Confronting the Seaweed Delusion
New report: "Industrial Seaweed will not cool the climate or save nature "
I love to eat seaweed. Nori, dulse, sugar kelp etc,.. there are thousands of years of story and salty tastes that weave these watery fronds deep into coastal cultures of peasants, indigenous peoples and emperors alike.
In the ever-moving ‘littoral zone’ between land and sea, between plant and algae, seaweeds clean water and confuse sailors, they inspire dreams and drive delusions. Mermaids, silkies, pirates and fantastic seabeasts may lurk there and just recently, so do the dreams of billionaire techno-capitalist future-grabbers.
Today ETC Group have published a new report, “The Seaweed Delusion - Industrial Seaweed will not cool the climate or save nature ”. It throws a spotlight on the fast flourishing ‘big seaweed’ industry - one of the latest and slipperiest of the climate technofixes The ‘Seaweed Delusion’ is meant as something of a response to the ‘Seaweed Revolution’ manifesto - and it was the last report I researched and wrote with colleagues while with ETC Group. I think it’s an important addition to the false solutions story and a clear warning that all that glitters is not green. I strongly encourage folks to take a look at it here and please share it widely!
In short, ‘The Seaweed Delusion’ describes an exploding new industry of salty algal startups taking to the water and to the market. These self-styled ‘seaweed revolutionaries’ are enjoying lavish investments from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (Via WWF), X/Tesla chief Elon Musk, Microsoft, Shopify and others. Fuelling this ‘Seaweed Rush’ is an alluring promise that rapid industrialization of seaweeds might just suck up huge amounts of carbon dioxide, repair biodiversity breakdown and kickstart a clean green eco-modernist mega-industry to replace petroleum and big meat. Its an investment streak eerily reminiscent of the biofuels boom just over a decade ago - and like “green” biofuel promises its built on a willful delusion and the displacement of traditional commons and livelihoods.
Why a delusion? well, It turns out industrial seaweeds probably aren’t carbon di-oxide suckers after all. Some great newer science out of Australia has inconveniently shown that seaweed ecosystems may in fact overall emit more co2 than they suck up. Nor is it so clear that feeding seaweed to cattle will sort out the emissions from their belches - or if it does they may make the meat and milk somewhat toxic as a result. Nor is seaweed farming an industry that can happily scale to gift massive free biomass grown in endless oceans. The places that grow seaweed are currently pretty limited to coastal zones where there is already competition for space - and growing monoculture industrial seaweed farms - like monoculture anything (salmon, trees, GM crops) comes with its own ecological problems. This includes invasive escaping species becoming green tides that are already choking beaches in places like China’s Yellow Sea.
Even more worrying is the rush to invent a new ‘seaweed dumping’ industry - where automated drone-operated operations grow seaweed and then sink it to generate Carbon credits. Marine scientists have been reacting in horror at this notion of crudely dumping biomass in the deep ocean for a quick carbon buck - but that didn’t stop Running Tide and Seafields teaming up with the German government a fortnight ago to carry out the first ‘seaweed dumping’ experiment. The prospect of easy new carbon and biodiversity credits is just too lucrative… (and Shopify, Microsoft and others are already ponying up cash.)
All of this should be named what it is: geoengineering. The idea that tech bros might transform swathes of ocean into industrial monoculture zones (and earn carbon and biodiversity finance as they do so) is a re-run of last century’s large-scale commercial roll out of industrial farming across land - a transformation that accelerated us into the climate and biodiversity crisis.
“Mass algae cultivation and the sinking of seaweed, like other geoengineering carbon removal projects, will bring a whole new set of environmental and social consequences. Like tree monoculture plantations and other false “solutions”, they will divert resources and attention from the measures necessary to keep the UNFCCC Paris Agreement goal of staying below 1.5°C. Industrial seaweed. Mass algae farming is a dangerous distraction from what must be top priority: to cut carbon emissions swiftly, especially in the global North”, said Silvia Ribeiro, Latin America Director at ETC Group.
While writing this report what bothered me the most was not so much the rampant climate false-solutionism (that has become very familiar everywhere we turn) but a newer wave of biodiversity-associated technofixes and financialisation now metastasizing around the recent Global Biodiversity Framework that was agreed in Montreal last December (I was there - you could smell the money and opportunism in the air) . At the heart of this is the ten billion dollar Bezos Earth Fund and a clutch of gleeful biodiversity capitalists opening up vast new areas of of opportunity for capital to plunder. Seaweed is just part of a bigger story of billionaires betting anew on biodiversity finance - an unfolding story that has yet to be properly told…