Private investors can help fight climate change – San Diego Union-Tribune

Many capitalists see climate as their next big payday. Finance will be the dominant theme of discussions, negotiations and deal-making at the Conference of the Parties – the United Nations-organized conference on how we can improve the Earth's climate, which began on Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan and runs until November 22 .

Investors want to know how they can make money by locking away the gases that are warming the planet and making us boil. The problem is that a lot of money is spent chasing bad ideas and the standards for solutions to the climate problem are worryingly low.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR), sometimes in the form of “carbon sequestration,” is currently the most attractive option. The idea is that coal, oil and gas originally came from the earth. So if we could rebury all the warming pollution that comes from burning these fuels, we could stabilize the Earth's climate. The problem is that many of the available technologies “bury” greenhouse gases for far too short a time to have a significant impact on global warming.

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere naturally pass from the air into the ocean, soil, trees, and the rest of the biosphere. Forest fires or tillage are some of the cases in which these gases can be released back into the atmosphere. This “carbon cycle” is important because carbon dioxide released today by burning oil, for example, stays in the cycle – from the atmosphere to trees to the ground and back into the atmosphere to the ocean and so on for a whopping 150,000 years.

Modern humans have lived on earth for around 200,000 years. If our distant ancestors had burned fossil fuels the way we do, we would still be seeing the climate impacts of their fossil fuel consumption.

The greenhouse gases we produce from our car's exhaust must be buried for as long as possible to effectively solve the climate problem. However, many of the proposed approaches are unlikely to be helpful in the long term because sinking has no long-term effect. For example, there are already attempts by the Department of Energy to capture carbon dioxide by growing seaweed in the ocean.

As the seaweed sinks into the deep sea, the carbon dioxide also sinks and may remain “buried” for hundreds, if not a few thousand years. Nevertheless, if pursued by large investors, this method will, at best, only create more problems for us in a few centuries, when the buried carbon dioxide bubbles up again from the ocean.

Meanwhile, all the sinking seaweed will serve as food for organisms on the seafloor, turning the naturally food-poor desert of the deep sea into one teeming with seaweed-eating animals and microbes. We will fundamentally change deep sea ecosystems, most likely not for the better, and achieve only a marginal climate benefit. Kelp is not the answer.

One problem is that “sequestration” is often defined as keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for 100 years. That's far too short a time frame for carbon sequestration to be effective in reversing global warming, according to science. If we invest most of our money in century-scale sequestration, we'll just be playing full throttle on greenhouse gases for the foreseeable future.

Some investors may make a profit, but the climate issue will continue to be with us. The UN should extend its “sequestration” goal to at least a few tens of thousands of years so that society doesn’t have to think long about this pollution.

The value of investments in sequestration should be assessed accordingly. Short-term solutions aren't likely to be worth much as they'll just ruin things. Long-term solutions should be worth a lot.

We are pleased that private finance is trying to solve the climate problem. Capitalists can be effective partners with governments, scientists and climate activists because right now, as bank robber Willie Sutton reportedly said of banks, “That’s where the money is.”

The climate problem cannot only be solved through government taxes, but must involve the private sector. Please let us spend investors' money wisely!

Norris is a distinguished professor of paleobiology at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and lives in Poway. Weiss, Ph.D., studies marine chemistry and geochemistry at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and lives in La Jolla.