After Geoengineering

by Holly Jean Buck

  They told each other what they missed about land, and what they were happy to do without, as night deepened around the bar.

  “Have you been tracking this storm?” she asked.

  “Not really. Your guys with the drone farms have way better forecasts than what I get. I only get the internationals, I’m not in state waters.”

  “It’s a straight-up hurricane now. And it’s turned.”

  “We don’t call them hurricanes out here.”

  “I mean …” She scrolled. “There’s a fair bit of variability, but it’s pretty brutal.” She held up her tablet. He said nothing. “Fuck. I’ve got to sober up and get around this thing.” Most of the customers, she realized abruptly, had already gone back to the water for the night. The lighting was now soothing twilight tones.

  “You should take a quick nap,” he said.

  “No, I just need an hour to get straight. Then I can autopilot south. Sleep en route.” He made her an espresso with orange peel and cinnamon. She studied the forecast as he stacked chairs. The floor began to roll. “You ought to move,” she said.

  “It’s a huge pain. That’s why I’ve just been floating here. People know where to find me.”

  “People can find you by tracking your updates. Your fans are following you, anyway, for your pithy observations about your chicken and your sunset photos, while they dream of the offshore life. Come on. I’ll help you prep.”

  Together they secured the fittings at the bar. In the greenhouse he undid plumbing and covered up loose soil. He checked the fuel tanks and she the batteries. They scouted for loose objects on the platform, in the moonlight. She could see no boats now, save her own.

  In his room, the books spilled out of bookshelves. The bed was unmade. He saw her look at it, and she saw him see.

  “I’ll get the cat. Can you help with the roof?” She ascended through the ceiling hatch to unscrew the solar panels. It was already the small hours, and the rain was drumming. She came down and checked her tablet again. “Really not looking good. Where you headed?”

  He booted up a terminal to plot a course. “I’m not going to avoid it all,” he said, “so I’d prefer the south end. I’ll fire off once you’ve undocked,” he said.

  The platform could reach maybe eight miles an hour.

  “Do you ever evac?”

  “Sometimes. Rarely. Everything I have is here.”

  “My boat’s pretty speedy,” she said after a moment. “Why don’t you come along? Take a few days off. Put a virtual sign on the door. Wait out the storm, come back, fix up. Bring the cat. Hell, bring the chicken.”

  She held her breath.

  “I’ve got to stay with the bar,” he said at last, and looked away. “Remote pilot doesn’t stand a chance in that storm without me. Thank you, though.”

  She shrugged. “No thing.” They locked eyes again and she kissed him quickly on the cheek and squeezed his hand, then headed out into the outskirts of the storm.

  The sensors woke her for artifacts, and she corrected course, dozing in between. When the sky turned gray, she heated the last of her coffee. There was one seaweed farm offline, an hour away, but the weather was shit. She was tired and it would take all her fuel, but if she kept going, she could reach the islands.

  In the late afternoon, she saw land. Harvesters and tankers were lined up to come in to the mega-biorefinery at Enue. The air stank of seaweed. Frigatebirds and boobies crowded the rocks. She scanned herself in at the small-craft marina at Bikini and made for her favorite of the island’s five restaurants.

  “Anything new on the menu?” she asked Lae.

  “Vat-burger, homegrown, special sauce. Fresh tuna. Taro chips.”

  “Tuna and rice. With that yuzu sake spritzer thing.”

  At the counter was an Indonesian harvester with a pink hair-band, nails green with seaweed. And the old man who practically lived here, whose bones must be the shape of that chair, Grumpy Jones. Between them was a tourist in a bright swimsuit and magenta muumuu, scribbling notes, asking the harvester about diving.

  “History suckers,” Jones said when the tourist left. “Coming to see drowned species. For the ghost reefs.”

  “Hardly ghost reefs,” Vilma said. “The restoration crews have done an awesome job. I was here last month. Saw an octopus. Seahorses.”

  “Ghost reefs or the bomb museum,” he muttered into his beer.

  “Storm’s passing north,” observed the harvester. “Center’s over Wake Island now.”

  “It looks vicious,” Vilma said. “I had to rush to get out of its way.”

  “Hear about the ghost bar?” the woman asked. “Gone.”

  Vilma felt very cold.

  “How do you know?”

  “Distress call, went dark this morning. Heard it on the radio. Cyclone blew through its position. No one there to help out. Just empty water.”

  Vilma put down her drink and closed her eyes. She knew, she realized, almost nothing about him. It’s not fair, she thought, and noticed she had spoken aloud.

  The rain hammered for a long time, and they sat in its noise.

  When she opened her eyes, Jones was opening a worn journal and drawing a black tally. The whole page, she saw, was filled with black lines. The harvester shook her head.

  “What’s that?” Vilma said. The dullness of her voice shocked her.

  “He counts the people who’ve been killed,” the harvester said. “By the carbon in the atmosphere.”

  “They had their fast boats and planes and frozen fish,” Jones said. “And we end up dead.”

  “That seems pretty pointless,” Vilma said, nodding at the journal. “You’re hardly going to hear about all of them.”

  “He only counts the ones he has first- or second-degree connections with,” the harvester said.

  “Pointless,” Vilma said again.

  “He grew up on Bikini. Worked on records of losses when he was younger. Not just numbers. Names, too.”

  When the rain let up at last, Vilma heard a squawk. “Look at that,” she pointed. It was the largest bird she’d ever seen. “Looks like its wings are dipped in black paint.” Even the waitress turned to look.

  “Gooney bird,” the harvester said. “Sometimes they come around nowadays.”

  “It’s good luck,” Grumpy Jones appraised.

  Vilma raised her eyebrows. “Never thought I’d hear you say those words.”

  “Everybody knows it’s good luck.”

  They watched the albatross circle above the water.

  “We could use some good luck,” Vilma said at last.

  “Lucky to even be here,” muttered Grumpy Jones.

  “Go on like this,” said Vilma, “we’re gonna have to start calling you Optimist Jones. Make sure you put the bartender’s name in your book, too. Ghost bartender. For the record.”

  3

  Regenerating

  December, Montreal, −18°C / −0.4°F

  The snow crunches under my feet as I make my way through a freshly gentrified red-light district toward the headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organization. The ICAO building itself stands as a modern monument to global cooperation, bedecked with gifts from various member states. There are woolen tapestries depicting the birth of flight, a model of the world’s first four-seat electric plane, a plaque from the United Arab Emirates that reads: “The civil aviation is an accumulation of human inventions, experiments, and cooperative efforts.” I have entered this international workspace to join a few delegates to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for a workshop on geoengineering research. Many delegates are coming from the tropics, and most of us keep our coats on in the conference room, gazing out the windows as the steam from neighboring buildings rises and fades into the gray sky.

  The delegates are members of a working group that gives scientific and technical advice to the CBD. They have been focusing largely on issues of synthetic biology, and on plotting pathways to a 2050 vision for biodiversity. Wh
y tack on a geoengineering discussion to an already-busy week? As it turns out, the CBD is one of the only UN conventions to address geoengineering, largely due to the activism of environmental groups. In 2010, it issued Decision X/33, a statement that is often described as a moratorium on geoengineering. Later, the CBD took Decision XIII/14, which noted that more transdisciplinary research and knowledge sharing is needed to understood its impacts. This workshop was convened by an NGO focused on geoengineering governance to discuss what sort of research on geoengineering could be useful.

  As snowflakes swirl outside, we watch a few expert presentations—a discussion of perturbed plumes and the chemical aging of substances in the stratosphere, the metaphor of geoengineering that grips “like opioids,” the need to include instrumentation from other countries in geoengineering experiments. Then, we talk.

  “What we thought was years down the road is facing us now,” a delegate from a small nation declares. “My country has to be innovative.” Another participant raises concerns that governance of geoengineering research is a bridge to development of further geoengineering, warning against “engineering kinds of thinking.” The earth is sacred and alive; the spoken or sung word is sacred. (These are not incompatible languages: UN negotiations take extreme care with words.) Pachamama has secret and sacred things, things you don’t see. We believe in correction and validation in the field with affection. There are still some ways of seeing that are hard to reconcile; bitter histories of exploitation and damage that get mixed in and bleed together. The rain, when it came down on our faces, was like lemons because of the geoengineering experiments. They boil down to the same truths, though, in the end. Our island is gone—who could imagine that would have happened? We will be extinguished.

  A good part of the discussion centers on responsibility. There’s the sense, in some quarters, of the inevitability of carbon removal. Whose responsibility is the removal? A high-level official reported on a conversation in which a diplomat from a developing country about carbon removal had remarked, “That’s for developed countries.” More questions: about capacity, about doing the work and following through. Will there be moral hazards on a national level—that is, will geoengineering make developing countries less likely to keep forests? With the storage—how are you going to contain that [carbon]? You want to remove and store, but you’re also releasing? A delegate from Africa asks: Do countries even have the knowledge to make use of or interpret the scientific results? Someone else asks: What kind of capacities, specifically, do we need? Another points out a problem with leaving governance and ethics up to individual researchers: when researchers in repressive regimes are told to do things, they do them. Researchers are workers and laborers, also working within systems with varying degrees of implicit coercion. A sudden noise erupts from my neighbors’ bag, like a wildcat mated with a 1950s rotary phone and gave birth to a ringtone. Next topic: we’re back to responsibility.

  Polluters—emitters—must put the pollution back, it was forcefully asserted. They must return it to the ground in natural ways. But if it came from 3,000 meters below the ground in unnatural ways, asks an engineer, how can you put it back in a natural way? My discussion group gets stuck on a key topic of the day: natural climate solutions. These practices are a climate-focused subset of “nature-based solutions” or “ecosystem-based solutions,” and are now an established part of the vocabulary in settings like these.

  Understanding natural climate solutions

  Natural climate solutions are conservation, restoration, and land management actions that either increase carbon storage or avoid greenhouse gas emissions from ecosystems. They’re not considered to be geoengineering, generally, because they’re often designed in conversation with communities and organized at local and regional scales. They’re also focused on mitigation, and on avoiding further loss of carbon. Yet there’s a potential tension within natural climate solutions, in that the activities or practices within ecosystem care or management range on a broad spectrum from highly interventionist to hardly interventionist at all. On the interventionist end, they can bleed into ideas of geoengineering—especially when they’re conceptualized with the goal of removing carbon at a global scale.

  “Natural climate solutions” is a fast-growing keyword. The language and framing around natural climate solutions has been developed over the past decade, with influence from conservation-based NGOs like the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and The Nature Conservancy, as well as high-level discussion by intergovernmental agencies like the UN Development Program and the European Commission, and the CBD. But grassroots environmental and agriculture-oriented groups are also excited about natural climate solutions, perhaps due to a desire for a better relationship with nature. Geographers Matthew Kearnes and Lauren Rickards depict new processes of (carbon) burial as a therapeutic relationship between humans and the underground, in a kind of “mirror image to the extractive processes of mining, drilling, and hydraulic fracturing.”1 Burial is reimagined as a part of earthly savior or redemptive processes. This redemption or restoration narrative emerges in tandem with new soil or ecosystem science (and in some cases, in contrast to it). As later encounters in this book will illustrate, this restoration narrative—which Kearnes and Rickards describe in conjunction with a “land aesthetic” that is deeply moral—is a powerful force underlying the rise of natural climate solutions, and terrestrial carbon removal in particular.

  Yet at this Montreal geoengineering research workshop, many participants expressed a feeling that these natural climate solutions were not being given their due in the big Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, or in the international climate policy the reports inform. One official noted that only 2.5 percent of global climate finance goes to ecosystem-based approaches. These two UN conventions, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the CBD, participants reported, were likened to two different planets—the same parties participate in both conventions, but they have totally different stories when it comes to the climate issue. The institutional competition between the two conventions reminded me of organisms seeking food—only in this case they sought attention, respect, and funding. Institutional politics aside, the discussion broached two questions: Were natural climate solutions in fact being ignored in global climate politics? Moreover, how useful can they be?

  In this chapter, we’ll look at some key nature-based approaches for carbon dioxide removal—regenerative agriculture, afforestation, soil carbon sequestration, biochar, and blue carbon—in an attempt to sort out the discourse from the facts in the field, and examine what it would take to make these solutions part of our climate future.

  Carbon farming: Traveling the regenerative spiral

  “Eat pizza. Drink beer. Save the planet.” This virtual flyer appeared on a soil health Instagram account, luring me to Café Gratitude on Rose Avenue in Venice, California. They serve pizza and beer made with Kernza, a Eurasian forage grass that’s been optimized for carbon storage. Foamy and rich, the Long Root Ale lived up to the description on the can: the Kernza added “a slight spiciness to the dry, crisp finish.” According to the can, “Kernza also pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and stores it in the deep roots and in the soil. You don’t get carbon credits but it’s a damn good beer.”

  Kernza is a perennial grass, so it doesn’t have to be replanted every year and can be grown without tilling, which means it sequesters more carbon. The roots extend ten feet deep, or twice as deep as wheat, which is key for soil carbon sequestration. Kernza (a trademark) has been studied since 1983 by plant researchers at the Rodale Institute, who worked with US Department of Agriculture researchers to select for fertility and seed size.2 Kernza was further improved and selected by a Kansas-based nonprofit, the Land Institute, who hopes to ultimately develop a variety with yields similar to annual wheat. With advances in gene sequencing, which helps them select which plants might offer desirable traits, it’s been p
ossible to rapidly improve the variety (without genetic engineering). The agribusiness giant General Mills gave the University of Minnesota half a million dollars to work with the Land Institute to study it. This particular beer actually emerged through Patagonia Provisions, the food division of the outerwear company, who funded the initial steps to get it to market.

  At first glance, this story—I walked into a café in Venice and bought a beer—might read as a dismissible tale of empty green consumerism. I mean, the pizza came served on a plate that read “What are you grateful for?” in Bambino font. However, dismissing it offhand would occlude the several decades’ worth of effort a remarkable constellation of actors put in so that this Kernza beer could reach my table. It took interest from everyone: government and university researchers to nonprofits, big agribusiness, environmentally edgy corporations, and the grassroots community advocates that drew my attention to the restaurant. All of them bore some degree of devotion to a vision of regenerative, carbon-sequestering food systems.

  “Regenerative,” etymologically, comes from “giving birth again.” It was first used in a design context by Buckminster Fuller, and “regenerative agriculture” was coined by publisher and organic advocate Robert Rodale in the 1980s.3 “Regenerative agriculture” refers to methods that manage land holistically for carbon sequestration, crop resilience, soil health, and nutrient density. Again, though, this type of farming is more than a collection of agricultural practices—regeneration is a wider narrative linking sustainable business with agrarian culture. To understand all this better, I talked with Finian Makepeace, a musician and soil health enthusiast who leads speaker trainings for an organization called Kiss the Ground. The trainings equip soil health advocates to go out and talk with people about why soil is important. Clearly, Makepeace has thought a lot about how to spread the message.