Latest / Clean Power Hour / Climate Restoration: The $2B Plan to Return to 300 ppm #327

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Climate Restoration: The $2B Plan to Return to 300 ppm #327 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Peter Fiekowksy: The first step is to realize that as far as the climate is concerned, it's really all about the Co2. When you read articles, you'll read about ice and methane and clouds and and forest cover and and methane, and you get all these long lists of things that affect temperature. If you look at the graph, at the graph of global temperature versus Co2 over the last million years, they, the two of them track almost perfectly. And you know, the point is, if you don't reduce safe Co2, then it's game over.
• 1:26
  Peter Fiekowksy: Everything else is a minor addition to that.
• 1:35
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the Clean Power Hour, our host Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 1:45
  intro: We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition.
• 2:01
  Tim Montague: I'm kicking off the new year with one of my favorite topics, and that is climate restoration. This was a real light bulb for me in 2023 when I learned about the book climate restoration by Peter Fiekowsky, my guest today, what I learned is that we can actually get back to 300 ppm in a way that is affordable and permanent, and in ways that the energy transition are not solving. As a energy professional, you are doing good work out there, and we want you to keep doing that good work.
• 2:35
  Tim Montague: Okay, fight that. Fight wind, solar, batteries, good. We need more of that. We want to get rid of the 50 gigatons of pollution that is the global economy.
• 2:48
  Tim Montague: Okay, that is net adding to the atmosphere. But we don't want to arrive at 2050 and have 450 ppm in the atmosphere. We're at 430 today, and it's very easily done that we could get to 2050 and be at 450 and that means climate chaos. So today we're going to talk about some ways that we could get back to 300 that are affordable, scalable, available and permanent. So welcome back to the show. Peter Fiekowsky,
• 3:21
  Peter Fiekowksy: thanks, thanks, Tim, it's great to see you again. Thanks for having me on.
• 3:25
  Tim Montague: I really appreciate the work you're doing. I talk to just about any thoughtful energy professional or prosumer who cares about the environment and the future of humanity. You know, the environmental movement is really not about saving the Earth, Peter, it's about saving our butts. Let's be honest, the earth is going to be fine. But I'm curious, before we get into some of the nitty gritties of climate restoration, what was the light bulb moment for you?
• 3:56
  Tim Montague: Because you were a scientist and an entrepreneur before you were a climate restoration activist.
• 4:03
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah, the light bulb moment for me was from the very beginning of my career. I was doing hunger and poverty were trying to make the world a better place, while I was doing my high tech semiconductor stuff, and the light went on when I realized that we were trying to save lives, but everyone ends up dying, that the key is we want to make life better. I said, Oh, because everyone ends up dying eventually. So saving life means extending a life. It's Oh, if we're going to extend it, let's make it a life that we want people living. And that is what morph means. It's like, Oh, my God, if all, if we're saving lives, but the world is a hot house is a mess, that's totally no good so that that's really changed my view right around 2000 2010 and 2010 I got serious about it and said, You know what, let's let's get this.
• 5:02
  Peter Fiekowksy: Let's make this happen.
• 5:05
  Tim Montague: And I love the premise of your book, where you, early in the book, lay out, you know, you created a filter that you wanted to analyze possible solutions to the trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere, and they had to be permanent, scalable, affordable and available today. It's a relatively simple filter, and then you ran all these different technologies through the filter and arrived at four, which you talk about in the book. And then you've explained over the years that since you wrote the book in 2022 I mean, that's when it was published. Anyway, you've kind of whittled it down to two very viable technologies, which are ocean iron fertilization. And and accelerated methane oxidation, and both of which are very poorly understood by the general populace. And so if you want to go there, I'm happy to talk about those things, but you're also building a movement and bringing more people along, because you obviously have learned that it's not, it's not any good. If you're just one person with this realization, right? You actually have to motivate many, many other people to have the same concern.
• 6:22
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah, you know, I'm working on a new book with Carol, my co author from from the last one, and it's three, three paths to three paths to restoring the climate. And it's really very simple. The first part is, is deciding that we want to restore the climate. It sounds naive like, of course we want to restore the climate.
• 6:44
  Peter Fiekowksy: Well, of course, it's not the same as deciding. And once we decide we want to give our children a safe climate, then we can go on and say, okay, good, let's pick a method. And that's the second thing is pick a method. And as you said, the method has to be scalable, that has to be affordable, it has to be permanent, it has to be safe.
• 7:06
  Peter Fiekowksy: If any one of those are missing, it's not going to happen. And it turns out that there's only one method, and that's the method that nature uses in the Ice Age cycle, which gets removed the same amount of Co2 that we want to remove. And we'll talk about that in a few minutes. And then, once you've picked that method, it's traditionally called Ocean fertilization. We call it localized ocean fertilization.
• 7:31
  Peter Fiekowksy: And then after you decided you want to do it, then you implement it. And the nice thing is, since nature has done it, we can actually replicate what nature does. It's surprisingly easy compared to what you would think. And that's the whole thing that decide, choose a method and then implement it.
• 7:54
  Tim Montague: And it's it is a beautiful thing that iron is rich in the Earth's crust, and so whenever dust is blowing off the continents into the ocean, iron dust is blowing into the ocean, and it is a fertilizer for microorganisms that absorb Co2, and some of that sequestered Co2 then sinks to the bottom of the ocean and stays there for a very long time. Volcanoes also erupt and put this dust into the atmosphere. You talk about Mount Pinatubo in your book, which happened in the early 90s, and which impacted, if I recall correctly, point, 1% of the ocean surface, but had a dramatic impact on the atmosphere. It caused global Co2 levels to flat line for a couple of years. And so you see there that nature is doing this experiment all the time.
• 8:53
  Peter Fiekowksy: Let me say a little bit about this. So the implementation, which is photosynthesis in the ocean. And as I said, it's traditionally called Ocean iron fertilization, and it's the reason that the most of the ocean is blue, which means there's nothing growing in it. What's missing for things to grow, as you said, is is iron, just minute amounts of iron, and this 1000 times less than humans need, for example, but nature provides that iron just with dust storms. Because how else is the iron going to get into the ocean than a dust storm or a volcano. Every once a while, whales will will pull iron, rich food off the deep ocean, and then they'll poop it out at the surface. That's the only way iron gets into the into the ocean. And what the localized ocean fertilization, which is really quite an advancement over what had been discussed for 35 years. It puts the iron in where it's needed, in these downwelling eddies the limit. If your readers, if your listeners, look up ocean iron fertilization, they'll see a lot of negative material about it, because the way it got written up in the literature and the scientific literature, in the public literature, is people imagine spreading it out over the whole ocean, which, of course, would change the ecosystem of the whole ocean irrevocably. And that's unacceptable. A non starter. It turns out that the only place we did research using satellite Co2 data and or Co2 data from satellites, and we discovered that the only place that Co2 is getting removed in the ocean is in these things that are called downwelling eddies. There may be 100 miles in diameter, maybe 200 and it's like a an eddy. Eat in your bathtub or in your swimming pool. And if it's spinning in clockwise direction in the northern hemisphere, then it pushes the water down, just like in the air, a clockwise movement of the air, where they call it high pressure system. Forms a high pressure system. That's, it's called the Coriolis effect, if you remember from high school physics, and don't bother, don't worry if you don't remember that. And so, so that that donwell And Eddie pulls the carbon down, pulls everything down. And what's very exciting about that is, if you don't have that, when you fertilize the ocean, all of the bio carbon that's grown, all the phytoplankton and the zooplankton that eats it gets eaten by fish. The fish metabolize it and exhale it as Co2 and it goes back into the air. It's only when you can pull that carbon down before it gets metabolized that you actually reduce the Co2 levels, and that means that we only need less than 1% of the ocean area, which means that no we know nothing bad is going to happen. But even if it did, the you know, the odd, the different, the rich vegetation would get pulled into the deep ocean, where, once it gets below about 1000 about three kilometers, or, you know, two miles. Once it gets down below that point, pretty much everything dissolves because the high pressure and and it's fine again. So what makes the this new localized ocean fertilization very exciting is that it removes about a 10,000 to 10,000 times more carbon than the ocean fertilization that you read about in the literature right now. So we're trying to get it published. The scientific community, as, you know, as it should be, is reluctant, because, you know, it's a stable boat science, and they don't like disruption, but I expect we'll get that published this year or in 26
• 12:55
  Tim Montague: so one of your initiatives is a 25 year plan to end global warming by 2050 Yeah, and this is a very worthy goal.
• 13:07
  Tim Montague: It's you know, as you said in your opening that if we're creating a future that is clean but not safe, what's the point, right? If it's going to be hotter than heck and all kinds of disruptions to life as we know it, much less food systems, for example, which will be a major impact to pretty much everyone on earth. You know, what's the point like so? So we have this technology, local ocean fertilization, and we we know that it works because we've documented it in nature. It's a known phenomenon. We know that we only need to impact a small percentage of the ocean surface.
• 13:55
  Tim Montague: We actually have products that are that are commercially available, that you can distribute in the ocean. So what are, what is the what are the next steps, so to speak, and what is it that people can do, who are listening to this to become part of this movement to decarbonize the atmosphere in a way that's timely and affordable?
• 14:20
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah, well, as I've been writing the new book that and looking at because the last chapter has to be, what can you do? So I've been thinking about this, and surprisingly, the main thing that people can do is become part of the message. And so we're, we have a million sponsor campaign, and where we we want to get a million people who are one, $1 a month, $10 a month, $1,000 a month, a million dollars a month, whatever your realm is, I think they're probably more $1 a month people, but commit to putting sponsoring climate restoration that will send a message to the scientific community and the political community that people actually do want to restore A safe climate. Currently the when I go to Washington, when I go to the scientific meetings, people say, Well, that's a nice idea, but if it were a good idea, the UN would be doing it already. And so the most important thing that listeners can do is go to the foundation for climate restoration.org, websites. The short form for it is f the number four cr.org and become a sponsor at whatever rate, expresses your your passion about giving your children a safe climate once you once that happens and more scientists get involved, more funders. Get involved, the amount of funding needed is about a billion dollars a year. What's a billion dollars a year? That's a penny per American per day. That's it a penny a day. So ultimately, the funding is not going to be an issue. The big issue is that first step of deciding that we want to restore the climate and go beyond the status quo. Yeah.
• 17:05
  Tim Montague: So we're thinking about scratching the match head on the Yes on the pavement. It's that first motion to get the fire started. That is the hardest part. And then there will be a chain reaction, and the numbers will tell the decision makers, the politicians, the scientists that hey, people actually care about this and and, you know, as you said, a billion dollars a year.
• 17:31
  Tim Montague: That's one of the crazy things that I I was like mind blown, for sure, when you point this out in your book, that for a billion dollars, worst case, $2 billion a year. We could decarbonize the atmosphere. That is a very small amount of money.
• 17:48
  Tim Montague: In the greater scheme of things, just for the United States, like the US alone, could fund that.
• 17:58
  Tim Montague: One of our billionaires, we have, we have dozens of billionaires, but just one of them could fund that without really feeling any pain or suffering. And I guess that's one of the things that really puzzles me though Peter is, why aren't more people of influence looking at this information and going, Yeah, this makes sense.
• 18:17
  Tim Montague: You know, Bill Gates is a good example. And I don't mean to pick on bill, but he's in the news a lot, promoting CDR direct air capture is his favorite form, seemingly building a machine that sucks Co2 out of the atmosphere. Co2 is in the atmosphere all around us, right, in very small quantities. It's a very potent heat trapping gas, and it's very hard to grab it out of the air. It's very energetically expensive. It's doable, but it turns out that it takes 100,000 times more resources to do that compared to OIF. And so why does Bill Gates and his colleagues feel so strongly about direct air capture, for example.
• 19:06
  Peter Fiekowksy: Well, it's just status quo that Bill Gates. He's not a scientist by training.
• 19:14
  Peter Fiekowksy: He's an entrepreneur. He went to Harvard same time I was at MIT, but he left to start his Microsoft My point is that he relies on his advisors to tell him what to do in these sciences like climate. And I know a lot of his advisors, and they can't afford to risk their reputation and tell them, Listen, you should buck the trend and actually go for restoring the climate. They can't afford that risk to tell him that. And so since, if he had, if he had a degree, it would be in computers, not in physics, I have a lot of sympathy for him.
• 19:56
  Peter Fiekowksy: You know, I told in the book I write about going to the Vatican and talking to Pope Francis and his office and talking to UN officials, every one of them, to a person everyone is wildly enthusiastic about restoring the climate and to a person, from the pope all the way to I was in the White House a year and a half ago in The Biden administration. They were totally sympathetic, and they said, There's nothing I can do about it. This is outside of my charter. And so that's, that's the reason is that it the idea of stabilizing the climate made sense in 1980 you know that we both have gray hair, so we probably remember 1980 slightly, and people didn't know how said scientifically, we knew global warming was happening, but you couldn't see it. It was, it was way below the noise level, right? And so I have total sympathy for all of our leaders who can't make a move. But your listeners,
• 21:01
  Tim Montague: you guys and gals,
• 21:05
  Peter Fiekowksy: sign up, even if it's $1 a month. Tell the leaders that there are serious people who want to restore the climate. Once they say we want to do it, then they have to figure out how. And once you figure out how and realize how easy it is, then it's almost a done deal. That's what I say.
• 21:22
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah.
• 21:23
  Tim Montague: Yeah. So we'll put the link in the show notes to the F for CR, the foundation for climate restoration, where you can go today and make a donation. And if many of us make a small donation, it will matter. Yeah, so, and if a few people put in a big donation that that also matters, of course, it's a both, and we want small donations and big donations. I don't often ask for my listeners to take some take a step. So concrete is this. But today, I am asking that of my listeners and if you would go to foundation for climate restoration, that would be a wonderful thing. The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over 10 gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS. 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand, and is America's number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and balance of system requirements go to chintpowersystems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more. So Peter, I'm curious what else we have to educate people about? Because I've had many conversations in the year and a half since I interviewed you the first time, and I would say only about one in 10 do I get a warm, fuzzy response to this whole concept of expanding OIF as a way to decarbonize the atmosphere. People have many questions and concerns, and like as a biologist, I just get it, and the light bulb for me was immediate, and I'm on board. But for many people, they need more assurance. So how do we assure them that this is a legitimate thing?
• 23:48
  Peter Fiekowksy: Well, there are two, two ways I'm going to harp again on the first thing is to decide you want it, because our brains confuse what we think with what we say, and what we say is what do. What makes us take action? So first you you know, you have to ask people, you know, we all want to restore this the safe climate, don't we?
• 24:10
  Peter Fiekowksy: And give them a second to think about it. And then, without that, what happens is a good solution to the wrong problem is a bad it's bad. And so even using ocean fertilization for stabilizing the climate at today's horrible levels is a bad solution. And so you're never going to win that. You'll never win their hearts, because they'll just imagine the current context of stabilizing. So the first is to get people very clear, it's a new option, the option of restoring safe Co2 levels for our kids. Then the second is realizing that nature has done exactly this every 100,000 years for a long time and and so we know it's safe because it's been done in dozens of times. And, yeah, go ahead.
• 25:03
  Tim Montague: Yeah. I mean, the the natural levels of Co2 in the atmosphere do fluctuate a lot over a very long time scale. And I'm curious. So from a scientific perspective, when levels historically get high, and we're we're in one of those periods now when they get high.
• 25:25
  Tim Montague: What is it about being in a high atmospheric level that then leads to some tipping point, some natural tipping point where iron can become more available to ocean dwellers.
• 25:45
  Peter Fiekowksy: So I think you're asking about the Ice Age cycle. What keeps it going? What keeps it stable is that what
• 25:52
  Tim Montague: you're well, the Ice Age cycle, I would see that as a a result of of levels, right? But, but, yeah, I'm just, yeah, I want to, I want to know how to talk to people about this. Because there is an ice age cycle. There is a Co2 cycle, and they are inter, well, they're, they're correlated,
• 26:19
  Peter Fiekowksy: right, right?
• 26:19
  Peter Fiekowksy: So, yeah, so here's how I describe it is. The first step is to realize that as far as the climate is concerned, it's really all about the Co2. When you read articles, you'll read about ice and methane and clouds and and forest cover and and methane, and you. Get all these long lists of things that affect temperature. If you look at the graph, at the graph of global temperature versus Co2 over the last million years, they the two of them track almost perfectly.
• 26:58
  Peter Fiekowksy: And you know, the point is, if you don't reduce safe Co2, then it's game over. Everything else is a minor addition to that. And then once you're looking at, how do we deal with Co2, and ask, well, what are the options? The sensible option is to do the same thing that nature has done, to remove 1000 gigatons. And there's nothing else that nature does that can remove 1000 gigatons in well, in the Ice Age cycle, it's interesting.
• 27:33
  Peter Fiekowksy: Overall, it's like 50,000 years, but actually it's more like 10,000 years, but still too long for us. We need to do it in 20 years. But that same process, if done in the right place, which is the downwelling eddies, then it can be done very quickly. And that's been demonstrated after volcanic eruptions that happen near these downwelling eddies.
• 27:56
  Tim Montague: And is that the most common theory though, that there was there just are periodic events where there's more dust coming into the atmosphere and falling into the ocean, and that leads to decarbonization, which leads to cooling.
• 28:15
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah, as an astrophysicist by training, it's actually surprisingly complicated, and it's these subtle things, because you have a positive feedback loop, which means that, rather than being stable, when the Earth, the Earth rotates in its orbit around it wobbles in its orbit around the sun. And that wobbling sometimes has the southern hemisphere be closest the sun in this in the summer, and sometimes it's the winter, the northern hemisphere closer to the sun in the summer. And that little bit of difference, it's a 1% difference in distance, is enough to change the climate a little tiny bit.
• 28:56
  Peter Fiekowksy: And it causes, I'm gonna go complicated here for just a second, just so you can appreciate the complexity. You don't have to learn this, but it causes the grasses in the grasslands to dry out faster.
• 29:13
  Peter Fiekowksy: When the grasses dry out, then you get dust storms, right when the grasses are green that they don't dry out, but when they get dry out faster, you get more dust, and that dust, then some of it, blows into the ocean, fertilizes the ocean, causes Co2 to go down. And when the Co2 level goes down, that makes it harder for grass to grow, because grass and old plants need Co2, and because it's harder for them to grow, they dry out faster, because they spend more energy and more water to grow, and then that you get even more more dust blowing, so that that's the surprising feedback, the positive feedback loop. But it takes just a little much 1% difference in warming between the northern hemisphere, with all the land, most of the land, and the southern hemisphere, which only has a little bit of land anyway, you should just appreciate how exotically beautiful that phenomenon is. But because we have technology, it takes almost nothing for us to distribute that small amount of iron in the right places in the right time.
• 30:21
  Tim Montague: So the foundation is raising money, and the Alliance is creating a program, and together, for example, they are creating pilot projects. So let's talk about some of those pilots. How does this unfold?
• 30:36
  Tim Montague: What is, what is the foundation going to achieve in the next couple of years, if things go well,
• 30:46
  Peter Fiekowksy: yeah, so the foundation is going to build up in the next year, year and a half, two years, the million sponsor campaign, it's been done before everyone wants it. I think it'll be a lot of fun and go quickly. And that's what the foundation is working on is the grassroots movement, and that justifies leadership to say, let's do it. Then the alliance is raising the funds from corporations primarily, but also wealthy families. There will be certain governments, I think our US government, will be the last in line to fund fund fund this.
• 31:24
  Peter Fiekowksy: But that's fine. The amount of money required is not large and but so corporations and wealthy families to fund it, and that funding should go pretty quickly. And then you were asking, What does it look like?
• 31:38
  Peter Fiekowksy: You know, in terms of the 10.
• 31:42
  Peter Fiekowksy: Testing, and that the testing starts out with getting the hardware working our Co2 sensors and analysis of satellite Co2 data and chlorophyll data. We have a number of interesting scientific things that need to be done. We need to understand the best way to deal with the downwelling eddies, because they shift with the ocean currents, and nature deals with it. And we don't yet know exactly how we're going to replicate how nature does that, but we'll definitely solve that problem and and over time, we'll find the best formula for fertilizing it, because, again, it says pretty small area, 100, 200 kilometers, 300 kilometers in diameter and but it'll be mostly iron, but different forms of iron and so on. Nature is very forgiving, but we'll optimize that. And so then, as that's happening, and we're finding which of the eddies are the best places to do this, and the new satellite data is going to shine a light on that, probably within three to 10 months, then we're ready to scale up. And the fun part, Tim is, there's a company that we're working with which is designing robotic ships to actually distribute the iron, because the biggest cost of these things is the diesel and the the people on board, you know, you have to have, you know, cooks and a medic and a captain and all that stuff. If it's all robotic, the whole thing becomes very inexpensive.
• 33:31
  Tim Montague: I love it. And so let's just walk through the cycle. You take iron pellets, which is a commercial product, you put them on robotic ships.
• 33:39
  Tim Montague: This is at some point in the future, but you put them on ships, tubs of this stuff, you drive to the identified spot where there's a down, a downward Eddy. This is just like a river that flows down, right? It's a natural phenomenon in the ocean.
• 33:58
  Tim Montague: And you put the iron in the ocean. It's absorbed by phytoplankton, which absorbs Co2. They do photosynthesis.
• 34:07
  Tim Montague: They absorb Co2. Some of them just die and sink. Some of them are eaten by other plankton, zooplankton that eat phytoplankton and then they die and sink. So the phytoplankton and zooplankton absorb Co2 and it sinks. Some of it obviously gets eaten by other things. So not all of it is sinking, but in a perfect world, it's sinking very deep and then staying down there for a very, very long time. Are there other parts of this cycle that we need to identify?
• 34:42
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah, well, what we've learned in the last year or two, as we've been studying what happened after the volcanoes, is the conventional thinking is, and I've discussed it, and I now say it differently. The conventional thinking is that the dead phytoplankton, zooplankton, fish, sink. What we realize now is looking at the satellite data, is that they get eaten before they sink, almost all of them. Okay, so it's the it's the downwelling Eddy, which pulls it down, and it pulls it down with the whole water mass that's going down. And here's one of the very cool things that we figured out just in the last couple of weeks, is one of the concerns about large about large scale ocean fertilization, yes, localized, but localized, maybe 50 spots, is people are worried about all that phytoplankton you're growing is going to affect the nutrition in the ocean. They call it nutritional robbing, and it turns out not to be a problem in this case, because if you think of a cubic yard or cubic meter of ocean, the main nutrient that we're worried about, nitrogen, we actually regenerate by the same way you do it on farms with nitrogen fixing bacteria. But after that, the next nutrient that's a problem is phosphorus.
• 36:09
  Peter Fiekowksy: And the concentration of phosphorus in the ocean is whatever it is in most parts parts of the ocean. But when the phytoplankton grow, they absorb the phosphorus it gets, you know, put it into their bodies.
• 36:27
  Peter Fiekowksy: But because it's not so much sinking, but just sort of hovering there. When the down, rolling Eddy pulls it down the the net concentration per square, per cubic meter, is the same, and then as the. The as the bio carbon sinks into the into the ocean, when it gets deep enough, the whole thing dissolves, because that's just what happens under the super high pressures and and then the that phosphorus is released back into the ocean. And it's like nothing ever happened, except that you had that mechanism of the photosynthesis on the surface, and then the sinking, and then the carbon gets saved as bicarbonate, like bicarbonate of soda, but it dissolved bicarbonate in the ocean. And useful fact is the amount, the amount that the bicarbonate goes up per year is about point zero, 4% is that right? Yeah, point zero, 4% per year, almost nothing. Per year. When we're all done, the amount of bicarbonate in the ocean will have gone up one, maybe one and a half percent, almost nothing.
• 37:35
  Peter Fiekowksy: And that's when it's pulled out all trillion tons of carbon of Co2 from the atmosphere.
• 37:42
  Tim Montague: So it's so the Co2 ends up dissolved in the deep ocean.
• 37:48
  Peter Fiekowksy: The carbon does it because the Co2, it dissolves for a little bit in the surface, then it gets absorbed into the phytoplankton and turned into BioCarbon. When I think of a tree, I think of the wood and the leaves. I don't know what you call it in the phytoplankton, because they're single cell organism. Yeah. And then with this bio carbon, and then when the bio carbon dissolves in the deep ocean, the solution is bicarbonate, so it's not because of a carbon dioxide, then it would come right back out again and get back into the atmosphere, because, instead of stored as bicarbonate, yeah?
• 38:31
  Tim Montague: Okay, so it's not, it's not like this rain of of skeletons of zooplankton that stays in some solid form, yeah?
• 38:43
  Peter Fiekowksy: And that's, that's a new discovery. It It hasn't been proven, but it makes logical sense that there are some, a lot of some of the phytoplankton do have silicate shells, like, like, not quartz, but micro quartz. Some of them have carbonate shells, like limestone, and those will sink, but mostly that they all get eaten by by the zooplankton, and so they don't sink. And that's that, you know, when people read about it in the internet, they'll read about how the scientists say, Now wait a minute, ocean fertilization doesn't work well because very little of the carbon goes down, and the answer is yes, you're exactly right. It only goes down in the down rolling eddies. And that we've written a study about it, but it hasn't gotten published yet.
• 39:36
  Tim Montague: Hey guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial, but wanting to scale into large CNI solar. I'm Tim Montague. I've developed over 150 megawatts of commercial solar, and I've solved the problem that you're having you don't know what tools and technologies you need in order to successfully close 100 KW to megawatt scale projects.
• 40:02
  Tim Montague: I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you.
• 40:05
  Tim Montague: Just go to cleanpowerhour.com, click on strategy and book a call today. It's totally free with no obligation. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate you listening to the pod, and I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Go to clean power hour and click strategy today. Thanks so much.
• 40:24
  Tim Montague: All right. Well, what else should our listeners know about climate restoration in our last few minutes together? Peter, well,
• 40:37
  Peter Fiekowksy: the main, main thing, as I said, is to share about it. It's a whole new paradigm for the climate. It's a whole new paradigm for the future of our planet, the future of our world that we're giving to our kids and our grandkids.
• 40:54
  Peter Fiekowksy: Makes me very excited to know that my grandkids, my oldest grandkid, is only five right now, but he, you know, and his cousins, they're going to have a great planet to live on, because the work that you're doing in solar is getting rid of the pollution from fossil fuels, and the air will be cleaner, the ground will be cleaner, the water will be cleaner. And we'll also make sure that the Co2, that the climate is good. So share about it, make people about you, make the people in your family and your friends optimistic about the future, because we are going to do this, and we need them to help.
• 41:33
  Peter Fiekowksy: Agreed?
• 41:34
  Tim Montague: So go to client, go to foundation for climate restoration.org, that's where you can make a donation. And Peter also has a website. With a very interesting white paper.
• 41:43
  Tim Montague: Peterfiekowsky.com, yes, and we'll put those links in the show notes. I want to thank Peter forkowski, author, entrepreneur and champion for climate restoration, for coming on the show yet again. And with that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. I'm Tim Montague, thanks so much, Peter.
• 42:02
  Peter Fiekowksy: Thank you, Tim.
• 42:02
  Peter Fiekowksy: Thank you. Audience.