US President Obama on has scheduled a Tuesday revelation of his program to address high and rising CO2 emissions.

In a video press release Saturday Obama says, “This Tuesday, I’ll lay out my vision for where I believe we need to go – a national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change and lead global efforts to fight it.”

He added, “Scientists will be needed to design new fuels, farmers to grow them, engineers to devise new sources of energy and workers to build the foundation for a clean energy economy.”

It’s great that the President is focusing on CO2 and the means to reduce its emission. This rather than just selling the world more contentious and hopeless scare stories is a big step in the right direction.

However it’s troubling that his ideas for reducing CO2 are such classically inside the box solutions. The sorts of actions he will reportedly call for are evolutionary not revolutionary. One such plan is now reported to be reducing CO2 emissions from coal fired power plants by 26% by 2020. This amounts to a 500 million tonnes of CO2 reductions! The cost will be in the billions each year.

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A far more revolutionary solution would be to restore sufficient plant life to take in that CO2, a task very difficult to do with forests but simple in the replenishment and restoration of ocean plankton pastures at a cost of mere millions.

There just might not be time for such plodding actions as President Obama seems preparing to call for.

Perhaps if the President gave some more thought to the nature of the crisis of CO2 it would help. The first thing to understand is that the problem of CO2 is a two-part problem.

1.  “Yesterday’s CO2″ is the first part of our CO2 problem. Since the start of the fossil fuel age the world has emitted nearly a trillion tons of CO2, this is “Yesterday’s CO2.″ Regardless of whether we emit any more CO2 today, or tomorrow, this first dose of CO2 has not gone away and for much of ocean life its a deadly dose.

2. “Tomorrow’s CO2″ is the second part of our CO2 problem it is the additional trillion tons of CO2 that we will be emitting as we continue to consume fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. It will be as terrible or worse that the first dose but that may be a moot point if the first dose is already deadly.

So while President Obama endorses an evolutionary process of reducing Tomorrow’s CO2 he is ignoring the far more critical and urgent Yesterday’s CO2 overdose already administered and causing terrible effects.

The Triage Approach common to all emergencies demands that we treat the most immediate and grievous problems first!

Treat the secondary problems second!

It won’t matter if we manage to prevent a second deadly dose of CO2 being emitted if the first dose, Yesterday’s dose, kills our very special, singular, patient – Mother Nature.

As you read on you will discover that there is an antidote for the first deadly dose of CO2 standing ready, albeit not embraced by the President and those who would sell us all an endless media diet of doom and gloom.

Less than half of Yesterday’s deadly CO2 dose has been neutralized by natural processes. Most of it is slowly dissolving into the oceans where it makes those ocean waters less neutral and more acidic. The rest is taken in by plant life where it is growing more plant biomass. But the dose of CO2 that is entering and affecting the oceans is an overwhelming large and rapid dose that Nature is ill prepared to adapt to without catastrophic change.

Just 60 years ago the ocean plankton pastures produced 85% of our planets oxygen as they performed 85% of all photosynthesis.

NASA Earth Observatory Dying Ocean Pastures

As a result of CO2 impacts on the ocean we’ve witnessed a terrible loss of ocean plant life.

In each five year period since 1950, an amount of ocean plant life equal to all of the plant life in the Amazon Rainforest has repeatedly disappeared from the oceans.

In just 60 years we have stood by idly and watched as 12 rainforests of plants have been eradicated from this “Earth’s” oceans.

This Yin and Yang of plant life on land and at sea is explained more fully in this posting…

We now know definitively that as we replenish and restore that missing dust to the ocean pastures they return to the state of health and abundance they and we enjoyed in the not so distant past. The amount of mineral dust, rock dust, needed by ocean pastures as provided by Nature is vast. But if delivered by the intelligent hand of man it can be a trifling amount costing mere millions not billions to bring back ocean plankton pastures, to bring back the fish that once thrived on those pastures, and to manage billions of tons of CO2.

Here’s how just 100 village scale, not nation scale,  projects can save the world!

President Obama could, by endorsing this one revolutionary action, manage more CO2 in a matter of less than a decade than all of his combined ‘in the box’ evolutionary actions will deal with in a century.

We are not saying the evolutionary approach is unnecessary. It is vitally important and we must do everything the President will propose.

But that is preventative treatment and it won’t save our singular patient, Mother Nature, from Yesterday’s deadly dose of CO2 already administered.

We need both evolution and revolution!