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Planktos revisited: One and a half cheers for goofy offsetting projects
The green blogosphere generally reacted with chuckles or consternation to Planktos’ announced plans to dump tons of iron into the ocean to, you know, see what happens. Gar Lipow took the article as another excuse to bash carbon offsets. To follow the logic, you first have to know why anyone would want to dump several tons of iron into the sea. Planktos hopes to demonstrate that seeding the oceans with certain nutrients is a credible way to stimulate plankton blooms. It further hopes to demonstrate that these blooms are a credible way to sequester atmospheric carbon. Carbon markets provide the incentive for this quixotic undertaking. If the experiment is successful — a big if — Planktos could one day tap into the many billions of dollars available for carbon reduction projects. To Gar’s way of thinking, this is another demonstration of the deep evil of carbon markets. And to be perfectly clear about this, I share his lack of enthusiasm for the Planktos experiment. But to my way of thinking, the story is an aberrant example of a general dynamic that is one the positive features of carbon markets. It is important to stress that regulated carbon markets have never recognized offsets generated from iron fertilization projects. Such schemes are highly speculative, and as such are not eligible to be a source of offsets. They likely never will be. Offsetting projects have to clear significant bars for scientific credibility and quality of implementation. Planktos is conducting its experiment in the hopes of someday clearing those hurdles, in roughly the same way the way that biotech companies perform research in the hopes of one day creating a drug that passes clinical trials. Of course, Planktos could try to sell its offsets in the voluntary market, which are presently unregulated. But no credible retailer would be willing to offer them unless, again, scientific credibility could be established. The voluntary markets tend to follow the lead of the regulated markets on these matters, not vice versa. So basically we have a situation in which a private company is putting private capital into research and development of a possible climate change mitigation strategy. The scheme may or may not be crackpot, but no public funds are at risk, and, hey, there are even a few credible people who thinks that such a strategy might work. The downside in this case, as Gar notes, is that the experiment is possibly reckless. I personally would rather not see tons of iron dumped into the ocean, although, to be fair, this experiment has been conducted many times in the past without any obvious ill effects. In general, all policy solutions have downsides and unintended consequences. Regulatory actions have weird loopholes (see, e.g., CAFE and SUVs); subsidies are easily politicized (cough, ethanol, cough); taxes are blunt policy instruments and widely hated. And carbon markets, along with a host of other issues, have Planktos. If this oddball project were representative of carbon offsetting projects in general, we might have reason to worry. Fortunately, it is not. And the general mechanism in play here — rewarding innovators for coming up with new carbon mitigation strategies and technologies — is a dynamic that should be encouraged. Tags: Carbon markets, Planktos, sequestration
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Comments2.
Comment by juliette
@ May 9, 2007 10 AM
 I replied fairly extensively at the last posting, so I’ll let those comments stand on their own. But, I do want to clarify the last statement made by Chad. The ocean is not dead. The iron experiments are an attempt to ameliorate the carbon dioxide situation we’ve created with all other technologies…they are not an attempt to save the ocean. The region in the ocean where these experiments take place are no more dead than are the deserts on dry land. In response to Adam’s posting, I certainly agree that private enterprise has more resources to make research and development happen. I guess I just think that in the case of the advances from biotech companies, those experiments were contained in the lab until (hopefully) stringent tests proved their safety. That’s not the case here. For the most part, the other iron enrichment experiments did not have immediately detrimental effects, but neither did they show any positive results. And having been invited to participate in this research described above, and having declined to do so, I’m not convinced that they will learn anything new unless they push the bounds of the experiment. And, I just don’t believe the ocean and the science are ready for that. As I said before, there’s still a lot to be learned from bottle experiments aboard a research vessel. 3.
Comment by Chad
@ May 9, 2007 5 PM
Juliette, I am interested in what “unsafe” scenarios could result from this experiment, in your mind. I cannot think of anything that is likely to get someone hurt or injured beyond everyday accidents, and even the worst-case hypothetical damage to the environment would be minimal and transient, as I noted above. And I agree, those parts of the ocean are not completely dead, but they are dead enough for horseshoes and hand grenades. If turning half of the Sahara into a garden was a cost-effective way to fight global warming, I would be all for it. I find no difference in logic when applied to the ocean. Whether dead or not is beside the point. The point is, iron fertilization if done properly has the potential to restore large amounts of green growing stuff to the ocean. This means more food for whales, fish, and critters of every kind. Anybody who lives in California can tell you that the west coast sea life is in serious trouble because of lack of krill (which in turn is fed by plankton). The east coast Cod fisheries are not bouncing back from being over-fished, the way that they were predicted to. All this points to the same problem. The oceans are struggling. If Planktos is going to add some iron and thus help the anemic oceans grow healthy, assuming they can do this cautiously and intelligently (and no reason to assume they won’t be cautious and intelligent, because they have a lot of very nervous people watching over their shoulders) then on the whole their work could be a huge gain for the ocean and for humanity. Unfortunately there are a lot of people, not just the radical side of environmentalism, but marine scientists too, who are opposed to this work on purely ideological grounds. They don’t want it, no matter how large the potential gains. They will (and have) inflate or invent every possible risk, no matter how specious, to argue against it. They simply don’t want anybody, for any reason, “touching” the ocean. They want us to sit back and let the oceans die. No life-support, no repair, no nothing. Why? Because they are like religious fundementalists, who refuse medical treatment, sometimes even letting innocents die for lack of medical care, because their “beliefs” say that any medical care is wrong. That’s what the world faces right now. Good luck to Planktos. They are facing fanatics. Steve Kerry 5.
Comment by Woody
@ May 10, 2007 7 AM
Chad, read the intelligent comments made by Juliette & Anonymous (#7 & #8) attached to Adam’s original posting on May 2 to answer your questions. Further, no one speaks of the environmental cost of putting this plan into effect, only the $$ cost. As most of us know, if the environmental cost of projects were fully included up front with the rest of the forseen costs, we wouldn’t have all the environmental clean-up to do that no one wants to take on. What about the pollution & carbon emmissions associated with recycling the scrap metal or mining the ore for this project? Mining— now there’s something the world needs less of, not more. Then the iron must be processed into the form necessary for the project. More energy & resource consumption plus transportation (read: pollution). If the pilot project, monitored by the company which carries it out, is deemed worthwhile, many tankers (huge ships, not trucks) worth of finished product must be transported by rail or trucked to the port & loaded on the ships. Then the ships (one of the greatest air pollution producers we have inflicted on the Earth) spew carbon & many other pollutants on their long trip to remote parts of the ocean. Only then do they begin running a pattern course designed to cover a huge area with the iron product. After burning all the fuel necessary to do this, the ships burn even more fuel to return to home port, thousands of miles away. This is not a one time event, either. Theoretically, this happens on a continuing basis to keep the phytoplankton growing. If this weren’t enough, add the environmental costs of the ships & other monitoring methods needed to continue follow-up research. More pollution & doubtless much paper & other resources consumed in documenting the results & writing up the reports & distributing them. Though much of this can be done electronically, which consumes less, it still consumes. The crews & scientists doing this monitoring then are not available for other, more productive endeavors. Let’s spend our time & resources on things that we know will help. Invest in green energy production. Support green energy legislation & their authors. Reduce energy consumption & offset what you do use. Work to reduce population. Educate others. By the way, this project intends to grow vast floating fields of plankton, it does not involve the sinking of ships or raw iron ore. This would only put a lot of iron on the ocean floor which would be unavailable for the phytoplankton which needs light, therefore it is near the surface. Further, rusting iron is biologically unusable to phytoplankton. 
Hm. My original post really has little to do with the merits of the Planktos project per se. But I find much to agree with in most of the comments above. Woody, to be frank, there’s not much merit to your objections based on the environmental costs of mining and ocean transport. You can always raise these sorts of general objections to any R&D project. How much metal is mined to create a wind turbine? How much fuel is used shipping those turbines all over the world to build new wind farms? Obviously, no one much cares about these costs, because on balance wind farms are very good for the environment. Ultimately, any project has to stand on its own merits, but raising vague concerns about strip mining without actually knowing how the pros and cons measure up isn’t a particularly fair way to evaluate these projects. Juliette, as I’ve noted numerous times, I’m not a big proponent of the project. My post is about the merits of providing financial incentives for R&D. My guess is we mostly agree on this issue. Chad, I think you’re a bit glib about the potential downsides of the project, but I do tend to agree that some (OK, maybe a lot) of the opposition is pretty overblown. 7.
Comment by Woody
@ May 12, 2007 11 AM
I guess my pessimism is showing through, Adam. In my general public position, I see too little evidence that we can engineer our way out of this, especially with nearly no inclination to reduce our population. How many R&D projects are actually “good for the environment”? The fact that no one cares about the environmental costs, even of wind turbine production, is exactly the problem that I’m addressing. Of course, fair evaluation should be done by a qualified oversight group, hopefully an impartial one. As I see it, our best course is to become far less consumptive of all energy sources, transition to more Earth friendly sources, & most importantly, work to bring our numbers to a sustainable level so most will have hope of a quality life. Then we might pull this off. I doubt that we will ever come to a consensus on this, however. I don’t think it’s in our make-up as a successful species to become self regulating. We’re not a wise social entity, just an endlessly varied collection of loosely connected self-interested groups. Earth seems about to provide the limitations for us; harshly, I’m afraid. But I support Terrapass & other agencies working in the right direction in case it can be done. One grand attempt at life, we are.
Woody — People do care about the environmental costs. In fact, carbon projects are required to subtract out the emissions created from the project implementation itself when calculating their reductions. I simply meant that wind farms are so obviously a net benefit that no one objects to them on the grounds of mining and transport costs. Likewise, it isn’t really fair to raise generic concerns about mining and transport costs for Planktos unless you have some actual data to base these objections on. That’s all I was getting at. I’m not overly optimistic that we’re going to depopulate or conserve our way out of global warming, but I’ve got reasonable hopes for renewable energy. - Adam 9.
Comment by John
@ May 17, 2007 9 AM
All - As a marine scientist I hate to see words forcibly inserted into my mouth. We are not at all like religious fundamentalists, and do not have what you call “beliefs” we have facts from studies of ecosystems worldwide, and the repercussions of our actions are known very well. Please do not see it as us “not wanting to touch the ocean”; of course we would love to reduce atmospheric carbon, but a large-scale method with benefits which outweigh the costs (monetary and evironmental) has yet to be discovered. Also please don’t interpret that as me saying that we have given up and no further studies are planned. With the $25 million X-Prize as an incentive, offered by Richard Bransen to anyone who creates a successful method of substantially reducing atmospheric carbon, plenty of research is being undertaken as we type at universities across the country and world. The problem we find with iron fertilization is that our oceans are not large enough to solve the CO2 situation in its entirety, many areas around the globe are not iron limited and will not benefit from added iron. Furthermore, carbon must be buried in the bottom sediments for CO2 to be removed from the system. A problem arises here again in many oceanic ecosystems that sustain tiny phytoplankton and in turn tiny grazers (the organisms eating phytoplankton). Dead phytoplankton and tiny fecal pellets from tiny grazers remain suspended in the water column where bacteria break them down and reuse the nutrients rather than sequester additional CO2 from the atmosphere. So in short, iron fertilization can work in some areas around the world, but not everywhere. That is not just a thought, an idea, or belief. It is a tested and proven hypothesis. So when we say “don’t do it” in some form or another we’re not basing that opinion on our love for a pristine ocean, we’re basing it on our documented research describing oceanic ecosystems. Lastly, please have some faith in our work. We are not the mad scientists of 30s and 40s sci-fi pictures, we have the information and know very well the linkages between ecosystems and the results of nutrient addition. I want to reduce CO2 just as much as the next guy, and iron fertilization may be a small step towards that goal, but lets keep our options open and not bash science by calling its constituents “religious fundamentalists.” I’d love to answer any questions or concerns you have to clear things up… Additionally, two pier reviewed articles by John H. Martin give a brief description of how iron limitation and addition works: Post a commentSearch the TerraPass blogTurn your old cellphones and PDAs into a FREE TerraPass. |
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I’m reposting my most recent Grist article that examines the 
I fail to see why anyone would object to this experiment. The downsides are small, and the potential pay-off tremendous. Yes, there are “risks”, but what are they? A 10% chance that more greenhouse gases will be emitted than absorbed? So what? Even if this happened, the scale of this experiment is such that the extra greenhouse gases would be a tiny blip on the amount we emit each year. The only other risk mentioned was a vague, un-named threat to living ecosystems hundreds of miles away. Again, such threats are unlikely and almost certainly transient if they did occur.
Unfortunately, I am detecting a whiff of the religion of environmentalism in this article - that “God” or “Mother Nature” or whatever you want to call it made the Earth a certain way, and therefore that is just the way it should be and we shouldn’t change it.
Such sentiment, which is surely religious, is pervasive in the environmental community and is the reason I never label myself as such.
A dead ocean is not a healthy ecosystem. I don’t see any rational reason for defending them.