Ocean Primer for Land Lovers
The newcomer's guide to the ocean's climate answer
In my first post I wrote about how we live on a water planet, but mostly on the land parts. Human beings are biased towards the things they can directly see and understand, and this bias is blocking a world of climate change opportunities awarded to us by the ocean.
I’m writing this Ocean Primer for Land Lovers to help everyday climate newcomers, philanthropists and stewards of private capital to more confidently explore the ocean’s solutions to our climate. To do this I share some of the memorable things I have learned that helped me understand the ocean’s unique role in climate, intuitively organize different classes of ideas, and provide lots of examples of real technologies and companies that are executing on them today.
First, here are a few pieces of sticky ocean info that helped me contextualize the ocean.
The oceans are a vast but rather thin layer across our planet’s surface.
This visual helped me reframe the ocean from enormous salty fury into something vulnerable, worthy of our protection, and ultimately: capable of healing.
Microscopic plants called phytoplankton transfer billions of tons of carbon from atmosphere to ocean each year, making the mineral wealth of the sea available to the animals. When they die, the lime and silica remains of the ocean’s creatures drift in an endless snowfall to the ocean floor and layer by tiny layer, create sediments as deep as 12,000 ft.
Most of the carbon on our planet is stored in the deep ocean interior as seawater chemistry. If your climate plan doesn’t involve the Earth’s natural cycles for handling carbon dioxide, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
The ocean is an essential partner to reverse climate change, but to learn how, it’s useful to understand why people are worried about its health. Human activity interrupts delicate ecosystems, creating three big points of pressure:
Marine Pollution: chemicals, plastic, light and noise make it harder for species to spawn and survive
Acidification: too much carbon dioxide throws the ocean out of balance, making it hard for species to form shells and skeletons
Overfishing: illegal fishing exhausts the natural supply of fish, with cascading effects
Pressure 1: Marine Pollution
Scientists believe chemical and plastic pollution is responsible for the loss of half of all marine life. 1 Fewer marine plants means less photosynthesis and oxygen for the planet, and fewer animals that depend on them for food.
Agriculture run off, industrial and consumer chemicals can be devastating even in small quantities, yet 80% of all wastewater is still untreated.
Poisonous plastics break down and enter the food chain, in some cases even being preferred by corals over real food! 2
Pressure 2: Acidification
In geologic timescales (meaning, earth time) the ocean would solve climate change on its own. But too much CO2 drops the pH of the ocean, what is referred to as acidification.
Acidification is dangerous because it targets the base of the ocean food pyramid. It starves tiny plants and animals of the carbonic ions they need to survive, creating a cascading effect on other marine life and opening the door for growing toxic bacteria.
Pressure 3: Overfishing
Fishing too much and in the wrong way is creating what’s called a biodiversity crisis in the ocean. When humans fish too high up the food chain, it has far reaching consequences referred to as the trophic cascade, a collapse in deeply connected ecosystems. In addition to overfishing, industrial fishing methods can damage ecosystems where fish respawn, sometimes taking hundreds of years to recover.
According to the Global Oceanic Environmental Survey, the ocean could sequester twice as much carbon if marine life was rebuilt: 6 Gt / year, instead of today’s 3 Gt/year 1.
→ Disclaimer: There are many other pressures on the ocean (warming, melting ice caps, deoxygenation, rising sea levels, coastal erosion), but I am not a scientist and this is about as much as I can manage with confidence medium levels of confidence.
Here is how I think about the solutions within the context of the problems they address:
Like most climate problems, we have many good ideas for how to address these challenges. We can divert pollution with plastic and chemical alternatives and closely monitor our ocean’s health. We can reduce carbon emissions with renewable ocean energy and extract CO2 from air and ocean with a dozen new methods. We can protect species and Rebuild Marine Life by restoring natural habitats and sustainably managing fish stocks. We can do it all and rewrite our future. We only need the political will to see them through, and the courage to make trade offs against real or perceived economic conveniences.
Help where am I? How to read this document:
I have organized my research and reporting by sections (e.g. Carbon Cycle) and solution category, with special attention paid to the most mature and promising solutions in a deep dive, embedded in a google slides deck below and followed up in subsequent blog posts..
I begin with the section I found most difficult: carbon cycle.
How to think about carbon cycling
Carbon is great, actually, and forms the basis of all life on Earth. The dangers come when it ends up where it doesn’t belong - like moving from stable geological storage in the form of oil or coal or gas, and into our atmosphere in the form of CO2.
Today, carbon dioxide is flowing into our atmosphere twice as fast as natural carbon sinks are able to absorb it. We can reduce the pressure the ocean faces from acidification by directly addressing the overabundance of carbon dioxide. We can do this by stopping the flow of CO2 into the atmosphere with renewable ocean energy, like offshore wind. We can also invest in ideas that drawdown CO2 from air or ocean, and help us come back from the brink. In this first section, I focus on the solutions that I think are most promising or interesting (previewed here in bold).
Section 1: Carbon Cycle
Reducing emissions
Low carbon ocean transport
Biofuels
Green Hydrogen
Ocean Chemistry
Basalt Carbon Storage
Plants & Photosynthesis
Microalgae carbon farming (+ iron seeding, artificial upwelling)
Seaweed carbon farming
You can read through all carbon cycle solutions in depth in the deck linked below, but I will also be following up on each class of solutions with an individual blog post; you can subscribe to get notified when I publish. If you find something missing or inaccurate, I warmly welcome feedback by email or via DM on twitter.
What’s next?
In addition to the carbon cycle posts mentioned (and linked) above, forthcoming sections include:
Marine Life: powerful methods that sequester carbon while rebuilding thriving, abundant ecosystems
Water Health: technologies helping to displace plastic and contaminants before they can become a problem and emerging methods for measuring water and ecosystemic health.
Climate Policy: a breakdown of successful climate policy around the world, and how weak policy leaves us vulnerable, disempowered and broke.
Regenerative Ocean Business Strategies: building business through ecological regeneration
Thank you for reading!
Would you like to be a coauthor? Please get in touch: irenepolnyi@gmail.com
Thank you for bringing attention to Ocean CDR, I’m curious about what makes you underestimate microalgae?