Partnering With Nature to Restore the Climate
Climate change has become one of our most politically divisive topics. But what if the way forward is less about politics and more about partnering with the Earth’s own intelligence?
I read Peter Fiekowsky’s book, Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race, when it first came out in 2022, and it left me feeling so relieved. Finally someone had a plan to move us out of the climate chaos. A welcome change for a subject long dominated by dread and despair.
Since then, politics has made the climate conversation harder, not easier. Even mentioning climate change these days is controversial. We see it happening all around us, but we’re not supposed to talk about it anymore.
And while we’re busy not talking about it, the climate science conversation is shifting. Fiekowsky and others have pointed out that reducing our carbon emissions isn’t enough.
Net-zero is only the first step—we need a new goal.
Net-Zero Alone Isn’t Enough
The climate conversation has always been focused on the goal of net-zero carbon emissions. We need to stop putting carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, and the way to do that is to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
That’s a critical goal, but it fails to address an important point:
Even if we transition to 100% green energy, we’ll still have a trillion tons of excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
Throughout all of human existence, the Earth has cycled back and forth between 300 parts per million CO2 and lower.
“Meeting the Paris [Accords] goal of net zero emissions by 2050 will see CO2 level off at about 460 parts per million. That’s more than 50 percent higher than human beings ever survived.”
Fiekowsky argued in 2022 that our transition to renewable energy was inevitable. Whether that holds depends on continued investment and policy, but even if it does, transitioning to clean energy alone won’t be enough.
We still need to find ways to remove the excess carbon.
Why We Need Climate Restoration
The goal of climate restoration is to clean up the excess CO2 we’ve emitted and return our atmosphere to somewhere close to 300 parts per million. That’s how we can ensure that future humans are able to live full, healthy lives on this planet.
You might think removing that much CO2 would require billions of dollars and a massive technological infrastructure, but that’s not necessarily the case. The Earth has already developed ways to remove CO2 on a global scale—she does it every time this planet shifts to an ice age, and at times in between to maintain her natural equilibrium.
“People often ask me why I’m so confident that we can restore the climate. I tell them, “Because it’s been done before.” Nature has removed massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere 10 times in the last million years…”
Fiekowsky outlines a number of methods that mimic nature: synthetic limestone manufacturing, seaweed permaculture, and ocean iron fertilization. As presented in the book, these aren’t new ways to exploit nature, these are ways to assist the Earth in doing what she’s been doing for billions of years—maintaining her own atmospheric balance.
Synthetic limestone manufacturing: taking the same process the Earth uses to combine CO2 and calcium to make limestone, then applying it to create rock for construction projects that we’d otherwise quarry from the ground.
Seaweed permaculture: imagine underwater kelp forests anchored to floating grids across the open ocean, pulling in more CO2 than the rainforests. Once grown, the kelp can be repurposed into new products, or intentionally sunk to the ocean bottom for to lock carbon away for centuries.
Ocean iron fertilization (OIF): sprinkling iron dust over the open ocean to stimulate rapid phytoplankton blooms, mimicking the natural activity of dust storms and volcanoes. The phytoplankton provides food for sea life, and the rest sinks to the deep ocean.
The Iron Controversy and Upcoming Trials
While none of these solutions is without challenges, the one that has received the most criticism is the one that is most interesting in the book. Many scientists consider OIF to be highly controversial. What Fiekowsky calls “sprinkling” iron to mimic dust storms, they call “dumping” pollution into the ocean.
The concern is not that this solution is extractive; it’s that global, long-term iron fertilization could have unexpected consequences. It could take necessary nutrients from downstream fisheries, give rise to toxic algae blooms, or fail to remove CO2 from ocean circulation. These are valid concerns considering the only OIF field trials so far have been small-scale tests to confirm that iron does cause phytoplankton growth.
New field trials are currently in the planning stages to assess the ecological risks, find out how much CO2 OIF will actually remove, and determine how long we can expect that CO2 to be locked away. It’s likely that we’ll see progress on this potential solution in the next year or two.
The Way Forward
Successfully restoring our atmosphere will likely take multiple solutions, carried out by responsible people with proper scientific and governmental oversight. It’s going to be a long process, and the specific methods in this book may not be the ones that ultimately move forward. There are others, but for now, these seem like the most promising for global scale carbon removal.
None of this is a replacement for reducing our emissions—that work continues. Climate restoration is a new goal, and it sidesteps the politics of reduction efforts. It doesn’t ask anyone to drive less, fly less, or change their lifestyle. It asks us to support methods that remove what we’ve already emitted, by enhancing processes the Earth already uses.
The way forward is sure to be challenging, but there is a way forward. There is a way to restore this planet’s balance and make it safe for future generations.
Maybe now talking about climate change can shift from the distraction of dread, despair, and politics to the actual work of moving forward in partnership with the Earth.