From Asia Times, November 3:
Game-changing approaches, technologies and innovations are emerging
worldwide but need capital and political will to make a difference
Can mass deforestation cool the environment? Is there a real, working technology that literally reverses the CO2 emission cycle? And are there economically feasible, multinational regulatory frameworks that could de-heat the planet?
The answer to all these questions, according to Simon Mundy, is “yes.” He ought to know. Currently the “Moral Money” editor of the Financial Times, Mundy spent two years crisscrossing the world reporting from the climate change frontlines.
The result is “Race for Tomorrow: Survival, Innovation and Profit on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis,” which hit bookshelves just before the UN Climate Change Conference, COP26, kicked off in Glasgow this week.
On his odyssey, Mundy witnessed highly innovative, potential solutions. Some are on the ragged edge of scientific possibility. Others are actual working innovations whose scope and possibility extend far beyond renewable energy sources.
The only things missing at present are the financial resources to upscale these innovations – and the political will to unleash them upon greenhouse gases on a game-changing scale.
Rewilding prehistoric Siberia
Greenhouse gas emissions do not simply derive from human industry: A key emitter in our warming world is melting permafrost, notably in Siberia, an area larger than China. Yet Siberia used to have a global cooling, not heating, effect.
Thousands of years ago, Siberia was a band of cool grasslands which reflected solar heat. Today, Siberia is shadowed by dark forest, thereby losing its reflective effect.
Those responsible for this seismic environmental shift were our prehistoric ancestors. That may shock those who believe primitive humans were environmental saints. And the solution will strike many as sacrilege: grassland restoration via deforestation.
Yet the science is sound. While forests in most of the world are carbon-dense plant habitats that absorb CO2, in the far north, “forests are unhelpful,” Mundy explained.
The proponent of this concept is extreme Russian scientist Sergey Zimov, who oversees the Siberian research project known as “Pleistocene Park” (a brand inspired by Steven Spielberg). Zimov and his team, armed with chainsaws and tanks, are “very unusual environmentalists,” Mundy admits. But although Zimov chain smokes and chugs vodka with every meal, he is widely cited and has won international awards in the field.
And there’s more. Zimov’s wildest and wooliest idea is a proposed method to reverse forestation: Repopulate Siberia with resurrected herds of tree-trampling mammoth. Yes, you read that right. The original reason Siberia’s tundra become forested is because mammoths and other huge herbivores were hunted to extinction by humans some 10,000 years ago.
Could such beasts return? Mammoth DNA has, indeed, been discovered in permafrost, but not in a complete enough form to recreate the great beasts. “This is something people have been talking about for a long time,” Mundy says. “We are nowhere near.”
Fantastical? Perhaps. But Zimov is not alone. A team at Harvard University is deploying genome engineering in an attempt to create a neo-mammoth based on modern elephants.
“The idea is to create a bigger elephant, give it wool and longer tusks and more blubber so it can take the extreme temperatures in Siberia,” Mundy said.
Gases emitted by thawing permafrost are already equivalent to that generated by all of international aviation, but transforming Siberia back into a global air condition is hardly an immediate solution.
A device or system that could literally reverse carbon generation in short order would, surely, be the Holy Grail for climate-change warriors. That is not a myth; it is a working technology.
Reverse emissions innovation
A novel, integrated solution that Mundy calls “amazing” is in use today by an Icelandic-Swiss academic-industrial partnership....
....MUCH MORE
