What's Not Getting Attention In Climate Debates, Platforms; Actual Carbon Cuts, Drawdowns

[hatrack]

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The emerging strategy of climate restoration argues for more than merely staving off the worst effects of climate change. In addition to mitigation and adaptation, its proponents suggest, we need to actively counteract the forces warming the planet by removing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and deploying technologies to regenerate Arctic ice. Yes, these ideas are currently expensive and difficult to scale. But restorationists argue we need to invest in all three legs of that metaphorical stool if we’re going to stabilize the climate.

“It takes time to turn over huge, embedded infrastructure,” says Leslie Field, founder and CEO of Ice911, an Arctic ice-restoration non-profit. What she once considered the “back-up plan I hope we never need” now feels vital. Field, who teaches a course at Stanford on engineering, entrepreneurship, and climate change, stresses the impact that decreased Arctic reflectivity is already having on everything from warming to weather patterns to the jetstream. For her, restoring reflectivity is part and parcel of any effective response to climate change.

This approach is a paradigm shift beyond #KeepItInTheGround and #ExxonKnew rhetoric, because it’s about more than emissions reductions and fossil-fuel sector accountability: It’s about removing carbon dioxide and reversing global warming.

“It’s not going to be a replacement for mitigation, but there’s a gap,” says Robbie Orvis, who directs energy-policy design at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy and climate policy firm based in San Francisco. “We don’t know how to get the last 10 percent of the power sector decarbonized.” So while it’s not a stand-alone solution, he sees restoration as worthy of research investment. As Orvis wrote in Designing Climate Solutions, “Achieving negative emissions necessarily involves removing CO2 from the atmosphere.” Zeitz, a former State Department official in the Obama administration and a leading figure in the global campaign against AIDS, is setting out to shepherd the ideas of climate restoration through the political arena. “Politics is the competition of ideas,” he says. “And we’re in that game.” His first move: grading presidential candidates from both parties.

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https://grist.org/article/candidates-are-finally-talking-about-climate-change-but-theyre-asking-all-the-wrong-questions/

[Boomer]

1. Good luck with that.

Considering how badly we'll failing just to mitigate climate change, it's certainly... ambitious to be discussing reversing it.