Professor Tim Flannery, one of Australia’s leading writers on climate change, believes seaweed could very well be the silent hero that will battle the world’s climate crisis.
Flannery is the co-founder of the Australian Climate Council, which provides authoritative information, advice and solutions about climate change to ordinary citizens. He was in Bengaluru on Sunday, to speak at the Bangalore Lit Fest.
TNM caught up with him to know more about seaweed’s role in battling climate change and why it’s time for developing countries to take cognisance and draft plans to tackle the world’s climate emergency.
Is seaweed the next saviour to help us fight climate change?
We are at a new phase of the climate crisis, or what I call, the decade of consequences. We have put enough carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. The new phase of the crisis is marked by the need to draw these pollutants out of the atmosphere, hard and fast. There are limited ways to rid our atmosphere of the emissions, but one of the best methods, which I have come across, is the growth of seaweed in the oceans.
Seaweed grows very fast and captures a lot of carbon. It has co-benefits (or added benefits) of de-acidifying the ocean and facilitating effective growth of fish and shellfish. Besides, we can store the carbon that the seaweed captures in the deep ocean.
[Oceans acidify when the pH levels of the ocean reduce over a period of time, primarily caused due to the uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere.]
How do seaweeds reduce CO2 in the atmosphere?
Let’s take the example of a tree. Most people think it grows from its roots. But in fact, trees grow from their leaves.
Now, CO2 enters the leaves through small holes (called stomata). The tree then breaks the molecules and uses the carbon to grow its tissues. Seaweed does exactly the same.
The big difference is that while only leaves of a tree produce oxygen, the seaweed is one giant leaf and the whole body is productive. Hence, it grows faster. It can grow 60 centimetres a day, compared to trees, which grow just a few centimetres. It's an effective carbon capture mechanism.
Considering seaweed needs oceans, it is easier to implement this in coastal areas. What about landlocked cities, like Bengaluru?
Seaweed is also useful in a place like Bengaluru. For example, freshwater seaweeds can be used to purify sewage. It is also used as a valuable fertiliser.
And if you treat that seaweed in particular ways through pyrolysis, you can lock some of the carbon up and store it in our soils. Seaweed is a very flexible and valuable commodity not often thought about but is a very important part of what I call closing the pollution loop. So making sure that we are recycling everything: the nutrients in our sewage, the carbon in our atmosphere, and so forth.
What about finances? Is it a feasible project to plan and executive?
Well, the seaweed industry is already at $6 billion-a-year industry. We're looking at extending it offshore.
Local seaweed is a huge industry in eastern Asia, it's growing in Europe. It's used for a whole series of things... even in Australia, we have seaweed farms, to clean up our water. These are things which are very real, they occur in the real world. And when I look at India, I see a nation beset by water quality issues. Seaweed could play a big role here freshwater seaweed in terms of cleaning up your, your nutrients, and creating fertiliser, which you otherwise have to import or make through fossil fuels, natural gas, and such. So, yes, I think it is real in parts of the world. It's being done. It has potential, logical application in India.
There are so many thousands of varieties of seaweeds and you have native seaweed here in India, including freshwater seaweeds, which could be used. They all have very different chemistry and very different applications, but there'll be some here that you can use for any option you could think of.
Can you help us break down climate change, and why should we care about it? And to change policies to tackle climate change, where do we start and how do we go about it?
The first thing to recognize is that this is a collective problem. And despite the injustices of the past and everything else, we need to work together on solving this problem.
Fortunately, we can solve the problem — we make better the life of the lot of the poorest Indians. The first electricity (connection) that poor Indians are likely to get, should be solar. And we can provide a clean energy pathway for a place like India that would actually be much better for the country then continuing on with burning coal. And could I point out that coal is a British legacy? It was Britain that started burning coal. So you are suffering from an imperial hangover with the continued use of coal. India's indigenous power supply, that has always powered this country, is sunlight. Sunlight makes your plants grow, it gives you rainfall, it can also give you the energy that will liberate the poorest Indians from poverty, through solar energy.
Everyone talks about working towards tackling climate change, but nobody has a clear idea on the path forward. As a policy or as individuals, what can we really do?
Look, the polluting industries would love to put the problem on the individual and make you feel guilty, so 'you' should do something. And it's true that we all need to do something to have a clean conscience, a good conscience about this. But the fact of the matter is, at the same time, those polluting industries are saying, "clean up your act as an individual," they continue to pollute, and they use your tax money to do it. The bigger problem is a policy issue, we need to cut our use of fossil fuels. That means closing our coal-fired power plants and replacing them with wind and solar, which are cheaper and better for the nation. It means moving from petrol-driven vehicles to electric vehicles over a longer time frame and building new energy sources here that will give India a real clean future with proper industrialization, clean pathways, it'll give you breathable air, as well as employment and prosperity. That can only come from solar, it cannot come from coal or from fossil fuels.
Look at the state of the air in Delhi today, it will tell you what the burning of fossil fuels and plant matter does.
In India, often people hesitate from getting solar power because of the costs involved.
The truth of the matter is that in India today, it's cheaper to generate electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind power than at least from coal. So if you're building a new plant to generate electricity, it's cheaper to use solar and wind than it is to use coal. In the near future, in five to seven years, most likely, it'll be cheaper to build and run a new solar plant than it will be to run an old coal-fired power plant. We need to phase out those fossil fuels plants as quickly as possible. And we need to prevent the construction of new ones because that is just a waste of money.
Can individuals play their part bit by bit or does a proper policy need to be in place?
I think that you do need a better climate policy and it needs to be linked to the betterment of people. So you need a climate policy that leads to swift economic benefit for the poorest people in India. And that's, thankfully, because the technology is now so cheap, very achievable. So I think you've got to tell those very few wealthy Indians who are still trying to make a profit or save their money from running coal-fired power plants. The time for that is gone. We need to make the transition as quickly as possible.
These are long term steps for the country. Are there any short term steps to fight climate change?
It's taken us 200 years to get into this problem, to this extent... so it'll take us decades to get out of it again. I wish I could suggest short term solutions but there are no quick fixes...
You spoke about industries making the individual responsible, so do smaller measures by individuals like say using paper straws instead of plastic or not using air-conditioners too often, does it work in the larger scheme of things?
There is a climate problem, which is a specific problem, and then there is a pollution problem, which is caused by carbon dioxide that trap heat close to the surface. And when you change the temperature of something, you change almost everything about it. It's like you getting a fever. You can't go back to normal life. You feel sick and lay in bed and until a fever passes? Well, the Earth is a bit the same as you change its temperature, you change all of its activities. plastic pollution is a separate problem. Even though plastics are made from fossil fuels, the main problem we face with plastics is the pollution of the oceans. So there is a separate category it needs to be dealt with. But we shouldn't be confusing it with climate change.
A recent study on the rising sea levels across the world noted Indian cities like Mumbai are expected to face severe consequences. Is it a situation that can be avoided?
India needs to stop polluting and to encourage others to stop polluting too, to minimize that damage. There will be some damage, regardless, for a place like Mumbai. And the best models I've seen for dealing with that sort of thing comes from New Zealand where they have an Earthquake National Insurance Program, where a certain amount of money is put aside each year for the inevitability of an earthquake. So, for India, I would suggest you need a national fund, which cannot be pilfered with, to be used for relief of those who will suffer inevitably from sea level rise. We need a clean government for that because a pool of money will only attract vultures.
Climate change denial is rampant all over the world. Is it because people believe this is a future concern and not something that is happening now?
People don't understand how urgent this problem is. This is not a decade from now, two decades from now, I can tell you that in my city of Sydney, tomorrow, we will face catastrophic fire danger as a result of climate change. We've already lost 150 houses and three lives in the state. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? I just say to people, don't leave it (for) too late. We need to start acting now. Otherwise, our children will quite rightly blame us for the situation.