Headlines simultaneously urge us to cower or flower over the prospect that billions are required to meet 2050 UK climate target.

The talk of billions provides endless grist for the mills of tabloid rage (both green and black), research & developer glee, and of course endless political wrangling.

Just in time, there is a better, faster, cheaper solution.

Proven ocean pasture restoration and plankton, aka fish food, might immediately repurpose the lions share of the nation’s CO2 into new ocean life at a cost of mere millions not billions.

The new report just released by Tory Government economic analysts states that the UK Climate commitments will need spending of £20 billion pounds every year, by 2050, to eliminate sufficient greenhouse gases to meet the UK 2050 climate targets. The government-commissioned report, by analysts at Vivid Economics, however sadly estimates that the UK ought to begin spending at a paltry £1-£2 billion per year. That’s a vapid not vivid economic recommendation on behalf of climate and the environment.

Most headlines on this story fail to mention that this trifling ‘starter sum’ won’t begin to mitigate but a tiny fraction of the 130 million tonnes per year burden of our fossil fool age carbon dioxide. CO2  from yesterday’s trillion tonne emission overdose added to by today’s and tomorrow’s additional emissions are destroying the environment, especially the oceans, and changing the climate. It’s more like just a fraction of an interest-only mortgage where the crushing growing principal compounds the misery for future generations.

Too Little Too Late

On average, the report estimates that the UK may need between £1bn and £2bn a year in 2030 to remove greenhouse gas emissions from the air, rising to between £6bn and £20bn by 2050.

According to the report, the most expensive projects would involve technology that can absorb carbon dioxide from the air. This could remove about 25m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year at a cost between £160 and £470 a tonne.

It claims the cheapest options include restoring natural habits, such as tree-planting, could barely absorb 5m tonnes of carbon from the air every year at a cost of between £8 and £78 a tonne.  That 5 million tonnes is just 3% of the 130 tonnes required. Mother Nature can do better.

Atlantic Cod have been starving steadily away to the point where any fishery is no longer considered sustainable. Click to read more

What’s not in the report, the immediate, low cost, proven solution at hand,
Bring Back The Fish

The climate economics report has made a determined effort to miss reporting on the most potent natural eco-restoration technology and methodology that has been under intensive research and development for more than 30 years with dozens of nations contributing more the $250 million to the effort.

This is, of course, ocean pasture restoration, sometimes referred to as Ocean Iron Fertilization. It has been demonstrated at a very large scale for its utility to ‘bring back the fish’ by the restoration of ocean plankton pastures. It’s incredibly effective fisheries restoration comes with the side benefit of it repurposing tens of millions of tonnes of CO2 into that new ocean life. The cost, not even £1 per tonne of CO2e. 

The cataclysmic collapse of the UK’s ocean pastures is reported. Click to enlarge.

Restoring NE Atlantic ocean pastures is a vital task as recent scientific papers show an incredible collapse of those pastures. In the graph to the left, the bold blue line shows the number of plankton cells, the ‘grass’ of the ocean pastures. Since 1960 the number of plankton cells per cubic meter of ocean water has dropped from 2.7 million per cubic meter down to 0.7 million per cubic meter. Any pasture manager or ministry responsible for livestock pastures on land in the UK would be calling a national emergency if such a decline in pasture grass were reported. No one would try to explain the disappearance of livestock on over-harvesting as opposed to simple starvation.

UK Climate policy is more like an offshoot of a BREXIT mentality than national and global responsibility.

This vapid report is the worst of folly. When one does the obvious maths the proposed effort is clearly just thinnest of window dressing. Present EU and World climate market costs for CO2 mitigation are running at between £20 – £25 per tonne CO2e. At this cost, £2 billion would produce a reduction of just 1.5% of what the UK has acknowledged is its share of the remedy to the global climate crisis. The report’s average cost per tonne is far higher than this so that 1.5% must be seed as a high number.

That’s not even enough to cover the ‘interest’ on the UK 130 million tonne per year problem. Stalling any real progress for a decade or more with such a trifling budget ensures the climate crisis will not be meaningfully tended to. This is a prescription for the climate version of BREXIT, a capitulation to capitalistic greed in the present tense and pushing of the cost of that greed onto the next generations.

The question is whether the report makes clear that there is real urgency in this need.  Effective climate action isn’t some effort that might be needed in the distant future. The 30+ years of climate change research, rancorous debate, and political action has finally come home to roost.

Sir David King, former Chief Scientist of the UK, noted in his recent address to the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in Westminster a couple of weeks ago, ‘it is vital that climate action begin immediately. Thirty years ago there was time to go slow but times up.’

The new reports authors state:

“Even if emissions are reduced aggressively across the economy, the UK is expected to continue to emit a significant amount of greenhouse gases annually,”
“The rate of rollout will need to be rapid, particularly in the 2030s and 2040s, and will require significant policy support.”

The fact that the report authors speak of time frames stretching decades from today is not encouraging. The report has urged ministers to consider supporting investment in greenhouse gas removal. This could mean offering new subsidies and grants for carbon capture technologies and projects, or demanding that companies that supply fossil fuels and agriculture products offset a percentage of their carbon emissions by investing in greenhouse gas removal. But on closer reading of the report recommended actions don’t begin to match even slightly the seeming urgent words they use.

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: “This report presents a variety of different options for consideration, and we will look closely at its findings.

“We recognize the importance and urgency of taking action right across the economy to deliver on our world-leading net-zero target, including by developing our approach to greenhouse gas removal technology.”

Recommending Untested Unproven Ideas

Meanwhile, the report suggests supporting hypothetical unproven methods like “enhanced weathering”. This is a new idea that some hypothesize would increase carbon removal from the air. In this untested method, fields are spread with ground-up silicate rocks, such as basalt, to increase the soil’s natural rate of carbon absorption. The authors suggest this might result in the removal of 15m tonnes of carbon from the air every year, but the cost of this uncertain process is said to be between £39  or ten times that amount at £390 a tonne. One can be certain that after a decade of research the cost will surely be on the high side.

BioFool

The analysts expect large-scale greenhouse gas removal to rely on projects that use bioenergy alongside carbon capture technology, known as BECCS, as well as projects that capture carbon directly from the air, or DACCS.

BECCS technology is being used on a small-scale at the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire, where some of the coal-burning power units have been converted to run on biomass. Biomass is considered by the UK and EU governments to be carbon-neutral because the pellets are made from sustainably farmed trees that absorb carbon emissions while they grow. However, the source of such biomass is today not primarily from sustainable forest plantations but often comes from more shady sources as so-called wood waste. There is a shortage of such wood and biofuel wood waste throughout the European continent.

Estonia forests instead of becoming lumber are converted to biofuel ‘wood waste’ pellets.

The UK imports more wood pellets than any other country in the world. Almost all of those are currently burned by Drax power station in Yorkshire. Two other large biomass power stations are under development and have already been guaranteed subsidies, each of which will burn 1.5 million tonnes of imported pellets. Most of those pellets come from the southern US, where carbon-rich forests ecosystems in the heart of a global biodiversity hotspot are being clearcut, increasingly for making pellets which are then shipped to the UK. Drax power station receives £2 million a day in subsidies for burning imported ‘wood waste.’

Atlantic and North Sea Cod Fisheries Declared Unsustainable
Second Miracle Of The Fishes Will Repair Fish And Climate Crisis

Earlier this week the certificate of sustainable status for North Sea cod was suspended by the Marine Stewardship Council. And yet just two years ago cod stocks were heralded as having recovered and the coveted certificate of sustainability was awarded. How could the fortunes of this fish have changed so quickly? The simple answer is that North Sea cod had never recovered, leaving serious questions about both the science and management of the stock.

North Sea Cod fishing has never been sustainable. Fisheries management science with the foxes ruling the hen house has been allowing a catch of 60% of the fish per year. Now the cod population has been shown to be at dangerously low levels. Click to read more.

The most recent analysis of the stock by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) – the body that provides official scientific advice to governments – shows that cod declined almost continuously from the 1960s until the early 2000s.

The problem with ocean fish is that they live in ocean pastures that have cycles of plankton blooms, and busts. Like all pasture livestock when the pasture collapses into a desert-like state the livestock cannot survive, let alone thrive. It’s been a fantasy of marine fisheries management that fishing is the only factor that influences these wild fish stocks.

No pasture manager on land would ever dare to proclaim in the face of pastures suffering from a prolonged drought that the decline in livestock was due to over-harvesting. Of course, the livestock are starving into extinction, on the way overfishing decimates the last of the fish, but overfishing is the lessor of the problems.

Restoring ocean pastures that have been the fishing grounds of the UK and Europe can be readily and immediately accomplished. In doing so the replenished ocean pastures will repurpose hundreds of millions of tonnes of our industrial CO2 into new ocean life. We will bring back the fish.

Whether the government will choose to begin the relatively inexpensive ‘first aid’ for our ocean pastures is another question. There are so many other issues to engage in rancorous debate about.