I mean just for example, the largest carbon sink in the world are the worlds oceans. We are covering these vast pieces of natures gas recycling system with plastics. Plastics like bottles etc don't decay as we know but they do break up. Break up into ever smaller pieces down to Micro, even Nano, levels. While it is tragic to see what plastics are doing to sea life at the top of the food chain, studies in the last 50 years are beginning to show just how massively, quickly and in numerous ways this evil by-product of the fossil fuel industry is limiting the ability of plankton to not only absorb CO2 from but also to release Oxygen back into the atmosphere.
To put an ! point on how the oceans are truly our last chance at removing vast amounts of CO2, we're almost out of rain forests now. It's estimated Congolese rain forest is the last strongly net negative CO2 rainforest left on the planet and we've destroyed so much natural vegetation in general world wide that land based plants overall have gone CO2 net positive!
The ocean may very well be all we have left yet we continue to non-stop dump by the giga-tons plastics in all forms that will infect it far faster than we can deal with it. Heck, you may not think of it but if your not wearing 100% natural clothing every time you wash something with polyester (a form of plastic) pieces of that make their way past all of the supposed filtration in our not so great waste water system, eventually into either our water tables or the ocean. Every time you spit after polishing those pearly whites you're spitting plastic into the water system. It's so much more than bottles and straws and bags. It's insane when you really start using the information at your fingertips to find out just how many ways and just how much and just how utterly devastating plastics are to our last life line for not just CO2 sequestration but the gas we need to survive no matter how much we stink it up. Robotic tug boats with plastic collecting draglines or some kind of plastic eating superbug, whatever, are just not realistic. We are arrogant to think anything except to stop using it will work.
While this technology may be promising sometime in the future there's no way we are going to come up with an "artificial" ocean type system that can absorb CO2 at the levels our oceans do. It scares the shit out of me and I see no quick way out of the plastic life we're addicted to. Big Oil and Big Petrol-chemical companies (and those easily purchased friends in government) have been lying about and suppressing the insane dangers of plastics almost as long as they have been doing so about about fossil fuel CO2 emissions and continue to do so.
And this is only scratching the surface of the human induced decimation of the planets lungs. Overall we are bringing the most evil gas, Methane, online before we even get ahold of CO2's tail. I get a lot of flack from this opinion but while I do believe we need to invest in finding true from the ground up net zero/negative ways to reduce human produced CO2 (yes, nukes are an unfortunate part of that IMO), I think carbon sequestration is like trying to fight a modern war with clubs of bone.
This immense challenge we face is not going to get resolved in the next 10, 20, 30 or even 100 years IMO. While we must resolve it for our species to have a chance (life will go on without us no matter how much we fuck this rock up IMO) I think we need to wake up and in order to give our direct descendants a chance start spending more and more money on adapting to survive in this ever inhospitable world we've created. That also includes a massive generational attempt at re-structuring and more importantly retraining ourselves out of this completely impossible socio-economic system and to try and do the absolute hardest part... get ourselves to net-negative population growth. Of course to that point its more than likely nature will take out a few billion of us if not ourselves before we figure out how to do that.
We've just screwed with our aquarium so much that, it's not a very bright future right now unfortunately IMO. We're going to have to learn how to live with what we have while re-doing how we live in order to get back to some kind of an equilibrium.. far into the future.
Partial source - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe
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