Our fight against climate change is getting desperate. We may be on our way to a renewables-powered future, but until then, immediate solutions are needed to contend with soaring temperatures and rising sea levels.
"The ocean basically does the work for us," Tom Green, CEO of the seawater carbon removal firm Vesta, told theThe idea may alarm you. Our oceans already absorb somewhere around 25 to 30 percent of all atmospheric carbon, and humans' excessive emissions areBut these firms say they don't want to burden the oceans any more than they already are.
Another firm, Vesta, wants to dissolve sand mixed with a common mineral called olivine in seawater to kickstart a similar process. Whatever the approach, the end result would ideally be more or less the same: the removed carbon gets packed up and buried in the ass end of nowhere, or gets turned into a solid material that could be used in construction.All of this sounds very tidy. Questions remain, though, on just how safe these chemical processes will be for the ocean.
And it's all a drop in the proverbial ocean compared to the billions of tons of carbon scientists think. But, maybe, just maybe, if these techniques all work out and get used together, we could actually make zero carbon a reality. Wouldn't that be a sea change?