That’s what some environmentalists said they feared when Planktos, a
California-based concern, announced it would embark on a private effort
to fertilize part of the South Atlantic with iron, in hopes of
producing carbon-absorbing plankton blooms that the company could
market as carbon offsets. Countries bound by the London Convention, an
international treaty governing dumping at sea, issued a “statement of
concern” about the work and a United Nations
group called for a moratorium, but it is not clear what would have
happened had Planktos not abandoned the effort for lack of money.
Here is the whole story.
Go the board and write “unintended consequences” 100 times.
Of course, this shows in part the emotional and Puritanical aspect of Al Gore-style environmentalism. If their goal were truly to reduce atmospheric CO2 at all costs, this experiment should have had their full approval. But for many, environmentalism is a secular religion, requiring self-sacrifice (and imposing that self-sacrifice on others) rather than creative scientific solutions.
Uncertainty is clearly a big problem in evaluating the planet-altering effects of our actions. A bit of paralysis might not be a bad thing in the long-run. Reducing carbon emissions does seem to be the safest bet. We can’t be sure any action is inherently safe so we have to adopt a process of adaptive management – cautious experimentation with possible options, careful monitoring and analysis, continual testing and adjusting of our assumptions and decisions based on the latest knowledge. And of course, the whole of society has to be involved because we are all stakeholders. That’s quite a challenge, but we can’t bury our head in the sand and ignore it.
We face unintended consequences either way.
The iron-infusing approach is different from the aerosol or mirrors approach.
The latter approaches mitigate CO2 which is allowed to remain in the atmosphere, so they must be maintained indefinitely.
The iron-infusing approach causes an algal bloom, which consumes a certain amount of CO2 and then sinks to a depth at which it will not decay. Therefore, if we decide we don’t like the side effects we can stop but the CO2 that has been removed is gone.
-dk
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