We Need to Harness Natural Carbon Sinks to Reverse Climate Change
We should leave nature to its own devices rather than addressing a human-caused problem with human-generated solutions.
Who doesn’t like baths?
Think of a bathtub. When you take a bath, you fill the bathtub with water with the drain closed.
When you’re done, you empty the drain.
The bathtub analogy is a good way to think about greenhouse gas emissions, the main lever of climate change.
For over two centuries, we’ve been filling our atmospheric bathtub with greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, and a few others.
To fix the climate crisis, we need to stop filling the bathtub.
But we also have to empty it.
Sounds simple, no? Just inject carbon back into the ground, they say. Or pay Elon Musk to send it away with his rockets. Or just bottle it up and leave it lying around.
I see tremendous promise in so-called negative emissions technologies (like carbon capture and storage). If done right, they could work wonders to stabilize our climate in the long run.
