Today is UN World Oceans Day.

It’s hard to care about the oceans today, isn’t it? The world is fraught with fractures and injustices. These are many and are embedded in the systems of our society. The issue of race is, for once, in its rightful place at the forefront of the national conversation. In case we had forgotten, there’s still a pandemic going on.

The impacts of environmental degradation tend to hit people of color the hardest, both here in the US and beyond.

But there is hope. Cast your mind or imagination back to the the first Earth Day, just over 50 years ago. In 1970, air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity, and awareness of the links between pollution and health was low. Yet lead from exhausts and unregulated toxic pesticides were causing millions to suffer from a wide range of nasty illnesses.

Earth Day began to change all that, bringing together people from all walks of life in the recognition that when the environment loses, we all lose. By the end of 1970, we had the EPA and the Clean Air Act, and have breathed easier ever since — a good thing in a time of infections that affect the lungs.

I believe the oceans have the power to help reverse climate change — and today, on World Oceans Day, I’d like to articulate how.

The challenge of climate change

Beyond the COVID pandemic, another one looms large. Like COVID, climate change will affect us all. Unlike COVID, climate change is unfolding over the course of decades and requires action over decades.Many of us have been entrenched for so long in the opinions we formed long ago about climate change that it’s worth taking a brief step back to examine the latest data.

Average CO2 levels in the atmosphere are now 413ppm. Last time CO2 levels were that high, sea levels were 50–80 feet higher than they are today. CO2 levels are increasing about 100 times faster this time around. For now, temperatures (and sea-levels) are still manageable, but they are both rising, and exist in feedback loops that only make solving climate change harder over time.

Global temperatures are over 1C higher than pre-industrial averages. There’s 40% less arctic summer sea ice than in the 1990s. Sea levels have risen by nearly a foot.

So far, this might all sound rather pessimistic.

One piece of good news is that skepticism towards human-caused climate change is headed towards oblivion faster than the Arctic ice sheet. Climate-deniers will soon join flat-earthers on the isolated fringe, clinging to extremes of conspiracy theory and cherry-picked data. Perhaps the two groups will even find common ground and organize joint conferences.

Another cause for optimism is that, as a society, we care about this more than ever.

Americans are becoming increasingly concerned about the climate — 38% now say it’s a ‘crisis’, up from 25% just five years ago. Happily the issue is becoming less partisan. For registered Republicans self-identifying as conservative, 32% are worried about global warming, more than double the figure from five years ago. I applaud those who have changed their minds.

Now to the question at hand…

What lessons might the pandemic teach us about climate change?

Lesson 1: Prevention is superior to cure.

We have seen that countries like Taiwan avoided significant effects of COVID-19 by being well prepared with contact tracing capabilities, stockpiles of equipment, a culture of acceptance of wearing masks, and clear action plans for how to respond. Countries that initially denied or ignored the disease and its implications are faring much worse, in both human and economic cost. We don’t know yet how many lives will be lost or what the financial cost will be. For the latter, estimates in the trillions of dollars seem reasonable.

Climate change has a similar dynamic. It will be expensive to make the investments necessary to avoid the worst effects. But the potential costs if we don’t will be astronomical. Billions of people are at risk of being displaced. It is no exaggeration to predict humanitarian costs on an unprecedented scale. The monetary costs could easily run into the tens of trillions of dollars. I’m hopeful, then, that this pandemic will teach us the lesson that when it comes to global crises, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’

Lesson 2: Exponential growth is a different beast.

Here in the US we had a few isolated cases, then a couple of weeks later we had thousands, then less than a month later we had hundreds of thousands and now have more than a million. Once the effects of climate change begin to accelerate, positive-feedback loops will likely lead to exponentially increasing effects. While the changes will happen over the course of years rather than months, the ‘this seems like not a big deal’ followed by ‘woah, what’s happening?’ sentiment may be similar. Perhaps we’ll learn to recognize that pattern, so we can take action before we get to ‘woah’. If not, we may be too late.

Lesson 3: we are all connected.

What happens on the other side of the world affects our lives profoundly. For all the suffering, the pandemic is also a moment of great global solidarity. We’re all in it together and we must come together to solve it. I hope we increase our global sense of shared connection and resolve, and decide that we all caused climate change and we must all help to solve it.

Technology Saves the Day

7 of out of 10 Americans believe that technological advances will save us from the worst effects of climate change. Great! What advances would these be?

It is in this question that we encounter perhaps the toughest part of this situation. All climate prediction models that keep warming below disaster levels assume we’ll remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in massive quantities. Otherwise, we’d need to halve carbon emissions in under 10 years. Just try to imagine the entire world halving emissions. That’s not going to happen.

So capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is the path forward then. Great, let’s do it! What’s the plan, then? Oh, there isn’t one. There are lots of dedicated people across the world working on various ideas, but nothing is remotely close to working yet at the cost or scale we need. Project Drawdown, a non-profit that pulls together all the different methods, thinks we can reach the point of capturing all human emissions in about 30 years (not 10 years), “if we make best use of all existing solutions”. So their best-case scenario still falls far short.

I promised you optimism. Here it is.

There are solutions. People all over the world are working on various ways to capture CO2, from chemically pulling it out of the air to growing kelp forests. The ubiquitous challenge is finding ways that are cheap and massively scalable. Time is short so we must pursue multiple avenues.

The project I’m dedicating my time to now is a way that the ocean can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into rocks. There’s a natural process which has existed for billions of years: when rain falls on volcanic rocks, CO2 is captured. After a series of steps it ends up as sediment on the bottom of the ocean, where it turns into limestone. The problem is, this process is slow.

A solution: green sand beaches

A green sand beach capturing carbon dioxide

The good news (finally!) is that we can speed up this natural process. It’s all about breaking down the rocks, so we take a green volcanic rock called olivine, grind it into sand, and spread it on beaches. There, wave action breaks it down, pulling CO2 out of the air and de-acidifying the ocean at the same time. Because we use natural wave energy to do this, we capture 20 times more carbon than we emit in the process of making these beautiful beaches.

Thirty years of peer-reviewed scientific papers, including various laboratory experiments, show that this process works. What we need now is real-life experiments at pilot beaches to demonstrate that the process works. After these, our open-source approach will ensure that this can be scaled up rapidly and globally. We believe global deployment could begin within 3–5 years, creating the fastest possible path to capturing and permanently removing 100 percent of humanity’s annual CO2 emissions.

We need your help, though. Research progress has stalled, and Project Vesta, a non-profit, exists to get things moving again. We have engaged the scientific community and drawn up plans for the beach pilots. If you believe that new technologies and processes will come along to solve the problem, then you are right. But it won’t just happen on its own. It will take people like you to help.

We are the change we’ve been waiting for.

Learn more and back the project.

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Watch (and share) our 3 minute explainer video —>

A Case for Climate Optimism - Three Lessons from the Pandemic