Our last minute, last chance, minute plant saviour, duckweed. As humanity we have created the present climate emergency. Duckweed is life on Earth’s saving lifeform for us and ironically it needs our help do its job! Only we can create the extra Earth surfaces it needs to perform its miracle reversal of the damage we have done. We have to learn how we have created this situation and how we are going to resolve it with the help of this tiny, almost microscopic, seemingly insignificant plant.
Duckweed saves us because it alone fulfils the necessary requirements to capture carbon from the atmosphere, naturally (and therefore free!), in a safe, controlled manner, that requires human interaction for it to become the saving super plant it is. That title being gained by its unique growing requirements and versatile storage capacity.
No other plant safely solves the equation for carbon capture by natural means:
MASS X TIME X SURFACE AREA
With most plants surface area is usually one, but for duckweed we can create as many surfaces as possible of the Earth we need. With duckweed vertically cultivated and farmed, only the sky’s the limit!
Carbon capture by non-natural means requires us to provide the energy for it to do so and a large proportion of our energy production is by using fossil fuels, which are the cause of the problem in the first place!
Our planet by billions of years of R&D has produced plants. These are the most efficient way to capture atmospheric carbon and keep it in balance in our atmosphere. In seeking to invent other means of carbon capture we are trying to re-invent the wheel!
With carbon capture we also have the problem to consider of what to do with all that mass of captured carbon. Duckweed, so small it desiccates in air and of the consistency of pulped cardboard means it can be stored in many ways, because it can be compressed into any shape or form.
Trying to put carbon in gas form back into the earth is ‘numbskull’ science. We all learn early on that as you go from solid to liquid to gas form the space required to store it increases too dramatically to be practical, since the carbon atoms are spaced further apart. When the former UK Prime Minister suggested that we should pump CO2 produced from solid coal or liquid oil back into the ground, it was his own Donald Trump ‘let’s inject bleach into the people to solve Covid’ moment!!
In our present climate emergency, most other plant solutions take too long for the mass to be built up. Only exponential growth fits the bill now. Most exponential lifeforms pose a danger to us because they are uncontrollable if they escape, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and algae.
We need some CO2 in the air (350ppm scientifically calculated) for it to work its greenhouse gas effect magic and keep our planet warm enough from retained radiated solar energy, to keep water in liquid form here on Earth, so that life can continue to function and thrive. If we use an uncontrollable lifeform we risk going the other way and taking too much carbon out of the air and becoming a frozen planet.
For all of this to happen we need a plan of human education and of human awareness of how we are going to solve the climate problem. Only by us all understanding how we got into this situation and how we are going to get out of it, can we produce the unity of humanity we need to act decisively. That is why we need the LEARN – UNITE – ACT plan to solve the climate emergency. This is an emergency that we as humans have created and now only we as humanity together can solve it using our capability to provide duckweed with the means to do its work and return our atmospheric CO2 level back from the present 424 ppm to the 350 ppm required asap.
Time is running out. We already put 36 billion tons of carbon into the air from current fossil fuel usage and even one year’s world food production in grain form would capture only one third of that. We therefore already need more than three planets for most plants, except for duckweed. We need to start vertically farmed duckweed production as soon as physically possible, before irreversible climate change kicks in. That will only happen if we understand how and why it works as the solution, so mass education is the critical first step.
When atmospheric CO2 concentration returns to 350 ppm, any fossil fuel extracted and used in future must be offset by an equivalent production of solid dried duckweed, ton for ton.
