[OANNES Foro] To Save the Climate, Look to the Oceans

[Mario Cabrejos]

They can be a source of clean, renewable energy, sustainable food, and more

To Save the Climate, Look to the Oceans

By  <https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/ayana-elizabeth-johnson/>
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson 

June 8, 2020

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/to-save-the-climate-look-t
o-the-oceans/?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=25b84ce340-briefing-dy
-20200608&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-25b84ce340-45511414

Learning to swim, in a pool in the Florida Keys, was pure joy. I was five
and reveled in blowing bubbles and doing cannonballs. A few years later,
when I learned to swim in the ocean, the vibe was different, not purely
playful. The mantra was: never turn your back on the ocean. Because, I was
warned, you need to keep an eye on the waves, to avoid getting pummeled, or
worse. I was taught to navigate undertows and rip currents, to respect the
power of the sea.

As an adult, I re-learned this lesson of the ocean's dangerous power
watching climate change-fueled hurricanes smash into coastlines, and reading
the science of sea level rise. But while we might respect the sea's capacity
to upend and rend lives and communities, what we have turned our backs on is
its power to heal. This too we neglect at our peril. I don't mean the
ocean's ability  <https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/35/1/50/5252008>
to heal us emotionally, although we should probably make better use of that
in these wild times. The healing power we most need to harness is the ocean
as a source of climate solutions.

This is a much needed flip of the script. We often focus on the ways in
which the ocean puts up with endless waves of abuse - pollution from oil
spills, agriculture, factories, plastics; seawater heating up and acidifying
due to greenhouse gases, driving fish toward the poles and disintegrating
coral reefs; coastal ecosystems being bulldozed to build resorts and shrimp
farms; the plunder of overfishing causing fish populations to plummet; the
deep sea on the brink of
<https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2017.00418/full> being
mined <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2017.00418/full> ,
torn up (perhaps needlessly) for minerals.

That was perhaps as overwhelming for you to read as it was for me to write.
For sure, we must keep our eyes on all that, and work to halt it. The ocean
is in dire straits (and it's so hard to write about it without inadvertent
puns). But, know that it also offers us a way forward. It offers major
opportunities to abandon fossil fuels, sequester tons of carbon, and create
a sustainable food system. I'm talking about renewable offshore energy and
algae biofuel, about coastal ecosystems and regenerative ocean farming. We
are overdue for a reframe, from seeing the ocean as victim or threat, to
appreciating it as hero.

Offshore Renewable Energy

Around
<https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/training/coast-complicated.html> 40
percent of Americans live in coastal counties. Imagine if the homes and
business along our coasts were powered by offshore wind and waves. This
doesn't have to remain a dream. Offshore, the wind blows more strongly and
consistently than it does over land, so floating turbines could mean more
energy, generated more reliably-and produced near population centers.
However, while there are quite a few in development, Block Island Wind Farm,
a few miles off of Rhode Island, is currently the,
<https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00057/full>
solitary offshore commercial wind farm operating in the U.S. Between
<https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D88P6BMW> protracted
permitting processes, the need for data on environmental impacts and the
fact that wealthy coastal property owners are
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/nyregion/hamptons-wind-farm.html>
fighting proposals near their homes, we are
<https://windeurope.org/about-wind/statistics/offshore/european-offshore-win
d-industry-key-trends-statistics-2019/> way behind the UK, Germany and other
European countries at making use of this free, gusty resource.

Offshore wind  <https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D88P6BMW>
can and should leap from providing essentially zero percent of our national
energy to over 10 percent by 2050 if we are to achieve the needed rapid
decarbonization of our electricity grid. And then there's the
<https://www.boem.gov/renewable-energy/renewable-energy-program-overview>
burgeoning technology for harnessing the energy of waves and currents, and
even spreading
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/floating-panels-buoy-predictions
-of-global-solar-growth-spurt/> solar panels across the sea surface. While
we must take care with ocean ecosystems and species' migratory routes when
we choose installation locations, we also need to move quickly.

Marine Ecosystems 

Not only can the ocean be a source of carbon-free energy, it can also
sequester tons of carbon: so far, it has absorbed around
<https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013GB004739#gbc20
172-bib-0010> 30 percent of the carbon dioxide we have emitted by burning
fossil fuels. Lately, there has been a lot of discussion of planting trees,
billions of them, with no mention of the fact that
<https://science.sciencemag.org/content/281/5374/237.full> about half of
global photosynthesis happens in the ocean. That land-centric myopia misses
the carbon drawdown potential of
<https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13835> wetlands and
<https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1477> seagrasses,
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/092181819190117F> coral
reefs and
<https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2017.0891> oyster
reefs,  <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.14303> kelp
forests and  <https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1123?page=6> mangrove
forests.

In fact, wetlands can hold
<https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2001/land-carbon-sinks/
> five times more carbon in their soils than a temperate or tropical forest!
And even though New York and New Jersey have already lost 85 percent of
coastal wetlands, what little remains
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09269-z> reduced damages during
Superstorm Sandy by $625 million. Coastal ecosystems can often provide
cheaper and more effective shoreline protection than sea walls, and "
<https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/coastal-blue-carbon> blue carbon"
should not be overlooked. Protecting and restoring coastal ecosystems is a
good investment.

Algae Biofuel

 <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/biofuel/>
Biofuels produced on land-mostly ethanol from crops like corn and sugar-
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960852410010138>
often rely on large amounts of water, fertilizers, and pesticides, and
require so much fossil fuel to produce that they can barely be considered
green. Not so with algae grown along our coasts, although much research and
infrastructure development is needed in order to produce algae biofuel at
scale. The federal Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Mariner
program, which funds R&D,
<https://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=arpa-e-programs/mariner> estimates that the
U.S. could grow 500 million dry metric tons of macroalgae annually, which
equates to about 10 percent of national transportation demand. Plus,
seaweeds absorb  <https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2790> tons of carbon
dioxide as they grow-kelp can grow
<https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article-abstract/26/5/357/303510> up to
two feet in a single day, and turn sunlight into chemical energy
<https://bmcecol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12898-019-0218-z> more
efficiently than land plants. Even though I know the science, to me,
photosynthesis still seems like magic.

Regenerative Ocean Farming

We also can, and arguably should, use algae to power our bodies and feed our
livestock, not just provide energy for our machines. With
<http://www.fao.org/3/i9540en/i9540en.pdf> over 90 percent of global fish
stocks maximally exploited or overfished, we certainly can't rely on wild
fish to feed the world as our population approaches eight billion. At the
same time, industrial aquaculture has been largely unsustainable, often
focused on carnivorous fish that require a lot of feed and infrastructure.
However, there is
<https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30886-3?_return
URL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS09609822193088
63%3Fshowall%3Dtrue> huge potential for a regenerative renaissance in ocean
farming, focused on seaweeds and filter-feeding shellfish (oysters, mussels,
clams, scallops), which live simply off sunlight and nutrients already in
seawater.

This type of ocean farming can
<https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2017.00100/full> reduce
local ocean acidification (photosynthesis!) and improve local water quality.
Plus, seaweeds absorb excess
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00318884.2019.1622920>
nitrogen and phosphorus that runs off land
<https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_nitrogen_fix_breaking_a_costly_addiction
> from overuse of fertilizers for industrial agriculture, and can cause
ocean dead zones. Bonus: These "sea vegetables" have
<https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/65/12/535/1903132> high
nutritional value, and when fed to cows can reduce their methane emissions
by up to
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652619321559> 67
percent.

As our economy struggles to recover from the coronavirus-triggered
recession, it is also important to note that implementing these
ocean-climate solutions can create many jobs. In the U.S.,
<https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/training/econreport.html> the "blue
economy" supports around three million jobs and contributes $285 billion
annually to GDP, from tourism, shipping, fishing and construction. And that
can continue to grow. In the next decade, installing offshore wind from
Maryland to Maine
<https://tethys.pnnl.gov/publications/us-job-creation-offshore-wind-report-r
oadmap-project-multi-state-cooperation-offshore> could support over 36,000
full time jobs. As part of a
<https://medium.com/@green_stimulus_now/a-green-stimulus-to-rebuild-our-econ
omy-1e7030a1d9ee> green stimulus package, a
<https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/a-call-to-action-for-a-climate-conserv
ation-corps> Climate Conservation Corps could put people to work re-planting
coastal ecosystems. Scaling regenerative ocean farming could create
<http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/947831469090666344/Seaweed-aquacu
lture-for-food-security-income-generation-and-environmental-health-in-Tropic
al-Developing-Countries> millions of direct and indirect jobs.

This is why we need a  <https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/blue-new-deal>
Blue New Deal in addition to a Green one. The
<https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text>
Green New Deal resolution merely mentions the ocean once in passing. The
ocean must go from afterthought to centerpiece if we are to address the
climate crisis at the order of magnitude required.

So when you think of climate solutions, don't just think of rooftop solar
panels and electric cars. Don't turn your back on the ocean. It positively
brims with climate solutions. 

 



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