Ice on Fire: The Cliff's Notes to Proposed Solutions

I was multitasking while watching Leonardo DiCaprio's new climate change documentary Ice on Fire on HBO (directed by Leila Conners). I was expecting it to be all same old same old, "it's almost too late ...but if we all take the bus and eat less meat we'll save the planet!" But after half-listening through it I realized--wait, there were some interesting bits in there. I went back for a re-watch.

Just in case you were also half-listening the first time through, here are the main solutions proposed (between minutes 0:33 - 0:57 and 1:18 - 1:30). Marine snow and the bionic leaf were totally new solutions for me. The six other solutions mentioned were relatively familiar, but I hadn't heard about most of the specific projects the film highlighted as exemplars.

~

Ice on Fire promo image, 2019 (IMDB)

"Climate change can be reversed if we act now," intones DiCaprio. Then Paul Hawken introduces the Drawdown solutions list (2017). Hawken points to the need to scale up solutions faster.

The two main categories of solutions presented are clean energy and sequestration (i.e., pulling carbon dioxide - CO2 - out of the atmosphere and storing or transforming it).

1. Forests (sequestration) (35:54)

The featured project for this solution is a 50,000 private redwood and Douglas fir forest in Mendocino, California, owned by the nonprofit Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc. (RFFI) and managed by the the Usal ("YOU-sall") Redwood Forest Company. They interview the chief forester, Linwood Gill. He explains how the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) is particularly good at sequestering CO2.

They also interview RFFI's North Coast Biochar Project Manager, Raymond Baltar, who talks about how they are taking dead trees (of which California has an overabundance) and turning them into biochar (pyrolyzed wood, essentially charcoal) to amend soil to increase its ability to sequester CO2 and retain water. He points to the potential usefulness of biochar on ag lands that struggle with drought.

My understanding is biochar's usefulness for ag lands is not well understood. How the biochar is made (the degree of heat used), the source wood, how it is applied, the soil it is amending, and the ag product being grown in the amended soil all play roles in its relative effectiveness at improving soil performance. A farmer can't go to the store, buy any bag of biochar, mix it into whatever soil, and expect improved outcomes. At least this is what I heard from researchers from UC Davis speaking at the 2016 Natural Areas Conference. Biochar is also not without its environmental drawbacks, such as toxic dust (Li and Parikh, 2018). It's not a magic bullet. Based on current research, it looks like it could be useful for some farmers, and soil chemists are eagerly studying it.

2. Soil (sequestration) (40:43)

This segment features Kate Scow, a soil microbial ecologist at UC Davis (Land, Air, Water Resources), talking about healthy soil's role in sequestering carbon. She talks about how organic farming using cover crops and compost sequesters as much as eight times more carbon than conventional farming. Read more about research going on at UC Davis exploring soil amendments and grazing treatments for carbon sequestration.

Ron Finely's Urban Farm in Los Angeles is also featured, with Ietef Vita (urban farmer and vegan chef, AKA DJ Cavem) talking about "culinary climate action" with organic community gardens. (Note they misspell his name as "Vida.") Ron Finely doesn't appear in the film, but you can see his 2013 TED Talk "A guerrilla gardener in South Central LA" on Youtube.

3. Kelp and oysters (sequestration) (45:13)

Bren Smith of Thimble Island Ocean Farm in Long Island Sound, a "restorative ocean farming" enterprise, talks about how he watched overfishing destroy the cod fishery. In response he became an oysterman, a more sustainable livelihood. Oysters filter nitrogen out of the water. He also farms kelp, which reduces the acidity of the water through a "halo effect," helping the oysters grow thicker shells. In addition to reducing water acidity, kelp sequesters up to five times more carbon than terrestrial plants. Kelp can also be made into "kelp noodles," fertilizer, and animal feed.

Smith mentions that cattle methane emissions can be cut by 90% if they are fed seaweed. That seems a little high to me. One experiment at UC Davis showed a seaweed additive (Asparagopsis) reducing cattle methane emissions by 58% (per a 2018 article). A type of Asparagopsis, taxiformis, is credited in a June 2019 article with reducing cattle methane emissions by 80% in a study at Penn State. Suffice it to say it bears further study, as do all of these solutions.

4. Marine snow (sequestration) (50:34)

Staša Puškarić, from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Croatia, talks about his proposed plan to speed up the process of the formation of marine snow, or tiny shells and other particles that travel from the ocean surface to the sea floor, removing CO2 from the atmosphere and producing oxygen. He proposes seeding the ocean with minute amounts of iron (6 kg per 100,000 square kilometers of ocean, targeting the southern oceans). This would trigger the formation of marine snow by attracting cyanobacteria and heterotrophic bacteria. His pilot project, named GEA@275, is currently looking for investors.

In a  2016 Forbes article, atmospheric scientist Marshall Shepherd calls marine snow "biological debris" that falls to the sea floor. "Some oceanic carbon dioxide can make it back to the atmosphere, but much of it can reside in the ocean for hundreds to thousands of years. If it makes it to the ocean floor it may reside for millions of years." Given how much CO2 has been absorbed by the oceans, "[a]t this point it is worth exploring the broader role that marine snow plays in the carbon cycle." He stops short of recommending artificially creating marine snow.

5. Onshore wind and solar + storage (clean energy) (53:50)

Hawken chimes in here noting that he was surprised that onshore wind was ranked #2 in the Drawdown list, while solar farms was #8. It is more scale-up-able than solar.

Next, Martin Hermann is shown talking about the Mount Signal Solar Farm in Imperial County, California, and the plans for scaling up solar in southern California. He points to future deployment of photovoltaics at greater scale, and using technology that allows solar to produce energy at night.

A note on Mr. Hermann and the Mount Signal Solar Farm: he is credited in the film as CEO of BrightNight, a small firm which he founded after he left as CEO/co-founder of 8minutenergy, the developer of the Mount Signal Solar Farm, in Dec. 2018, a day after the solar farm was completed. 8minutenergy is currently the largest independent photovoltaic developer in the U.S.

Mr. Hermann doesn't refer to any specific innovation that would allow photovoltaics to produce energy at night. However, an article from July 11, 2019, points to a promising thermal battery being developed at Curtin University that would allow solar to produce energy "overnight."

6. "Direct air capture" (sequestration) (1:18:05)

Christoph Gebald of Climeworks in Switzerland explains his company's CO2-capturing machine that pipes the harvested CO2 to a greenhouse. (Note that they misspell his name as "Christof.") He co-founded the company with Jan Wurzbacher, beginning their work on CO2 direct air capture in 2010.

Mr. Gebald talks about making jet fuel out of the captured CO2, or sequestering it underground and turning it into stone using geothermal heat. The latter approach, the CarbFix Project, is being piloted in Iceland where geothermal is plentiful.

An April 2019 article points out that it costs Climeworks $500-$600 to remove a metric ton of CO2 from the air. One expert quoted in that article says they need to be able to do it for $100/metric ton to be commercially viable. Like a lot of the projects featured in the film, they need investors.

7. The "artificial leaf" and the "bionic leaf" (sequestration? clean energy? both?)

Daniel Nocera, from Harvard University, talks about his artificial leaf and bionic leaf, which work together to turn CO2 and sunlight into possibly marketable products.

He says the artificial leaf improves on natural photosynthesis: it removes CO2 from atmosphere and splits water to hydrogen and oxygen. Then the bionic leaf takes hydrogen from bacteria and makes fuel. Depending on the genetics of the bacteria used, it could make "materials," e.g., drugs or fertilizer. It can use any water including sea water.

He didn't actually talk a lot about the fuel application, but this article from 2016 explains it a little. The Wikipedia page for the bionic leaf lists its possible useful products as fertilizer, bioplastics, removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, and "other" uses (including "fuel cell").

Nocera's first big published result from 2016 was, essentially, achieving 10 percent efficiency in converting sunlight into alcohol fuels. Then, in 2017 his lab found a way to use a hybrid "catalyst-plus-bacteria" approach to fix nitrogen and make ammonia. According to this 2018 article on the race to invent the artificial leaf: "That is a tantalizing discovery because over 1 percent of global energy is used today in the production of ammonia to fertilize crops and feed the world."

The hope is that it might make a different in the developing world. Nocera's project is being funded by the "First 100 Watts" Program at Harvard, per this 2016 article from Harvard. According to this Jan. 2018 Harvard Gazette article it looks like they are aiming to use the technology to produce fertilizer in India. Nothing more recent is posted on the Nocera Lab's site.

I didn't get the time stamp for this and the last solution because HBO withdrew free access to the film a few days earlier than the posted date.

8. Ocean energy (clean energy)

James Murray and Chris Milne of Orbital Marine Power, in Scotland's Orkney Islands, describe how their floating tidal turbine works. Note that Orbital was called Scotrenewables from its launch in 2010 until October 2018. This CNBC article from Aug. 2018 reports on the results of the first year of testing: "[the] turbine had supplied the equivalent annual electricity demand of roughly 830 U.K. households and, at times, more than 25 percent of the Orkney Islands’ electricity demand." The next step is commercial production.

The film then spends a few minutes with Neil Kermode, Managing Director of the European Marine Energy Center (EMEC), also based in the Orkneys. He talks about the enormous potential for "making electricity out of seawater" (specifically the motion of seawater). We get to see footage of "the Penguin," made by Finnish company Wello Oy, a turbine that generates power from the motion of a pendulum within a vessel bobbing on the waves. You can see other video of the vessel at the Penguin's page on the EMEC site. Another vessel like the Penguin is being built as part of the European Commission's "Clean Energy from Ocean Waves (CEFOW)" initiative. "CEFOW is aiming to be the first project to grid connect an array of wave devices in the UK and to create an efficient supply chain to support larger wave power projects in the future," per EMEC. CEFOW is funded by EU Horizon 2020, the "biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever," focused on promoting sustainable growth through innovation.

~

The rest of the movie is mostly about detecting and measuring climate change and emissions of CO2 and methane. It also touches on the problem of fossil fuel industry-driven disinformation campaigns.

There's a special focus between at the one-hour mark (about 15 minutes' worth) on the uncertainty posed by different kinds of new methane sources, including emissions from oil and gas extraction sites, methane hydrates, and microbial methane (from melting permafrost).

The microbial methane piece (from about 1:15:30 - 1:16:50) is where you see the literal ice on fire referenced in the title and pictured in the promotional graphics. Biogeochemist Katey Walter Anthony ignites methane seeping out of a frozen lake in Alaska against a darkening sky, foomph. She says she is doing "a positive flame test" or "quick gas chromatograph" above the ice of a frozen "methane lake." The visuals are stunning. There's a 2-minute Youtube video posted in 2010 about her work that shows her producing a tremendous methane foomph on a frozen lake at around 1:20.

Note that it was supposed to be streaming free through July 16, 2019, but as of July 12 HBO is asking you to subscribe to see anything beyond the trailer, so boo for that.

Also boo for no Native/First Nations perspectives in the film, but lots of footage of the usual famous old white guys working on climate. I appreciate what they had to say but does it really have to be them saying it on camera? Representation matters.