In 2019 I wrote two posts about reversing the carbon cycle. As a quick recap, we are currently adding about 4-5 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere annually. That has put us in a position where we are heating the earth’s system by the equivalent of 4 nuclear bomb detonations every second. So that’s bad. Very bad. But there is one piece of truly good news: atmospheric carbon is the ultimate global commodity.
What is a commodity? A commodity is a good that has fungibility. Take gold for example. You can substitute one ounce of gold for another ounce of gold. The ability to substitute with minimal or no effect is what it means for something to be fungible (a word that’s often used in the context of currencies, because a dollar bill can substitute for another dollar bill). Other words one could use would be indistinguishable or interchangeable. Well, carbon dioxide or methane are both commodities. A ton of CO2 can substitute for any other ton of CO2. When you order CO2 for an industrial process, for example, you order a ton of CO2 and any ton will do.
With commodities you still have to deal with delivery though. For example crude oil in Saudi Arabia can’t be substituted for crude oil in the US without significant cost of transportation. But our atmosphere mixes itself over time due to wind. This obviously doesn’t happen overnight and there is such a concept as “CO2 weather” which tracks the differing CO2 concentrations across the globe. But still the net effect is roughly the same: it doesn’t really matter where additional CO2 is emitted, it winds up in the global atmosphere and thus contributes to heating.
Now often this is presented as bad news. Usually this happens in the context of someone arguing for why they shouldn’t have to pay for emissions while others are still polluting freely. But the converse is also true: it doesn’t matter where or how we emit less or where or how we draw down carbon from the atmosphere. A ton of avoided emissions or a ton drawn down is the same anywhere on the globe. Solutions anywhere and everywhere can help us reduce atmospheric carbon!
This insight is particularly important because there are components of the overall carbon cycle that are huge, such as the global total of photosynthesis uptake, which is 123 gigatons of carbon.
In upcoming posts I will write about some of the interesting solutions that are being explored for impacting various parts of this cycle.
