This article is excerpted from Life as We Know It (Can Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World by Bill Weir. Weir is a veteran anchor, writer, producer, and host who came to CNN in 2013 after a decade of award-winning journalism at ABC News. In 2019, he was named the network’s first Chief Climate Correspondent, drawing on his experience creating and hosting the primetime CNN original series “The Wonder List With Bill Weir,” now streaming on Discovery+.
Life as We Know It (Can Be) started as a collection of Earth Day letters to Weir’s then newborn son, River, to explain how and why our world is changing and the people and technologies that are fighting to keep our planet habitable.
When I was your age, River, parts of the American sky had the appearance of a neglected fish tank. New York smog looked like London fog, and the view of the Hollywood sign from Los Angeles was blocked by the kind of pollution you could taste in the back of your throat.
The problems with an economy built on dirty fuels and planned obsolescence were so disgustingly obvious back then that leaders from both political tribes agreed to create the Environmental Protection Agency and passed the Clean Air Act without a single nay vote in the Senate. When President Nixon tried to block the Clean Water Act, his own party helped override the veto.
“Study after study, public opinion poll after public opinion poll have revealed that the economy of this nation can absorb the costs of cleaning up pollution without inflation or without a loss in economic productivity,” Tennessee Republican Senator Howard Baker argued from the floor. “If we cannot swim in our lakes and rivers, if we cannot breathe the air God has given us, what other comforts can life offer us?”
♦♦♦
The people making the most money putting methane and CO2 in the sky like that we’ve failed to properly describe the monstrous costs with milquetoast terms like “greenhouse effect” and “global warming.” A greenhouse evokes yummy tomatoes and pretty flowers, and the synonyms for “warmth” are “cozy,” “snug,” and “pleasant,” so when it comes to conveying the enormity of a civilization killing itself, climate change has the worst branding in history.
While sitting on a plastic bucket on a dock in Maine, I was given a much better storytelling device by a deep-thinking fisherman named Marty.
“It’s a Godzilla,” he said. “It’s burning forests down. It’s stealing our fish. It’s devastating our crops. It’s hurting our farmers. All the stuff that’s free and fun is getting ruined. We should get mad and go kill that thing. Right?”
Carbon Godzilla. So simple. Like the Japanese kaiju unleashed by nuclear weapons, human success has unleashed a 2 trillion-ton monster into the sea and sky, and to rescue Life as We Know It, we must:
Stop feeding it.
Catch it, chop it up, and bury Godzilla back where it came from.
Devoting his life to these simple-but-complicated steps was not something Marty imagined when he was hopping from boat to boat on Portland’s busy docks as a boy. But while he was studying robotics at Dartmouth and Earth systems at Columbia, a combination of melting Arctic ice and shifting currents made the climate risks too high, he said, and mackerel were all swimming north toward Iceland in search of cooler water.
When he connected the undeniable trends to what he knew about excessive levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and ocean, Marty Odlin started to think deeply about solutions to our wants-and-needs problems, and he started at the bottom of the pyramid of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Air and water. If he couldn’t chase mackerel, he’d start an ocean repair company and turn frustration into action by chopping Carbon Godzilla from the sky as hard and fast as he could.
“You either give up or you get kind of mad, you know?” he said from his bucket. “You can call it hope and optimism or you can just call it rage. Two sides of the same coin.”
At first, it was just Marty and a friend noodling engineering ideas on a whiteboard they found by the road. Now they have billionaire investors and a team of engineers, biologists, agronomists, fabricators, software developers, data specialists, and boat captains who all revere nature as history’s greatest engineer and want to use technology to give her a boost—because climate change is a timed test.
“We’re all out to build the oil industry in reverse,” Marty told me, and after considering dozens of different weapons to take on Godzilla, he’s betting on the power, scale, and physics of the sea, and his tentpole technologies are oysters, limestone, and seaweed.
The centerpiece idea is a network of thousands of buoys floating in the North Atlantic, each holding a microforest of kelp and a few pounds of limestone. The seaweed gobbles up carbon at a rate much faster than trees, with no need to irrigate, fertilize, or fight gravity. When the microforest gets big enough, it sinks to the ocean floor, where Marty says the pressure will lock Godzilla away for centuries.
We don’t know for sure how these ideas work at scale, but at least Marty was starting to find out. And as he did, his team invented a way for his buoys to link with a satellite and beam data to the cloud while bouncing around in heavy seas. His search for a better way created an accidental breakthrough. And while Marty says he’s driven by hope and rage, I think he’s just filling the Love and Esteem levels of his pyramid, as a father, fisherman, and scientist.