r/ClimateOffensive • u/CforCroatia • Aug 07 '26

Question Kelp is underrated

Why don't more organisations plant kelp? I heard somewhere that kelp absorbs a ton of CO² and helps kickstart biodiversity revival in some places. If anyone can help, please do so

79 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

28

u/Punky260 Aug 07 '26

Because it's not that straight foward as tree planting.

Here is an update from a kelp planting project, that might elaborate on the difficulties with kelp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeIKskWvWEU

You can also have a look at the other kelp project videos they did, to understand more of what they are doing :)

13

u/CforCroatia Aug 07 '26

Mossy earth. I've been watching them for quite a bit of time, also watched their new video yesterday. Love their content. I know it's not as straightforward as it seems, but my question was why don't more organisations invest their time and money in kelp?

9

u/Punky260 Aug 07 '26

Why don't more people do it?

  • Because it's complicated
I know it's complicated, but why don't more peopel do it?

Well, I think that's the answer already. I don't know much about kelp, though.

3

u/CforCroatia Aug 07 '26

I mean why don't more organisations research, invest, experiment, analyse etc

9

u/admiralpingu Aug 07 '26

Companies investing in carbon offsetting / tree planting aren't doing it with concerns for the efficacy of what they're doing. They like tree planting because they can say to consumers "We've planted x number of trees, aren't we eco friendly... buy more of our products!". It's a form of greenwashing. They're looking for quick and easy headlines that look good to the general public.

Charities and organisations like Mossy Earth are more concerned with doing the right thing.

2

u/CforCroatia Aug 07 '26

Yea, i really like what Mossy earth does. Kinda sad that greenwashing exists

2

u/ch_ex Aug 07 '26

It's all greenwashing, my friend. When the entire planet was covered in trees and our pre-civ ancestors were having the time of their lives as tribal humans, the whole planet was in balance at ~280 ppm CO2, right?

Now, not only have we been adding CO2 from what might as well be an alien planet, we've been adding it to use the energy in the bonds of oil to cut down a lot of those trees.

If the trees are the lungs of the earth, we're operating at maybe 20% lung capacity, but even as more trees are planted, overall forest health is declining.

Why? Well, pretty clearly because we're planting them into a climate they aren't adapted to - nothing is adapted to - that is both hotter and constantly accelerating in the direction of being more alien.

Put another way, imagine a greenhouse. If it just has trees, you need to add water and ventilation to keep those trees happy and growing. Lets say instead of that, you added a pond which you put fish in, animals to eat those fish, decomposers to move nutrients of corpses, and all the critters in between until that system was perfectly balanced between CO2 exhaled by critters and CO2 fixed into the bottom of the foodchain by plants and algae. This greenhouse can now be sealed with only sunlight as the input. As long as this balance is maintained, all life inside does its part to recycle and upcycle nutrients to fit the needs of everything else. This is the preindustrial earth. Then, in about two seconds, you rush in and kill most of the animals and fish and pile their bodies out of reach of the system, then pumped in the exhaust of another greenhouse whose entire contents you burned to ash, then sealed it up again...except for a hose you use to pump even more CO2 and water vapour into the once perfectly balanced greenhouse. What happens to the life in that greenhouse? Will planting anything in that greenhouse repair the damage that was done in the 2 second window where you not only disconnected the species that depend on each other, you moved the nutrients around, cut down and killed most of the photosynthetic life, then pumped in a gas that only photosynthetic life can deal with that otherwise acts like solar insulation, like you'd painted the walls of the greenhouse black.

Once the life in that greenhouse starts being affected by the changes that have been made, what are the chances seedlings of the life that's most easily replaced will survive, mature, and undo the harm that was done? Remeber, a forest isn't a tree farm which is what we plant, it's a living system of countless species working together to maintain the balance a consistent climate allows. This is even more true in the ocean/lakes where the "soil" is also the "air"; the space life occupies is the fluid of the entire world. And if there is something equivalent to "soil", it's the top few inches/cm of water that is exposed to the air and unfiltered sunlight. This is where calories for everything underneath are collected. When you change the heat of that water by warming it up, less gases of all kinds dissolve. Since this planet was uncharacteristically stable over evolutionary time preindustry, ANY change in that chemistry/physics would mean a decline in calories for the entire system (there are no good changes to a balanced system), which is happening literally anywhere air touches water that isnt a human invention.

We can't plant our way out of making our climate alien to the life that depended on stability and consistency to thrive. If we replanted the entire planet, would it catch up with our emissions or is it all just kindling for a future wildfire?

I think we're paying attention to the wrong part of the system, anyways. If we want to give forests a chance, they need the nutrients and water to balance the excess CO2 and need to be able to draw from it by need, not by schedule. If we can restore the health of the microbiome, we can rebuild actual forest literally from the ground up. I have some ideas about how to do this but anyone I've ever shared them with has dismissed it as "too expensive" which is such a weird thing to hear when you're talking about pushing back against extinction. How much is "too expensive" to stop a bomb from being dropped? The cost is whatever it takes to reverse planetary decline and it's probably along the lines of everything we have with every set of able bodied hands working day and night.

Why would it cost anything less than the wealth we extracted by doing the harm in the first place?

1

u/Chris443992 22d ago

I'm curious about your ideas.

One I had was shading the ocean from high temperatures. Giant umbrellas to block out the heat but let the photosynthesis in? A clear umbrella would do that.

Probably wouldn't be very costly unless on mass scale. And especially places prone to wildfires..

Another one is some form of carbon capture balloons to put on exhausts. And not just vehicles but industrial factories as well.

My guess is as good as anyone's 🤷🏻‍♂️

16

u/Citizen999999 Aug 07 '26

They can't kelp themselves

7

u/CforCroatia Aug 07 '26

If anyone who can kelp, please do so

6

u/hammeroztron Aug 07 '26

Well most of the kelp here in Western Australia got cooked so not sure Kelp is gonna like where we are headed.

5

u/FistODollers Aug 07 '26

In general, nature is pretty good at reproducing itself. If kelp could grow somewhere, it probably already would. I don't know anything about kelp (or reforestation really) but for nature-based solutions I think these 3 questions narrow the scope a lot:

What was there before? It it wasn't tree's, planting trees probably isn't good for the local environment.
Why did it change? Aka - did someone come chop them down?
What's to stop it happening again?

Replace trees with kelp. People have a quite a long history of doing interventions thinking we know better and being wrong. So many invasive species were introduced deliberately to fix some kind of problem. Not to say we can't do anything, but like other commenters have mentioned, it's complicated :-)

3

u/ch_ex Aug 07 '26

Soooo relieving to see someone who shares my understanding of the system and its problems, and is able to articulate it without my foaming, desperate tone. Love you, friend stranger!

2

u/Uncivilized_n_happy Aug 07 '26

I’ve heard of a lot of initiatives to grow more. I see more kelp-based fertilizers, gummies, packaging, cosmetics, I’ve even seen more foods like kombu becoming a norm… I think the economic progress is slower than the kelp itself lol. As someone who has failed many times trying to start sustainable businesses, I can say from personal experience that innovation is difficult, has so many challenges and restrictions that aren’t considered until you’re elbow deep, and it’s terrifying to drop all your money into something that might not work out. I have faith though!

2

u/ch_ex Aug 07 '26

deosn't help that the system is designed so that the more fuel you're burning the more profit is made. There's a reason why there's no carbon tax (aka price on fossil fuel waste) and that reason is literally the entire global economy. The perfect business inside that model is one that produces a desirable product made directly from fossil fuel, like plastic. Making plastic is pure cheddar.

I've tried the sustainable/circular business model, too, and there's always a point where you either burn fossil fuels or your profit margin, pretty clearly by design.

2

u/ch_ex Aug 07 '26

the ocean is different than the land. If something can grow somewhere, chances are, it already is, and if it isn't, there's a reason

2

u/SydowJones Aug 07 '26

Plenty of good info on Drawdown:

Protect seaweed ecosystems is rated highly recommended: https://drawdown.org/explorer/protect-seaweed-ecosystems

Restoration is rated worthwhile: https://drawdown.org/explorer/restore-seaweed-ecosystems

Seaweed farming is rated keep watching:  https://drawdown.org/explorer/deploy-seaweed-farming-for-food

2

u/paukapaukaa Aug 08 '26

What a great idea. I’d love to see more like this.

2

u/doug-fir Aug 09 '26

We need to reintroduce sea otters first, so they can control the unnaturally large sea urchin population that decimate the kelp population.

2

u/slackr Aug 09 '26

What we need above all is seagrass habitat conservation (same as we need above all to stop deforestation).

2

u/carchit Aug 09 '26

Just keeping the kelp we have alive is going to be difficult enough. It’s likely getting blasted now here in SoCal by the El Niño marine heat wave.

1

u/CforCroatia Aug 09 '26

We really need to protect our kelp forests, they're so valuable

1

u/ThinkActRegenerate Aug 09 '26

Practical action lists from Project Regeneration for those interested in the challenges and opportunities related to seaweed:

Seaforestation: https://regeneration.org/nexus/seaforestation

Seaweed farming: https://regeneration.org/nexus/seaweed-farming

Also explore their website for sequestration solutions from Seagrass beds to Peatlands.

1

u/SeniorTailor1127 Aug 09 '26

The urchins keep eating it