Sustainability 101: Climate Change (Part 4: A New Hope)

I may or may not have decided to make the Climate Change sub-series four posts long just so I could make the Star Wars reference in the title of this uplifting finale. Uplifting is exactly what I will aim for, as while my last post gave a brief overview of what exactly is at stake if Climate Change goes unchecked, there are still opportunities to mitigate the damage. But before we can understand what we can do, we need to understand where the carbon is.

The Carbon Cycle

Scientists call the movement of carbon from the land to the atmosphere then back to the land and oceans the “Carbon Cycle.” This is very similar to the Water Cycle that we learned in grade school. In the Water Cycle we know that water exists as a liquid in lakes, streams, oceans, and underground in aquifers. It exists as a gas in the atmosphere and clouds, and a solid as ice primarily at the poles. Water settles for long periods of time in some places which we refer to as “pools,” such as the ocean, glaciers, and atmosphere. There are movements (“fluxes”) between these pools – evaporation and precipitation for example.

In the Carbon Cycle there are also pools where carbon stays for longer periods of time, and fluxes from one pool to another. The five main pools are labeled in blue in the diagram below. These are the atmosphere, plants (and animals), earth (soil and rocks/crust), fossil fuels, and the ocean (surface and deep). In some cases scientists will separate the earth and ocean into sub-sections like they have in this diagram. This is because deeper areas like rocks and the earth’s crust mostly trap away carbon so that it can’t interact with the rest of the cycle, while soil can interact with the cycle (like being turned into plant mass).

The fluxes are labeled in red, representing movements from one pool to another. As you can see, rivers transport 0.6 Pg/year of carbon from land (soil) to the ocean. Photosynthesis draws down 120 Pg/year of carbon from the atmosphere into land mass. These red arrows are to carbon what evaporation and precipitation are to water.

Knowing this, we can look at one single pool. Because we’re talking about climate change, I’ll focus on the atmosphere pool. We can look at the red arrows going into and out of this pool. Those going into the atmosphere are Ocean loss, Deforestation, Volcanoes, Plant respiration, Soil respiration, and Burning fossil fuels. Those leaving the atmosphere are Photosynthesis and Ocean uptake. We can add all of the “in” fluxes together, and subtract the “out” fluxes.

Doing so, we can see that based on this data that the atmosphere pool is increasing in size by 3.9 Pg per year. Doesn’t seem like too much until you realize that a Pg (a petagram) is one billion tons. Every year, about half of what we are burning globally in fossil fuels is staying in the atmosphere. That’s a lot of carbon.

What can we do?

If we’re looking to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we need to either reduce the inputs into this pool, or increase the outputs. We also need to keep in mind what we have control over as human beings. It’s not like we can or should prevent bacteria from decomposing dead matter. That’s kind of the basis of our entire food chain.

This is why environmental advocates urge a reduction in fossil fuel usage and deforestation. These are the two fluxes into the atmosphere that we can directly control. Project Drawdown is a fantastic organization that provides resources on ways that we can reduce our output to the atmosphere. Their Solutions Summary gives hard numbers on what sort of impact to the atmospheric pool various technologies and advances would have. Many of these solutions focus on reducing the flux into the atmosphere by reducing our resource usage and finding innovative ways to work with the resources that we have already extracted. Not only would this help mitigate our atmospheric impact, but in many cases these solutions would make long-term financial and economic sense.

Another way that we could reverse the carbon flux to the atmosphere is to increase the amount of carbon that we’re removing from this pool. I have seen many novel solutions to this, from ocean seeding and planting trees in order to augment the existing fluxes out of the atmosphere to some extremely creative and innovative new technologies.

Technology to the Rescue?

I was a chemistry undergraduate student, and as a rite of passage (ok, a requirement to graduate), I took Organic Chemistry. It was a difficult course to be sure, but it also provided me with the understanding that chemicals are in essence just giant tinker-toy models that can be assembled under particular circumstances. I apologize to my professor for the gross oversimplification, but bear with me. Granted, it’s usually easier to take some large molecule (like those in fossil fuels) and whittle it down to what you want to get as a result, but it’s also possible to take smaller molecules and piece them together. It just requires some determination and ingenuity to make it happen.

And if there’s anything we human beings are, it’s determined and ingenious.

Starting in the early 2010’s a flurry of activity began to investigate using CO2 as a building block to make large hydrocarbons. This is a huge class of substances that include everything from carbon fibers to plastics. What if we could filter CO2 from the air and use it to build things that we have traditionally used fossil fuels for?

That’s just what scientists have done, and now industry is looking to scale up. We have already proved that it is possible to make carbon fiber, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fuel from taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. 

There are even some companies making fuels from CO2, and looking to scale up. One I’m relatively familiar with is Carbon Engineering in British Columbia, Canada. Granted, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere just to burn it again seems counterintuitive. Think of it in terms of those fluxes. The arrows into and out of the atmosphere for these fuels would be equal. So it would provide 0 change to the atmosphere and would buy some time for other efforts and solutions to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. In the meantime, we would be able to rely on our fuel-based infrastructure as we phase in greener solutions.

There is Hope

Ultimately there is hope for our future, but we need to act quickly and invest in opportunities like those I’ve linked. We will realize long-term gains not only in terms of our environment and health, but financially as well. We can make it through what some are calling a “climate crisis,” but we need to act quickly.

And of course put in that determination and ingenuity that we humans are capable of.

Thank you for joining me for this Sustainability 101 explanation. There is a lot of ground to cover in this series, so please join me for upcoming articles on subjects like climate change and science-based targets, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and solutions like RECs, carbon offsets, and carbon taxes.