The first reality here is that this is all new science and also new
law as yet to be written since it the therefore truly governed by
the commons, it is appropriate for the commons to go out and try.
By the way, since we are now enforcing pollution laws in the open
ocean, perhaps the USA, and China would care to accumulate and
destroy all the rubbish now in the great Pacific Garbage Patch?
A better plan may be to make all plastics biodegradable and use iron
sulphate as a filler to boot.
There is also more science at work here that understood at first
blush. The iron went into a local sea eddy that naturally retains
the iron for a sustained dwell period. This is unambiguius and
increased productivity will be quite measurable and even reliable.
If the increase is significant, continuing the program will make
excellent sense.
The costs appear high but then they may well involve a number of
further steps. I suspect that the carbon credit tale is simply a
ruse to satisfy oversight needs. If this doubles the communities
fishery, we will not be hearing any more about carbon credits. And
any environmentalists showing up will be quickly branded as racists
attempting to despoil the poor Indians.
Ocean-fertilization
project off Canada sparks furore - Bid to boost salmon stocks relied
on hotly debated science and dubious carbon credits.
Jeff Tollefson
23 October 2012
Workers on a Haida
Salmon Restoration Corporation boat release iron sulphate into the
Pacific Ocean.
When a chartered
fishing boat strewed 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the ocean
off western Canada last July, the goal was to supercharge the marine
ecosystem. The iron was meant to fertilize plankton, boost salmon
populations and sequester carbon. Whether the ocean responded as
hoped is not clear, but the project has touched off an explosion on
land, angering scientists, embarrassing a village of indigenous
people and enraging opponents of geoengineering.
The first reports
about the project, which appeared in British newspaper The Guardian
on 15 October, presented it as a rogue geoengineering scheme — the
largest in history — in “blatant violation” of international
treaties. Critics suggested that Russ George, a US entrepreneur, had
persuaded the Haida Nation village of Old Massett on the Queen
Charlotte Islands to fund the project by promising that it would be
possible to sell carbon credits for the carbon dioxide taken up by
phytoplankton.
The reality was much
more complex, and it underscores the combustible politics and
uncertain science of geoengineering.
Contacted by Nature,
George lashed out at the media and “radical environmentalists”
for manufacturing a “racist” story about a maverick geoengineer
taking advantage of naive natives. “This was their work and their
project,” he says. “It is not the result of them being too stupid
to know better.”
It is now clear that
Old Massett, a fishing village of fewer than 1,000 people,
embraced the project in hopes of restoring dwindling salmon runs by
boosting phytoplankton and, in turn, the entire marine food web.
Villagers voted in February 2011 to lend Can$2.5 million (US$2.5
million) to the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation (HSRC) to
fertilize the ocean, says John Disney, head of the Old Massett-based
corporation and economic-development officer for the village. George,
who previously headed Planktos, a firm based in San Francisco,
California, that had sought to commercialize ocean fertilization
using iron, signed on as chief scientist after the HSRC approached
him, says Disney. The company planned to repay the village for its
loan by selling carbon credits to companies seeking to offset their
greenhouse-gas emissions, he adds.
“We created life
where there wasn’t life,” says Disney, adding that the
fertilization fed a phytoplankton bloom of some 10,000 square
kilometres, which attracted fish, birds and whales (see‘Sowing
controversy’). “The only difference between what we’ve done and
what everybody else has done is that we’ve taken it up a notch.”
In fact, the Old
Massett scheme dumped five times more iron than previous
fertilization experiments. And no scientists outside the project have
seen data that might show whether it worked as advertised. “I’m
not going to condemn it offhand, but this is just not the way to do
this experiment,” says Victor Smetacek, a marine biologist with the
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in
Bremerhaven, Germany. “It’s quite sophisticated science, and it
would have been good if scientists had carried it out.”
The project was also
on uncertain legal grounds. Ocean fertilization is restricted by a
voluntary international moratorium on geoengineering, as well as
a treaty on ocean pollution. Both agreements include exemptions for
research, and the treaty calls on national environment agencies to
regulate experiments. Officials from Environment Canada say that the
agency warned project leaders in May that ocean fertilization would
require a permit.
“Environment Canada
did not approve this non-scientific event,” environment minister
Peter Kent told Parliament on 18 October. “Enforcement officers are
now investigating.” The Canadian National Research Council gave
nearly Can$70,000 in funding to the HSRC, and the US National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration provided 20 buoys to help to monitor
water conditions. But officials at those agencies say they were never
informed of the ocean-fertilization project, and they thought that
the work involved salmon ecology.
Jason Blackstock, a
geoengineering expert at the University of Oxford, UK, says that the
situation highlights the grey area between geoengineering to alter
global climate, and local actions with other goals such as boosting
salmon stocks or seeding clouds for weather modification. “This has
the potential to become a ubiquitous problem,” says Blackstock.
The ETC Group, an
advocacy organization based in Ottawa that has led a global drive
against geoengineering, has suggested that George misrepresented the
project’s potential to generate carbon credits. Documents from the
Old Massett website imply that in raising funds, project leaders
stressed the potential for easy carbon credits. One document, tied to
a 2011 loan application, showed that bank managers were wary of the
HSRC’s claims that the market for such carbon offsets was proven
and that “retail outlets and banks in Germany are begging for the
product”.
In fact, carbon credits from iron-fertilization projects cannot be
offered on formal markets such as the European emissions trading
system, although willing buyers might be found outside those markets.
And whether iron fertilization actually sequesters carbon is
uncertain. A study1 by Smetacek published in July — based on
analysis of an experiment in 2004 — found that at least half of the
carbon taken up by the iron-fertilized plankton was buried after they
sank to the bottom of the sea. But other studies2 have found
that carbon in the blooms remains in the active biological cycle and
is not sequestered at all.
George says that the
bankers were ultimately satisfied, and that carbon credits are no
more than a possible source of future funding, if the science
supports them. But in an initial interview, Disney repeatedly said
that the company needs to sell the carbon credits quickly to repay
its loan from the community. “Being the guy who sold this to the
community, I bloody well better come up with the money,” he said.
Disney later backed off his emphasis on carbon credits and stressed
that he stands by George.
It
is unclear whether the project will restore the salmon. A bumper run
of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) in 2010 came two years after a
volcanic eruption in Alaska sent a layer of iron-rich ash over the
ocean, fertilizing a plankton bloom3. But many scientists remain
sceptical.
Whether the Haida
experiment worked won’t be known for two years, when the youngest
of the salmon feeding in the ocean today return home to spawn. John
Nightingale, president of the Vancouver Aquarium in Canada, says that
will be a chance to glean some science from the project. The work may
have lacked scientific rigour, he says, but the HSRC has now agreed
to make all of its data available to scientists. It has “done
something unique”, Nightingale says. “I want the maximum
information, the maximum analysis, the maximum debate.”
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