A New Podcast Special Series: Can oceans save us?
More than 4 billion years ago, when Earth was still in its infancy, the atmosphere held
more than 100,000 times the amount of CO2 it does today. Ever so slowly, that CO2 was absorbed into the oceans, where it reacted with rocks of the seafloor or was scavenged by organisms, eventually becoming trapped in sediment
and slowly sequestered into Earth’s deep interior. This is the Earth’s
deep-carbon cycle - nature’s way of regulating greenhouse gases.
This week, Climate Now takes you on a special three-part podcast series that explores a novel suite of technologies, termed Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal (Ocean CDR), that aims to speed up Earth’s natural GHG regulator by enhancing the carbon dioxide removal
processes already happening in the oceans. In our
first episode, we are joined by a suite of entrepreneurs who see the climate-saving and profit-making potential of Ocean CDR, and who walk us through what these technologies
are, how they work, and why they could be so valuable to mitigating climate change. Our next two episodes will address the "but..." (because there's always a "but...").
Even when we are working in good faith to solve a problem, it is hard to anticipate the downstream environmental impacts of our actions.
(Just think - plastic bags were
originally intended to be an environmental solution!) Given the globally interconnected nature of the oceans, and the reality that
we have better maps of other planets in our solar system than we do of the ocean floor, ocean carbon dioxide removal technologies are a category ripe for unintended consequences.
In the
second installment of our series, we apply a healthy dose of skepticism to these developing ocean CDR technologies. We explore the challenges of monitoring ocean CDR safety and efficacy, what start ups are doing to
address them, and what kind of oversight is needed to ensure we aren't creating a bigger problem than we are solving.
Of course, that leads us to our next question: who should be doing the overseeing? Because international waters don’t
belong to anybody, but everybody is connected to them. What a single country or corporation chooses to put into the ocean as a climate change solution could be felt by the global community, if it turns out to have negative consequences on ocean
chemistry or ecosystems. In the series'
final episode, we will take a look at the existing international legal frameworks relevant to ocean CDR - how they originated, how they apply, who is responsible for enforcing them, and what oversight needs to be
put in place before these technologies start to scale up.
You can listen to each podcast through the links above, or
subscribe to access all our episodes in your favorite podcast app!
