Bad Idea

Back when it was funny, Saturday Night Live did a classic spoof commercial for "Bad Idea Jeans". A group of guys (including some comedic icons) were shooting the breeze while getting ready to play basketball. They spew out line after line of sheer idiocy (my favorite concludes, "...when am I going to make it back to Haiti?"), each followed by a black screen with only the words "bad idea" (btw, I couldn't find the clip on YouTube, but did find a commercial for what is apparently a real Swedish company that is actually called Bad Idea Jeans).

A re-make of this ad might include something along the lines of the plans of Planktos, a new company looking to get ahead of the game in the carbon market that will burst onto the scene when the U.S. eventually passes a carbon cap-and-trade bill. NYT environmental blogger Andy Revkin covers their plan in a recent post. The idea is basically to dump tons of iron into the sea to simulate natural settlement of dust containing iron that stimulates blooms of microscopic algae. The algae photosynthesize, which captures the carbon dioxide that is in our atmosphere in great excess and causes the greenhouse effect and all of its consequences.

The problem with this plan is that algal blooms are, by definition, episodic and even extreme events. They represent a temporary yet drastic change in the ecosystem that then subsides with a return to more normal conditions. Algal blooms are akin to the pulse of wildflower blooms that can color woodland meadows or coastal dunes for brief periods at the right time of year, but they likely cause much greater biological and chemical changes given the nature of photosynthetic activity. We know very little about the natural frequency, intensity or effects of algal blooms, and therefore cannot possibly predict the consequences of stimulating more of them.

Furthermore, we have no idea what other ecological impacts might take place. As noted in a previous post, we are only just beginning to catalog the microbial and planktonic communities of the marine realm, let alone understand how they are structured and function. This makes me think of another recent NYT article that really drives home our very limited understanding of the natural world and the need for humilty and prudence in managing our effects upon it. It was discovered recently that a decades long effort to protect the endangered greenback cutthroat trout in Colorado might have been focused on the wrong fish, which instead was the more common Colorado River cutthroat trout.

I point this out not to mock those involved with the effort. Biological taxonomy is neither simple nor straightforward. Defining and identifying species is fraught with difficulty and uncertainty. I once asked a leading ichthyologist for the best guide book to help me distinguish the longfin damselfish from the dusky damselfish in preparation for a field study. His response was that there was no such book because every book got them wrong (so don't put much stock in the info provided in the links). And these are two of the most common fishes on clear, shallow and well studied Caribbean reefs. Similarly, the greenback trout misidentification happened with a large vertebrate in a system that is relatively easy to observe and study (i.e., a stream, compared with the ocean) and surrounded by biologists, fishery managers and anglers who all know fish and know them well. If we are prone to make these very basic errors, then we should be very wary of the potential to make far more profound errors in systems for which we have much, much less basic understanding. But it is one thing to call a fish by the wrong name, and another to disrupt the fundamental chemistry of an entire ecosystem.

Curbing global climate change is clearly one of our greatest challenges, not simply among environmental issues but among all public policy issues. However, we should first strive to make headway on energy efficiency, development of renewable sources, and less risky carbon-capture approaches (e.g., planting trees stimulates photosynthesis and carbon dioxide uptake in a much better understood way). Dumping iron into the sea is the environmental equivalent of standing over a beaker containing a pile of unknown solid white cubes with a beaker of water. If you pour the water in and the cubes are tofu, you've got miso soup. But if they're pure sodium, the resulting explosion will make you lose your eyebrows if you're lucky and more likely go blind. Bad idea.