Carbon Mining - A Better Way to Fix the Climate


Reducing carbon dioxide emissions, far from being the only solution to climate change, actually harms efforts to stabilise the global climate. That may seem an astounding and counter-intuitive assertion, but it is supported by evidence, suggesting a need for a radical rethink of the strategic framework around efforts to address climate change. Such a rethink will show that governments need to reassess its view that climate intervention cannot substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

If the world economy reduces its CO2 emissions, the result will be a slowing of the growth rate of atmospheric CO2. Reducing emissions does not reduce the total amount of CO2 in the air. This difference between growth rate and total amount is crucial to understanding response to climate change. Emission reduction by itself cannot reduce the amount of carbon in the air and sea, but is like turning a flowing tap in a plugged bath down to just a drip, to delay but not prevent overflow. Climate stability needs to reduce the amount of carbon in the air, which means we need methods that are like pulling the plug in a bath. We can pull the plug on global warming by mining carbon from the air and sea using algae, with potential to operate on a scale bigger than total world emissions. Just as Tesla’s alternating  ...Read More...