Somebody in this room is going to save the world
If Ocean Visions doesn’t give you hope, I don’t know what will
There’s a buzz in the air at the Ocean Visions summit this year.
An energy.
Four hundred of the world’s top marine Carbon Dioxide Removal people are in one room at one time. Scanning the crowd, I can’t help but think “man, somebody in this room is going to save the world.”
I don’t know who, exactly.
There are all kinds of different people here, pursuing every sort of approach.
You’ve got your Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement people, looking at fifteen different ways to help the ocean absorb carbon. You’ve got your seaweed people and your phytoplankton people and your carbon markets people and your governance people. You’ve got people doing exotic stuff I hadn’t even heard about before, targeting species with names I can’t pronounce. You’ve got your lab people and your modeling people and your doing-research-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean people. You’ve got your electrochemical direct ocean removal people and your photoacid people. You have your remote sensing people and your satellite monitoring people and your autonomous ship people and your marine spatial planning people and your submersible people. You’ve got your biogeochemists and your marine ecologists and your molecular biologists and your mechanical engineers. You’ve got your government people and your university people and your NGO people and your start-up people and your finance people and your foundation people. You’ve got your big, blue-chip research organizations and your grungy garage start-ups.
You’ve got heaps of PhDs proposing dozens of field trials through more than a hundred organizations.
There are just all these people bouncing ideas off of each other, hatching research plans and business plans and community engagement plans and just all this energy.
It’s…it’s kind of amazing.
Brad Ack, the guy who runs the non-profit that convened all these people, says that when they started it back in 2019 they were just a couple of dozen people in the room, talking about ideas that sounded far-fetched at the time and just dreaming of turning marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) into something it really wasn’t back then: a field.
Boy have they succeeded.
The people who were at that original 2019 meeting are amazed to see the explosion of interest over the last six years. Now, mCDR is definitely a field: young researchers and activists and entrepreneurs looking for a career path can now very sensibly say “you know what, this is what I’m going to do with the next forty years of my life.”
They have a range of organizations they can build that career around — a range of universities to pick from, a range of different niches they can choose between. Just sitting in this room makes it very clear: mCDR is way, way past “weird idea some eccentric dudes thought up.”
This shit is happening.
Right here, right now.
Of course, it’s early days. The field exists now, but it’s in its infancy. Most of the trials being proposed exist mostly in the realm PowerPoint presentations — for now. The Monitoring, Reporting and Verification standards that will eventually allow all these people to start slinging the carbon credits that are eventually going to pay for all this are still being designed and validated. The permitting is still sort of up in the air in most places — though not all.
The field is young.
But it is a field.
Over the next decade or two, as it matures, the mCDR world will surely shake out. Most of the projects being developed here will fail. Everyone here understands that.
But chances are that a few, or maybe even just one, won’t fail.
It will succeed.
Big time.
And one is all it takes.
Thanks for posting about this. I find this avenue of inquiry very interesting and hopeful. There is so much baked in “belief in science “ in the climate debate but precious little open inquiry and discussion of practical measures. Beggaring humanity into the dark ages seems where the “scientific consensus” on climate change is leading. Keep exploring and posting.
It was a great conference, with 400 brilliant people. I learned a lot and connected with key people, answering questions like, "How do fishery ministeries expect to measure the benefit of ocean fertilization for feeding fish and fisheries."
What could be missing in this beautiful melange? A meaningful goal, such as restoring safe CO2 levels for our children.
I heard zero conversations about that except when I brought it up. All of the sessions I visited were oriented towards how to ultimately create carbon credits that can be cashed in. The assumption, of course is that if someone came in with half the world's GDP, they could fund enough of the carbon offsets to restore the climate within 100 or 200 years.
We can restore safe CO2 levels by mid-century. Nature showed us how in 1992. But to get there we must decide it's important and then commit to doing it, no matter the political barriers. Those are the barriers that prevented the other 400 attendees from even discussing ocean fertilization at Nature's 1992 scale.
For readers who want to get involved in CO2 removal that is designed to restore safe CO2 levels by 2050, come join us at the Climate Restoration Summit at EarthX on April 24. There are only a few dozen of us explicitly working to achieve our goal--join us! Your presence will make an enormous difference to you and to the movement.