Planetary scale
What does it mean for carbon removal to happen at a planetary scale? And can our tiny brains even conceive of it?
Yesterday afternoon, I took a cross country flight back to San Francisco from the east coast. From my window seat, I saw a patchwork of agricultural land below, its sections and quarters still defined by rules first written in the US Land Ordinance of 1785. I could see this remarkable pattern of land use stretching all the way to the horizon. I felt its vastness.
When I worked in US agriculture, I flew to the midwest roughly once a month for four years. What I remember from those flights was a feeling of inspiration from similar views out the window; what laid below was a visual reminder that agriculture is the human endeavor that has most transformed the surface of our planet.
The central promise of engaging farmers in carbon removal is the fact that humanity already cultivates land at a massive scale. The four billion acres of land that farmers manage today can also become an active surface, a substrate, on which carbon-removing practices like enhanced rock weathering occur. Whether carbon is removed from the atmosphere by plants or by alkaline rock, land is a key input.
So how much land would need to be enlisted? Lately, I’ve started to see the term “planetary” used more and more to describe the sheer magnitude of activity that is required to meaningfully slow climate change. Every carbon removal solution purports to having a path to “planetary scale.” RA Capital’s climate tech investing is done through a so-called “Planetary Health” fund. But thinking in planetary terms is actually very hard. Fortunately, the Rocky Mountain Institute just put out a fantastic article on this mental challenge, and the authors treat land both as an input and use it as a point of comparison:
While the entire article is worth reading, I found the graphic above to be particularly mind-blowing! And sobering. For all the work that has been done so far to prime the carbon removal sector, when I force myself really to grapple with what planetary impact actually entails, I am floored by how much further we have to go.