Follow The Money. The Planet Can Be Saved. Who Stands To Lose.

Follow The Money. The Planet Can Be Saved. Who Stands To Lose.

The very key issue in work to develop and deliver the technology and know how to replenish and restore the oceans and in doing so save the planet has always been. What if it works. What if we can “save the world, and make only a little money on the side.”

We now know without any shadow of doubt that ocean pastures can be easily and cost effectively restored to historic levels of abundance. As those pastures return to abundance and high carrying capacity for fish and other sea life they do so by capturing and converting vast amounts of CO2 from its deadly form into life itself.

So who stands to lose in this incredibly hopeful scenario for the planet. The best way to start is to follow the money.

Where is the money?

That’s the easy one. The money is the hundreds of billions dedicated to climate change research and mitigation. Some authorities estimate this is nearing a trillion dollars world wide. No small sum. Surely worth fighting over to try to get a piece of that pie.

Who gets that money at present? This where things get interesting as the answer is lots of people.

  1. The Carbon Market where carbon offsets have been trading has seen recent years with trades amounting to 150 billion Euro. So an immense amount of money goes into hands of traders.
  2. The green NGO world has enjoyed a large piece of the pie raised via donations and where being included as “stakeholders,” direct subsidies from governments.  Climate change is the biggest cash cow in the history of the green movement. The more successful they are in confecting media events the more money they make.
  3. Media, from news organizations to film makers to event impressarios, to literally countless bloggers.
  4. Advertisers and their professional managers
  5. Academic science has been wildly enriched with funding to study and model every conceivable aspect of the impending doom of climate change and to pontificate, profess, and hypothesize on the topic (in that order).
  6. International governance and political organizations of every flavour naturally have been front and centre at the giant trough that they have created and work to sustain.
  7. Consultants with such biodiversity that one might think trying to identify them all that they’d stumbled into an entirely new form of rainforest, it’s a jungle.
  8. Engineering firms building technologies to actually manage greenhouse gases and carbon, hurrah for them.
  9. Forestors, farmers and even an ocean scientist or two, again our hurrah.
  10. Last and least are the few actual carbon mitigation projects that are producing and delivering new emission reductions and real results.

In thirty years and more of study, debate, and speculation on the crisis of first “global warming”, then the renaming to “climate change”, that hundreds of thousands of individual have a big part if not all of their paycheck tightly tied to is indisputable. Even though they all will tell you that they are dedicated to this topic because of the importance of the dangerous effects and impacts of climate change one thing they mostly seem to hold in common is that the topic is first and foremost their job, their source of money, and secondly of course the work they do is noble and honourable and needed. I agree with the noble and honorable part god bless them all. That in all this time the principal solution put forward is that with ever increasing amounts of money and higher carbon taxes more and more solutions can be sought.

The work has not been for naught but it has been a spectacular failure save some notable minor gains. The global demand for energy is increasing dramatically and even if all of the alternative low or no carbon energy sources and conservation make tremendous leaps the growth, increasing  populations and energy demand will so out pace alternative carbon neutral energy sources that by the end of this century the percentage of energy from low carbon sources will be a fraction of what it is today.

What almost all of the players in the global climate industry share is the desire to keep their jobs. Can they do that if hope in the form of a demonstrated solution suddenly appears on the scene.

What many are working toward, most are hoping for, and some even ideologically sacrificing all for is revolutionary technology, the techno fix to the techno problem.

But this techno fix has to be more revolutionary than a new light bulb.

More revolutionary that a new electric car. More revolutionary than a just about anything.

So far the scariest and most truly revolutionary proposal that frequently comes up in radical circles is the idea of drastically reducing the population of humans, the source of the carbon emissions. It is proposed by armchair authors and radical NGO’s, and taken seriously by almost no one, or at least we all hope so.

The last on the list are geoengineering concepts that are mostly very far out, literally.

The worst nightmare it seems common to so many to whom climate change has become a job and career, those who think about money first,  is a new technology that is truly revolutionary, immediately ready to implement, and inexpensive. What if such a techno fix were to emerge. Imagine all of the people who would soon be out of a job. You can see them in your minds eye as you read the list of their job descriptions above. At least I can, they are not happy.

What might happen if just such a miracle cure for a changing planet, a dying planet, were to be demonstrated.

What if it came far out of left field, perhaps developed and delivered through an act of ancient faith and obligation by those totally outside of the box.

What if it were provided by the most incredible and impossibly tiny organization. What if all it took was a tiny village following ancient wisdom combined with state of the art science.

Would those delivering this good news for the planet and all of its life be greeted with smiles and applause and a good old pat on the back “good on ya.”

What would we expect of all those well meaning and not so well meaning alike who depend on bad news for the planet. Those who need unlimited and un-imagined resources and ideas to keep being paid to chase yet never get near.

Perhaps instead of praise from all quarters, would the response would be attacks from all the quarters. Sadly at this time the latter is the reality.

But wait! We are not really nearing a world where the bad guys win and they are redoubling their vehemence. The ocean pasture restoration techno fix is only proven in one small ideally situated and implemented experiment.

Our one experiment that meets the definition of a commercial scale pilot project is a fantastic success but it is the first such experiment.

The data is still being worked on, at least that part of the data not taken away by the SWAT team.

More experiments are needed, many around the world are planning just such similar experiments.

The book of knowledge hasn’t been completed on the practicality and sustainable practice of ocean pasture stewardship.

Surely the financial experiment showing that the work can be profitably monetized is not done.

The very clear goal of many is to stop this work at all cost. Don’t let the scientific data be processed and a book of knowledge about a success be written. If it is burn that book. Don’t allow anyone to even think of doing what is good for the planet if that threatens cash flow. Make money, save a little planet on the side. Be gone heretic.

And yet it works!