Time: Exploit the Ocean to Build Our Green Future

Essay by Eric Worrall

Time Magazine painting a glorious green vision of massive exploitation of unspoilt marine wilderness to build our renewable energy powered future.

The Ocean Is Climate Change’s First Victim and Last Resort

BY ELIJAH WOLFSON | MAP BY KYLA MANDEL AND LON TWEETEN

JUNE 23, 2022 7:00 AM EDT

Rain forests may be known as the planet’s lungs, but it’s when standing before the seas, with their crashing waves and ceaselessly cycling tides, that we feel the earth breathe. The ocean, say scientists, is the source of all life on earth. It is also, say philosophers, the embodiment of life’s greatest terror: the unknown and uncontrollable.

This duality has become increasingly manifest in the climate discourse of recent years, as ice melts, seas rise, and shores everywhere face storms of a ferocity unseen in living memory. But even as the ocean has become the subject of hand-wringing over what we’ve wrought, it has also become a keystone of hope that we may limit the damage if we act now.

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We can start at the bottom. The floor of the Pacific is littered with the rare metals we need to build the batteries necessary to power carbon-free travel. Moving upward, by harnessing the force of the tides, we could plug another source of renewable energy into our struggling grids; offshore wind farms are also poised to expand exponentially as an essential power source. And while we may think of road vehicles as the focus of electric-mobility efforts, decarbonizing maritime shipping may be what really brings the global economy into a green future.

Meanwhile, oceans are the central banks of earth’s carbon stocks. Researchers are hard at work figuring out how to affordably capture CO2 from fossil-fuel-­burning plants and inject the gas into the rock below the ocean floor. And efforts are already under way to protect and rebuild oceanic ecosystems like mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrasses, that not only sequester more CO2 than their land-bound counterparts, but also act as natural breakwaters to protect coastal populations.

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Read more: https://time.com/6190044/ocean-climate-change/

I used to tease my green friends about how we need more factories, but I actually like nature.

One of my happiest memories is walking through my grandpa’s forest, spending hours alone amongst the trees. My Grandpa bought the land for a song in the 1930s, low value land deemed unsuitable to agriculture because it was full of rocks, trees, scenery and tall hills.

From the very top you of my Grandpa’s hill you could see a city, many miles to the South. Sometimes while walking I encountered absolute wonders, like the ruins of an ancient gold rush era pub no historian remembers, or the multi acre field of Drosera plants I discovered growing peacefully in their native habitat, well off the forest trails, hidden under the trees. Those fragile, beautiful plants would have been worth thousands of dollars to collectors, but the forest where they grew was a hidden place of beauty, which brought joy whenever I visited. I left them undisturbed.

For all I know those beautiful plants are still there, still untouched. Maybe one day someone else will discover hidden beauty while walking through the woods. I hope whoever finds them in the future also chooses to leave them as they found them.

I’m not anti-industry. I’m a realist, I like the conveniences of modern civilisation. But during this fake climate emergency, we’ve already seen reasonable protections for the environment swept aside, like the gentle treatment wind farm operators appear to receive when they kill lots of protected eagles. Would climate motivated exploitation of the ocean be any different?

The rush to exploit the ocean, to support something as worthless as the climate crusade, the green vision presented by Time, in my opinion represents wanton destruction, needless and reckless destruction, just like all those poor dead eagles which are being slaughtered by wind turbines.

What transformed greens who once chained themselves to trees, to block new roads or dams, into rabid exploiters who seem to want all the valleys concreted up, converted into pumped hydro, raptor killing wind turbines everywhere, solar panels covering all the valleys, and now apparently want to turn vast tracts of ocean and mangrove swamp into an industrial wasteland?

How can these people convince themselves that they are still in any way behaving like people who care about the environment? How can covering the world with giant machines and poisoning the ocean with mine tailings and industrial filth, sweeping care aside in the name of the fake climate emergency, possibly be the path to a better tomorrow?

For shame, Time.