Geoengineering or not—why, of all things, would this corporation try ocean iron fertilization? And why would a band of environmentally attuned indigenous leaders agree to fund it?
Here’s why ocean fertilization, or adding nutrients to the ocean to “fertilize” it, is interesting for carbon sequestration. Phytoplankton—those tiny little bits of living matter in the ocean—are responsible for half of earth’s primary productivity. There’s a lot of biomass growing and churning and dying in the oceans. If more of it can grow, and sink to the depths of the ocean, it could in theory store a significant amount of carbon. Essentially, it’s a way of biologically enhancing the ocean sink. What limits plankton from growing, in certain areas of the ocean, is a lack of nutrients. So: more nutrients (fertilizer), more plankton, more carbon sequestered. Broad strokes, it sounds like it has a lot of potential. But the fine print: we don’t know that much about the actual carbon sequestration potential of this method, because for it to be truly sequestered, it has to sink down to the deep ocean. It’s fantastically difficult to measure and study this; the deep ocean is like another planet. Sequestration also depends upon the availability of light, silicate, and other factors—and there are potential side effects. Because of these measurement difficulties, and unknowns, it would be really tough to actually set up a market for this kind of intervention.
However, this wasn’t the only motive named by the HSRC. As their name might suggest, they also saw ocean iron fertilization as a way to accomplish salmon restoration. The Haida, who have operated a successful hatchery on the Yakoun River for over forty years, know that salmon go out into the deep ocean. After they leave for the deep ocean, however, no one knows exactly what happens; what is known is that, although salmon runs fluctuate wildly, they are not coming back to Haida Gwaii in large numbers. Moreover, as indigenous scholar-activist Kyle Whyte has pointed out: “The declining salmon runs do not arise only or primarily from the looped back effects of recent anthropogenic climate change. They are due to factors including land dispossession, disrespect of rights and ecological degradation.”7
The HSRC wanted to do their own research on this matter. They were working with a theory that has to do with dust, something that the entrepreneur Russ George also talked a lot about. The idea goes like this: Phytoplankton are in decline. Growth of plankton in the North Pacific is known to be limited by the amount of iron in the water. The fantastic 2010 salmon run could be linked to the explosion of Kasatochi volcano in Alaska, which rained nutrient-laden ash on waters. The logic was thus: more dust leads to more plankton, leading to more creatures in the food chain, which ultimately leads to more salmon. This is a striking feat of cognitive linkage—one that would be extremely difficult, maybe impossible, to “prove” according to scientific standards. It would likely be thrown out in a research grant proposal because it would be so difficult to gather robust evidence for making these kinds of causal claims.
But if you’re not a scientist at a grant-funded research institution—if your interest is applied, and your product is not citations and CV line items but increased ocean productivity and pelagic biomass—maybe offering robust, empirical proof isn’t as relevant, because if it works, it works. The project was dubbed a “nonscientific event” by Environment Canada; but to truly understand it, it’s more useful to think of it as a different type of science; perhaps “free range” science, following environmental geographer Rebecca Lave.8 The methods, funding sources, and intents were often a hybrid of conventional and unconventional, or professional and amateur, practices. The project was conceived by people who didn’t have advanced training in science, but wanted to do the work.
Much of the condemnation of the project as geoengineering was linked to Russ George, a familiar character to activists concerned about ocean iron fertilization. George has a checkered past with carbon credit startups. His earlier company Planktos was chased out of the Galápagos following public outcry back in 2007, with George defending himself as a “first responder to a planetary medical emergency,” claiming the terrain of responsibility for restoring nature.9 Outrage over his proposal in turn helped move forward the 2008 Convention on Biological Diversity moratorium on large-scale commercial ocean fertilization. George makes an eccentric villain. Yet focusing on him as the “rogue geoengineer” ignores a lot of important contextual facets of the 2012 HSRC project. For one, the village has a long-standing concern with both climate mitigation and adaptation. The economic development officer who worked with the salmon restoration project, John Disney, also had a vision for comprehensive stewardship that included transitioning to independent wind and tidal energy, strengthening the local food system to become more sufficient, and reforming health and transportation systems. For example, years after this ocean fertilization project, he helped get a new biomass boiler built to heat community buildings, replacing polluting diesel with electricity generated from wood waste. Also among his past efforts was an attempt to generate revenue for afforestation through carbon credits, from which he learned that “one-off” projects aren’t sustainable. This is, in short, because no one is going to pay communities to conserve their resources. What happened with this ocean fertilization project, though, is that the village voted to use their own money. As McNamee said, the Haida of Old Massett Village “have a cultural imperative to steward their resources,” and since efforts to curb global emissions have been unsuccessful, we have a responsibility to look at alternative solutions.
Changing the earth is still often imagined in Cold War terms. We are still under the spell of images of mechanization, desensitization, and compartmentalization, and they tint how we think about engineering the climate. It’s supposed to be people in drab clothes who are scheming up climate control—throwbacks to imagined bureaucratic, monocultural hierarchies—or else a constellation of conspiratorial businessmen. Not indigenous people—a fisherman working and living in a tiny village, or an elected councillor who admits to an awkward media presence. “Geoengineering” wasn’t supposed to be a village project, and the script of “geoengineering” makes it hard to understand this project in its context. The script calls for a confrontation between actors who haven’t even shown up for the performance.
Still, some of the characters in how this story is usually told are contemporary enough: the entrepreneur and the eco-hacker; the eco-startup or “ocean biotechnology and stewardship corporation.” Who these days gets to be a “maker”? Or a “decision maker”? Plenty of climate engineering startups have popped up (and some have already gone silent): Climate Engineering (industrial air carbon capture), Global Thermostat, Kilimanjaro Energy, Biorecro (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), Cool Planet (biochar), to name a few.
People who are taking action, being creative, or disrupting often have affinities with this startup culture. Silicon Valley’s cultural roots have been traced, most notably by media scholar Fred Turner, both to the collaborative, interdisciplinary, cybernetics-infused work being done in federal labs during the 1940s and ’50s, as well as to 1960s counterculture—specifically, a tech-friendly strain of this counterculture, filled with ideas of holistic systems ecology and back-to-the-land New Communalism.10 Russ George fits in perfectly with such a cowboy-nomad archetype, and the press picked up on this. Rogue, maverick, wrangler of credits on the carbon frontier, guest speaker at Silicon Valley’s Seasteading Institute, where libertarian tech gurus plan their floating existence loosed from the shores of the backward-leaning mainland. And his emphasis on “ocean pastures” and “ocean ranching” extends the cowboy archetype more literally. Press treatment of George reflects the media’s love-hate relationship with the entrepreneur and the hacker, the ones who are rolling up their sleeves and playing around and doing, rather than theorizing. Startups get to do the unconventional work, something for which they are distantly admired. But we’re also skeptical of their sense of responsibility, and their drive for disruption.
Even though George is a solo entrepreneur, there is also a
conversation here about what kind of jobs can be created for whole communities, especially in rural areas. Jason McNamee dreamed of taking collaborative science to the next level with a Haida Ocean Center of Excellence to study marine changes: “We would also aim to innovate new ways to study the ocean and empower citizen science by designing and building cheap DIY instruments, the plans and software of which would be publicly available,” he told me. “Such a center would require shore-based, ship-based, and robotic infrastructure.” HSRC was already able to borrow needed equipment and get input from professional scientists—many of whom weren’t interested in formal association with the project, but were interested in the data. Science has been set free from the big institutional laboratory, and the processing power and tools to gather and handle large datasets are increasingly affordable to a broader range of people. The cautionary downside to this kind of research is that it may miss key bits of information or broader understanding, the kind one gets from years of training and layers of institutional oversight. Yet if scientists began to collaborate with citizens, amateurs, or people who didn’t spend years as underpaid graduate students, perhaps this would be a great democratic shift, and good for science. Perhaps it would mean that people beyond big cities and big laboratories would get to participate in the knowledge and information economies. If carbon removal can be done in places beyond big cities—in a robust and permanent way—those projects could help support knowledge-economy stewardship jobs in rural communities.
In what follows, we’ll pick up on some of the threads in this story: the plight of rural or extractive economies, the roles of the hacker and the disruptor, the robotic ocean gliders, and the plankton itself.
Rural labor: Burden, or carbon care work?
The transition toward a society dedicated to carbon removal at climate-significant scales could be an opportunity for rural reinvigoration—or conversely, one for rural oppression and the continued transfer of wealth out of rural lands. This goes for both developed and developing world contexts, though each bears its own challenges. In either case, we should see carbon removal through the lens of rural economic development issues. When it comes to soil carbon and regenerative agriculture, revitalization of rural economies is certainly already included in the conversation. Yet when it comes to high-level policy, or research on “negative emissions” or carbon removal writ large, consideration for how these technologies will intersect with rural communities is conspicuously absent. Perhaps this dynamic is omitted because most people talking about carbon removal live in cities, or because they don’t readily associate “technology” with “rural”—another persistent binary.
There are tremendous opportunities for rural communities to benefit from carbon removal practices based in cultivation and burial. On the cultivation side, carbon removal policy could provide economic opportunities for farmers who take up regenerative agriculture. Public awareness and support from urban food consumers and taxpayers is crucial to bridge this gap between targets and reality, but so is demand from rural areas for subsidy redirection. On the infrastructure side, building out infrastructure and operations for carbon capture and storage with direct air capture or bioenergy would offer jobs with a similar skill set to those in the oil and gas industry, provided an effort were made to retrain workers into this field. Enhanced mineral weathering of mine tailings for fertilizer would offer mining and transport jobs. Connecting with unions and workers would be key here, and carbon removal could become part of a just transition away from fossil fuels. In any case, carbon removal would be more likely to succeed and actually reach net-negative emissions if it emerged in dialogue with what rural communities need.
There’s a funny tension here: Is this work a burden, or is it a privilege? It depends. Take carbon farming: on one hand, it entails a bundle of practices that entail various new burdens. Farmers need to purchase a different set of equipment, and it can take several years to make that transition. As a side effect, farmers are also cleaning up someone else’s waste. Growers, on the other hand, get to be landscape designers, exerting control over land and resources. If you’re a day laborer or hired farmhand, though, you’re executing someone else’s vision, presumably with little say. This brings up the question of collective labor and democratic decision making in farm design and operations—something recognized by the principles laid out in the “Regenerative Organic” certification scheme. It has “Social Fairness” as one of its three pillars, with several standards for “Farmer and Worker Fairness” around a living wage, transparency, and the right to form associations.11
When we think of environmental maintenance work exclusively as a burden, we miss something important about what motivates people to intervene, to take action, to do this caring work. In current environmental policymaking, writes development scholar Neera Singh, conservation is regarded as a burden that entails high opportunity costs, and so financial incentives come to be seen as critical to offsetting those costs.12 But in fact, they aren’t necessarily so critical. Singh has studied community forests in Odisha, India, for twenty years. What she has found is that when payments are established for ecosystem services, the payments are often insufficient to compensate for lost income and opportunities. Rather, efforts to conserve forested land depend upon a host of nonmonetary, personal, and collective motives, including sacred values and intergenerational concerns. Conservation care is described by Singh as “affective labor,” and as a “gift.” Affective labor, in contrast to alienated labor, writes Singh, involves self-expression; its ideal is a craftsman or artist, who expresses their inner self and gives to society as a whole. It can’t be separated from the person doing it. The relationship between the person and the object of labor is crucial.
In the “gift” paradigm, people act not as buyers and sellers of environmental services, “but as reciprocal partners who share both the burden and joy of environmental care.” Singh cautions that “caring labor framed in the language of a gift can be potentially exploited, as women’s caring labor continues to be.” But, she explains, this framework also means that markets and purchasing power are no longer the arbiter of how resources are allocated: power is shifted to the gift givers, whose power comes from the reciprocity inherent in the gift. One challenge with a gift paradigm when applied to carbon management, as environmental humanities scholar Karen Pinkus points out, is that the recipients are humans in the future: “On first glance we could say that the recipient cannot give back to the giver because they do not occupy the same space/time except in the most phantasmatic sense. Wouldn’t carbon management, then, overcome the temporal aporia that makes the gift impossible?”13 In this sense, perhaps carbon removal implies a greater ask of the gift: a gift that will go unreciprocated during this generation.
The takeaway here is that with carbon removal, just as with land stewardship, initial payments might be insufficient to motivate action. “Incentivization” is the go-to way of thinking about how carbon removal would be accomplished; and it will likely be very important, but it’s not the only motivator. Have we been brainwashed into thinking that paying people is the only way to get things done? It’s relatively easy to imagine farmers taking the perspective of affective labor, stewardship, and the gift—many growers I’ve talked with certainly speak a form of this language, though it doesn’t translate well to conventional farm operations. How could this perspective apply to industrial carbon capture and removal? A pipe fitter, for example, might very well view their work with pride, as something that powers the nation. The failure by urban elites to recognize their labor as such contributes to the divisions in today’s society.
It’s possible to simultaneously hold all these perspectives as true—carbon removal as burden, opportunity for work, and form of care—while at the same time not losing sight of the dimensions of responsibility (who should be responding to this duty) and agency (who has the capacity to do so).
Tech labor: Coders, makers, and entrepreneurs
“In the future, carbon
removal is going to be automatic, and simple, and happen invisibly in the background,” says Paul Gambill, CEO of Nori. Nori is a startup interested in disrupting a broken system: carbon markets. The aim of the company is to use blockchain technology to set up a voluntary marketplace that will connect people who will pay for carbon removal and people who can actually remove carbon. The gift cards, or tokens, are used to pay for carbon removal credits. Gambill is explaining all this to a room full of carbon removal enthusiasts at an event called Reversapalooza—“a collaborative summit for climate change reversal.” He invites us to imagine that we’re in a Lyft or Uber. After we get out, we receive an alert asking us if we want to have a sponsor pay to negate the emissions of that ride. “Or imagine that you drive your car up to a gas pump, and after you fill it, in the same transaction, you can pay to purchase carbon removal certificates that will negate the emissions from that tank of gas.” Or imagine a mobile phone game about environmental restoration, in which in-app purchases go to carbon removal. In this room, the vision seems possible.
Outside, it’s a bright, blue-sky spring morning on Seattle’s waterfront. Sailboats from around the world are gathered for the Clipper Round the World race, colorful flags fluttering from their masts. Ferries are crisscrossing the shining harbor, framed by the snowcapped Olympic Mountains on the horizon. And in a ballroom in the basement of the Marriott Waterfront, a hundred people are playing a game in order to better understand how blockchain can help reverse climate change. Soil scientists, blockchain enthusiasts, activists, and climate foundation professionals are roaming around, making transactions. In this game, buyers of carbon removal credits have the goal of offsetting our emissions by buying carbon removal credits. Sellers are trying to generate additional revenue by selling these credits. My tablemate and I are sellers, simulating a vineyard enterprise that has the potential to remove 1.6 million tons of CO2 during year one—but it’ll cost us 1.9$ million over two years. The black hotel tablecloths are stacked with carbon removal credits and tokens representing the eponymous Nori cryptocurrency.
After Geoengineering Page 18