Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race

by Peter Fiekowsky, Carole Douglis Narrated by David DeBoy

Overview

The Paris Accords, widely accepted as the key to solving today's climate crisis, set a goal of zero net carbon emissions by 2050. But that's not good enough. The only way to guarantee a livable future is climate restoration, which can reduce greenhouse gases to historic levels. Scientist and entrepreneur Peter Fiekowsky explains the technology and maps a practical path that will let humankind survive and thrive.



As Fiekowsky explains in Climate Restoration, this will require removing a trillion tons of excess CO2 from the atmosphere. The good news is that this task, while enormous and technically challenging, is eminently feasible. Scientists and engineers have developed four major technologies for greenhouse gas removal and storage: ocean iron fertilization; synthetic limestone manufacture; seaweed permaculture; and methane oxidation.



Fiekowsky shows that these technologies are safe and practical-and, even more remarkable, that they require little if any government funding, since they can be financed largely through existing markets. For these reasons, they have enormous promise as vehicles for achieving climate restoration. With the global climate crisis continuing to spiral out of control, the time for tough conversations about what it will really take to create a healthy future for humanity is here.

Editorial Reviews

BookLife Reviews

05/02/2022

Offering both a dire warning and a path forward, this ultimately optimistic treatise surveys the bleak reality of climate change projections and makes the case that current mitigation pacts like the Paris Accords will ultimately do too little to stave off human and environmental catastrophe. “Meeting the goal of net zero by 2050 in no way guarantees the survival of human society as we know it or even that of homo sapiens as a species,” Fiekowsky writes. But there’s reason to hope: “climate restoration,” he argues, “is not only feasible, but, once started, will pay for itself.” Moreover, he argues that this restoration—an effort to "restore the safe, healthy levels of greenhouse gasses last seen on Earth over a century ago”—can be achieved by 2050. Climate Restoration offers guidance on how to move “from hope to science and confidence.”

Hence, “climate restoration,” the development of technologies not just to reduce carbon dioxide emissions but to remove already emitted carbon from the atmosphere at a rate of at least 50 gigatons a year for two decades. To that end, Fiekowsky, an MIT-trained engineer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, presents four potential climate restoration methods, each considered for his scalability, permanence, and likelihood of actually being financeable. This practical approach is rooted in the belief that, in the absence of political will to save the world, market solutions could, though he acknowledges that “profitability and restoring the climate are separate goals which overlap only in rare cases.”

With inviting clarity and an engaging optimism, Fiekowsky considers four promising solutions (creating limestone out of CO2; building seaweed and marine permacultures; iron fertilization; enhanced atmospheric methane oxidation), presenting the possibilities with persuasive power. He simplifies the science for easy comprehension, and makes the case with such hopeful vigor that the book becomes something rare: a dead-serious, no-illusions look at climate change that doesn’t stir despair.

Takeaway: A persuasively hopeful look at four possible methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere—and maybe saving the species.

Great for fans of: Katherine Hayhoe’s Saving Us, Paul Hawken's Regeneration.

Production grades Cover: A- Design and typography: A Illustrations: A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159599285
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	524,340

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