Duckweed provides carbon sequestration of unlimited tonnage and rapidly, just what we need.
We have to reduce fossil fuel usage dramatically at the same time, however, because Duckweed can’t save us on its own. It is NOT an excuse for the fossil fuel industry to do business as usual. We have to ween ourselves off fossil fuels if we are to have a future and a stable planetary environment.
Billions of years of R&D by planetary evolution has provided the most efficient means of carbon capture there is, by natural process – PHOTOSYNTHESIS.
Duckweed is THE ANSWER because of two essential features it has, involving time and spatial dimension.
It replicates itself as a plant every 2 days, (48 hr cycle exponential growth).
It is of a size that is easy to harvest on its growing medium (water) and to shape. It can be grown by vertical farming, (it only needs a few centimetres depth of water to grow in), meaning there is no surface uptake limit impinging on essential land growth for other agricultural crops. It is therefore additional to other crops, not instead of them!
Farmers will also love it because it can depollute their flash flood chemical overspill and the process may enable recovery of some of those fertiliser chemicals. It would also have a monetary value as a physical block form of carbon sequestration that could become a world standard unit of carbon capture.
Carbon offsetting could then become true and not the deception it is at the moment, because other means used at present rely on potential tonnage, like tree planting. A tree needs years of growth to reach its potential and is a lifelong sequestration over decades, NOT instantaneous like dried Duckweed blocks would be. However, tree planting is essential for long term stability and sustainability and needs to be continued aplenty. Duckweed merely provides a fast means to sequestration. It is that time factor that is critical as time runs out for us. Long term trees have such impact on retaining the richness of life and habitats.
To solve climate change we have to STOP CHEATING about offsetting.
Take for example the offsetting that all Governments and local authorities do with an incinerator.
An incinerator in fact belches out physically thousands of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. This is not counted by Gov, or local Authority but is given an equivalent offset against the methane it would have produced in landfill over decades. This means double the amount of carbon coming out of the incinerator stack is disregarded. This is cheating because not only is that stack’s carbon ACTUALLY going into the air but another same amount is being discarded or disregarded elsewhere. The EARTH ‘feels’ ACTUAL carbon.
Offsetting, like that done with incineration, is CHEATING unless it is from carbon in solid physical form that can be seen or handled.
We can NEVER solve the atmospheric carbon crisis of climate change if we CHEAT!
