CIEL  Challenges Geoengineering

http://act.ciel.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=10025.0&dlv_id=15447&current=true&em_id=10025.0&pgwrap=n

ere’s what you need to know about these risky, unproven technologies:

1. Marine geoengineering will not eliminate the causes of the climate crisis or ocean acidification. These technologies do nothing to reduce or mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, which are the major drivers behind climate change.
2. No marine carbon dioxide removal techniques have been proven effective in removing and storing CO2 in the long term, and some could undermine the ocean’s ability to store carbon. 
3. Geoengineering creates a moral hazard, which is when companies and people feel safe to continue harmful actions (like burning fossil fuels) because they think someone or something else will clean up the consequences sometime in the future. 
4. Experiments involving ocean alkalinity, iron fertilization, and artificial upwelling can lead to ocean acidification. A more acidic ocean is harmful because it weakens the shells and skeletons of corals, shellfish, and plankton, which are essential to marine food chains and for overall ocean health. 
5. Geoengineering has been restricted by a de facto moratorium, or a permanent legal pause, under the Convention on Biological Diversity since 2010. 
6. Marine geoengineering, like all geoengineering, risks violating the rights of people everywhere, including the right to health, to food, and to clean water. 
7. If deployed, these technologies would need to be carried out at a massive international scale, which has never been done before. For example, to capture 0.2% of emissions with seaweed would require the equivalent of growing a 100-meter belt around 63% of the world’s coastlines.
8. We won’t know the true impacts of marine geoengineering until it is deployed at a planetary scale, at which point we will be locked into potentially irreversible effects, turning our planet into a lab experiment. 
9. Marine geoengineering will have transboundary effects. This means that everyone will feel its impacts regardless of how close they are to a coast. 
10. We cannot build our climate solutions on speculative and risky technologies. The only reliable path is a full, fast, fair, funded phase out of fossil fuels. 

The oceans are our greatest ally in the fight against climate change, and we must protect their deeply complex ecosystems. 

If something seems too good to seem true, it probably is. Manipulating our Earth’s deeply complex systems is an unproven and dangerous way to try to address some symptoms of climate change.

We know the real solutions: phasing out fossil fuels and moving to clean, sustainable energy sources.