Trick” for solving human caused CO2 induced climate change. And so as always, we should be properly skeptical of people selling silver bullets solutions to vexingly complicated problems.
Look, sure, plenty of oceanographers are skeptical of OIF.
Plenty of other oceanographers (https://oceaniron.org/who-we-are/) think the first batch of studies were promising enough to warrant more study.
I’m very happy to accept the skeptics might turn out to be right. (Just one way to find out!)
Maybe you should play around with the possibility that they’re not, though…
Trust me, I wish it all could come true. And of course there are Oceanographers who see potential and would like resources to continue to study it further. And I’m not opposed to that, so long as we proceed responsibly.
But as Mike Pesca is fond of saying: “there are no solutions to difficult problems, only tradeoffs.”
Think for a moment about why OIF is potentially so much cheaper at CO2 capture than the alternative technologies you outline in your piece. Is it because diatoms are just that naturally awesome in and of themselves? (They are, but that’s not the reason…).
Now let’s think for a moment about why fossil fuels have historically been such a cheap source of energy. Is it because coal, oil and gas are just that naturally awesome? In the past, many would have argued, yes, yes it is. (And some still do…)
But I submit, the real reasons are essentially the same. Both are cheap, not because the naturally occurring thing (fossil fuels, diatoms) is awesome, but because exploiting it to our benefit shifts much of the true cost to an externality accrued against a global commons. The atmosphere and open oceans respectively.
Diatoms are already out there doing their thing and have been for tens of million of years. The ancestors of today’s diatoms were responsible for sequestering much the carbon we’ve been burning for the last century in the form of oil and gas. And one way or another, when humanity ultimately stops increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentrations at unsustainable rates, if nothing else changes it will be diatoms that will eventually, naturally sop much of it back up and lock it away again, but on a geological time scale. But of course geological timescales won’t do to save us from the accumulated externalized costs of cheap fossil fuels.
So the question is do we risk accruing another massive environmental externality to “solve” our current one? Because to “hurry up” a geological timescale process to such an extent that we could conceivably “pay back” our debt to the atmosphere (and acidified surface ocean) in a matter of a few decades would without a doubt accrue a new externality in the form of suddenly, massively altering the biology of much of the surface of the planet to an extent that dwarfs anything we’ve done in the past.
Like the creeping rise of CO2 concentrations, a radical alteration of the open ocean ecosystem initially would be largely invisible and therefore intangible to the vast majority of people, which is an excellent place to exploit (and profit) from an externality accrued against a global commons! And again, if the oceans were just some vast disconnected place that could absorb all of our externalized costs, without consequences ultimately coming back to us, that would be great. But we’re hopefully much smarter now and know that isn’t true.
So let’s get concrete for a minute and return to the idea that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
What about the health of the Oceans would we be willing to trade to stave off the human costs of climate change? Would the extinction of most marine mammals and many seabird species be worth it? Would the destruction of the human edibility of most seafood and the economic viability of global marine fisheries be worth it?
Let me introduce you to Domoic Acid (DA), a potent neurotoxin that bioaccumulates in the marine food web and affects the brains of mammals and birds. It’s nasty stuff. High concentrations of DA can be produced by some species of diatoms under bloom conditions. That is, specifically the kind of conditions that OIF aims to induce across vast stretches of the global ocean to achieve its intended effect. DA is specifically known to be produced by diatoms of the genus Pseudo-nitzschia (P-n for short, among others), and open ocean P-n species have been among those demonstrated to bloom in large numbers in response to iron fertilization experiments conducted in the open North Pacific.
Would the ocean become one giant neurotoxic P-n stew due to OIF? Probably not? But it might! It’s virtually guaranteed to be a major issue to some extent, and that would be very bad.
Is a problem with Domoic acid accumulation and toxicity in marine food webs likely to be the only, or even the worst unintended consequence of all of this? Almost certainly not, it’s just one reasonably well understood risk. There are likely to be many others that we may only learn about when it’s nearly too late, or we are too dependent on the path we’ve chosen to turn back. Does this sound familiar?
So yes, large scale OIF has the potential to be much cheaper, but only if you don’t count all of externalized costs, most of which will likely be incalculable until much of the damage may already be baked into the ecosystem. I’ve seen this movie before and don’t like how it ends.
Anyway, thanks for your article and keeping the conversation civil and constructive. I enjoy reading your work and believe it’s important that we keep looking for ways to reduce and mitigate the impacts of our civilization on the planet. Optimism about the future and pushing back against both defeatism and radically unworkable proposals is important work. Keep at it.
I mean yes, going from the state of knowledge today to a full-scale global OIF implementation with no intermediate steps would be totally insane. But of course nobody is ever going to call for that, because nobody is that crazy.
You roll out a trial, you monitor it, you evaluate it, and if it seems to be promising you roll out another trial. If domoic acid is a problem, you try to figure out why, and you reformulate your program.
You do this iteratively, like a reasonable person, and monitor and recalibrate at each step. You refine the process, learn from mistakes, correct along the way. And if at some point you pick up on ecosystem impacts that are unacceptable you scale back, or stop.
What you don't do is decide that the results will be bad before you have proper data to show that. That's not science, that's ideology.
What you want is something that turns the extracted CO2 into something useful like, say alcohols or methane. Then it can replace fossil fuels in all the places where we use them today and we stop using the fossil fuels
Greenpeace supported Ocean Iron Fertilisation twenty years ago on scientific grounds, but then the accountants observed that their donor base were adamantly hostile on religious grounds so the support was withdrawn, and Greenpeace led the demonisation of the 2012 Haida Salmon project in Canada. Speculative risks can only be assessed by field testing, but the environmental NGOs arranged for the UN through the London Protocol and the Convention on Biological Diversity to place an effective moratorium on field tests except in locations where OIF would not work. The whole topic is an immensely corrupt scandal with government policy driven by renewable energy rent seeking and neo-communist green ideology. Forget the left and seek support on the political right.
I asked the marine biologist friend about the idea of eating CO2 to sequester it and I got a firmly negative response. Basically anything that eats carbon is itself made out of carbon, and at some point it dies or fails and adds to the problem.
Sure, only "at some point" can be in 100,000 years...
I’d be interested in a discussion of what average Joe environmentalist thinks of this idea. I’d wager a good many of them would balk at the notion of doing anything that can have any impact on any ecosystem whatsoever. I’m thinking here of groups like the Sierra Club.
If they’re not in favor of doing this, it’ll make it much harder to ever get this idea funded or carried out at scale.
There's definitely a base-level unthinking NIMBYism to a lot of the mainstream environmental movement but I wonder how monolithic it is anymore. The Paris Agreement actively calls on parties to develop greenhouse gas sinks, of which this is obviously one. I'm thinking if it's properly explained, there's a good chance you could peel off at least enough support from greens to make this viable.
The key is to ramp up slowly, address the concerns one by one, and show the ecological benefits too.
Remember phytoplankton are at one end of the food chain that whales are on the other end of. You're really talking about...stocking the salad bar whales feed at! Is that really something Greenpeace wants to come out against?
I wouldn't be surprised if Greenpeace et al came out against it, regardless of benefits to whales or the climate or whatever else. A lot of these groups seem to be focusing hard on de-growth, and the sorts of remedies you're proposing here suggest de-growth isn't actually the only way to address carbon emissions.
I suspect they see it like we see the sale of indulgences by the catholic church... That it's "morally wrong" (in a deontological-sense) to create the CO2 in the first place, so attempts to justify these "evil acts", later on, are themselves reprehensible.
But yes, hopefully these groups get sidelined and lose influence.
I mean, I'm in no position to disagree, I've written more or less the same thing:
https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/how-climate-became-religion
You won't carry the greens as a block, but I think it's possible to peel off some portion of the movement. Maybe. Not sure how big a portion, but a portion.
You don’t really need to ask that do you? The groups are going to fight it because it doesn’t involve ending fossil fuels or communism or …
Don’t ask, don’t tell. Just go study it somewhere and write the paper later.
Quico, I find this really fascinating, and would like to discuss with environmental law professor colleagues. (I started in environmental law, went to the Rio Conference, but now do mostly global political economy. And art!) Can you suggest papers, etc.? dwestbro@buffalo.edu
https://oceaniron.org
Thank you. Very interesting.