A Recipe for Cooling the Climate By Peter Bane
A Recipe for Cooling the Climate
By Peter Bane
Pandemic has exposed the clay feet of the market economy and the hypocrisy of its acolytes who have long argued that stabilizing the climate would just cost too much, that “there is no alternative” to business as usual. But in the face of unprecedented demands for changing the way we live and do business, there are, it seems, many alternatives.
In the name of public health, factories have been shuttered and deserted. In the meantime, Washington deficit hawks have embraced socialism and are poaching it in an ocean of red ink.
Now that the clarifying potential of mass death has knocked back some zombie ideologies about the primacy of profit as the guiding force, let’s look at what else the world needs, besides face masks, ventilators, more nurses and hospital beds, and a vaccine for Covid-19
Global heating will unhinge the world’s economies and its governments long before financial centers in NYC, Tokyo, London, and Shanghai go literally under water—and with far more enduring consequences than the COVID-19 pandemic. If you fear people will get ungovernable when they lose their incomes, think about how much worse it could be if there wasn’t enough food.
If pandemic has taught us nothing else, it has driven home the old saw that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So how do we ensure a stable climate and a robust food system?
Here’s what we’ll need to do.
The planet needs another trillion tons of soil carbon and a trillion new trees to first mitigate, then reverse global heating. Those trillions won’t all happen tomorrow, but they must be well underway this decade, maturing by mid-century. The direct US share of this effort is about one-fifth, based on our wealth of land, money, and other resources. For the rest, we must partner with other countries, innovate policy and action, and lead by example.
What do soil carbon and trees have to do with climate cooling?
Though atmospheric carbon is an important measure of climate health, it’s not the driver. Water is. To cool the climate, green growth must expand and endure, which requires water. Trees and plants bank carbon in soils, and soil carbon holds water, which enables plant growth. A pound of C in soil holds a gallon of water. (A trillion tons of soil carbon would hold about the volume of Lakes Michigan and Huron combined). Trees release the moisture through their leaves, and make the rain, cooling the climate with clouds and frequent, moderate moisture. Trees also release volatile organic compounds which react with other chemicals in the atmosphere to produce aerosols that play a role in forming clouds and raindrops, while bacteria from tree leaves nucleate snowflakes and rain droplets, processes that help clean the sky, release solar energy to space without warming the air, and nourish everything on land. This life-sustaining water cycle allows cooling and climate regulation to occur naturally.
The water cycles of Earth are disrupted by activities like industrial farming, deforestation, and development. Bare soil and pavement reflect more heat to an atmosphere charged with more and more heat-trapping gases. These conditions originate with human action, compounding over time. A 30-year lag between inputs and outcomes ensures that the worst is yet to come. We cannot wait to act.
In addition to their impact on climate heating, bare soil and pavement sluice runoff to the oceans, contributing to flooding and sea-level rise. Water, with its potential to nourish regular, gentle rains over wide areas, is flushed away. Driven by a hotter climate, it comes back in the form of atmospheric rivers, straight-line winds, hurricanes, and other massively destructive events that devastate lives, communities, and societies. Therein lies the danger to humanity that we must urgently address.
Where and how?
The pillars of a new blue-green economy rest on agricultural, urban, and other waste land. Working outward from the most highly leveraged riparian and ridgetop acres into main valleys in semi-arid zones, we would cease cultivation, tillage, and arable cropping, plant multipurpose trees in contoured alleys, and grow a catch crop of forage for livestock. In a dozen years, hedgerows and windbreaks would expand across the farm belt, restoring environmental sanity, pest predator habitat, and farm income, supplanting dangerous chemicals and ending soil erosion. Highway medians would become carbon sinks with strip forests providing shelter for interstate commerce. Urban boulevards and pocket parks would sprout edible forest gardens.