Harry Marks wrote:The palm oil story reminded me of my big worry about algae growth as a source of carbon fixing: without incentives to take into account externalities, it could make the problem worse.
The main difference in this comparison is that algae for carbon removal aims to improve biological productivity in the vast High Nutrient Low Chlorophyll regions that cover 60 million square kilometres of the world ocean, improving biodiversity, whereas palm oil is wreaking apocalyptic destruction on some of the most precious ecologies of our planet, sending rainforest species extinct.
The economic debate on externalities and incentives is central to developing a credible political and investment case for carbon removal technologies. Another word for externalities is side-effects. I just had an interesting conversation about side effects of carbon removal technology. Any ocean-based algae production method must focus on ecosystem alterations, weighing up all environmental consequences in assessment of safety and efficacy.
Assessing such ocean based climate restoration methods is like pharmaceutical trials. In medicine there are often situations where the benefits of a treatment significantly outweigh the risk and damage of side effects. High efficacy can outweigh safety problems, depending on the frequency and severity of the problems, to justify decisions to approve trials and subsequent deployment.
With ocean fertilization, adding iron might cause an overall increase in biodiversity and a net cooling impact. These possible protective effects should be weighed against a range of possible harms.
In drug trials, design of economic incentives is central through patenting of intellectual property, but overall the main incentive of the developer is to comply with the regulatory requirements in order to bring the product to market. The moral debate around climate puts some perverse incentives in place by comparison, with the overall leftist tenor of debate viewing patents with disdain, applying a moral theory sometimes called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The context for algae is that political criticisms of climate restoration proposals, especially activist claims of moral hazard stopping emission reduction, appear to have stymied all field research into ocean fertilization in the current decade, so the market is highly distorted and gives incentives not to engage in research. There is a risk that hypothetical and real side effects can sometimes be exaggerated and distorted, overshadowing potential benefits. Very different incentives are needed, but as with patents, these are likely to be more in regulation than taxation.
Design of algae production may be able to minimise unwanted side effects, but discussion needs to ensure that isolated effects are not unduly generalized. Externalities from algae production using iron fertilization could potentially include production of toxic species, depletion of oceanic oxygen, and robbing of nutrients downstream from the location of iron fertilization. As well, there is debate on how long removed carbon would stay out of the air.
Geological data from the ice ages suggests these hypothesised effects might be very small. Advocates of field trials consider these hypothetical effects to be either too small or too long term to block the need for field research. It is difficult to make a cost-benefit analysis of such claims in the absence of major field trials, especially where the a political agenda is in play.
Many climate scientists oppose carbon removal because of the moral hazard argument that it would reduce political pressure to cut emissions, although the debate is shifting following major recent reports. In some cases the moral hazard line can lead to exaggeration of possible harm from technologies like algae farming.
Algae production using the iron salt aerosol process that I am advocating, of which more later, could potentially work with other cooling effects to become a cost-effective contribution to climate restoration. If it turns out to be the case that the price, speed and safety of this method are far better than anything else, the moral problem arises of what level of system disruption is acceptable, as long as such disruption is clearly outweighed by the benefits.
Harry Marks wrote: We need to know what natural growth is being displaced, and account for the impact of that, and we need to know what the algae is being used for, because if it drives down fossil fuel prices, by adding to fuel supplies, it can have follow-on effects inhibiting transition to other technologies. There is no substitute for prices which reflect actual scarcity of the inputs, adjusted for the unmarketed impacts (external effects like GHG's).
On displacement of natural growth, one leading scientist presented a model at at the Canberra Negative Emissions conference suggesting that adding enough iron to the Southern Ocean to optimise plankton productivity there would slowly deplete the nutrient levels in tropical waters, the alleged 'downstream robbing' effect. It is far from clear if this model is accurate, in view of the immense quantities of nutrients in the deep ocean. The timeframes for such effects are measured in centuries or millennia. Immediate benefits, reducing the impact of global warming, may be judged to be worth the risk of uncertain long term disruption. But the situation now is that anxiety about such side effects completely outweighs political support for using such technological intervention to help stabilise the world climate.
If algae farms occupy 1% of the world ocean there would be local ecosystem disruption, but this could be justified by broader stabilisation.
Your point about price effects is a very good one. My view is that algae technologies such as iron salt aerosol will work in combination with marine permaculture to help create new carbon markets that will mean lower prices for fuel can be balanced by other large scale methods of carbon storage such as biochar, plastic and concrete.
My view is that it may even be possible to store algae in fabric containers on the bottom of the ocean, a carbon bank that could be rapidly built up to stabilise the air and regulate the climate, then gradually drawn down for fuel and other uses. The volume needed would be about twenty cubic kilometres per year, or 0.000002% of the world ocean.