1. The Paris climate targets are woefully inadequate, and net zero atmospheric carbon growth is nowhere near enough. In a world with carbon levels already passing 320 ppm (parts per million), we need to actually reverse global heating to get our atmosphere back to conditions that we know can sustain life (pp. 8-9, 22-25, and elsewhere, with a particularly grim look at what life would be like meeting the Paris targets on p. 8).
2. We have the capacity to solve the problem by implementing technologies that are relatively permanent (workable for at least 100 years), able to scale up rapidly (removing at least 25 gigatons of carbon per year), and able to attract investors to finance them (p. 33).

He obviously travels in a different world than I do, a world of high-level scholars and big investors who need to be convinced of these two axioms. I have never heard a single climate scientist claim that the Paris goals would be enough, that an average temperature rise of even just 2 degrees Celsius would not spawn massive changes around the world. And for at least a couple of decades, I’ve been convinced of humans’ ability to solve the problem. He apparently has found it difficult to convince colleagues and influencers of this, and strikes a tone I find unnecessarily defensive.

But the things I’ve always thought of as our most positive steps toward mitigating catastrophic climate change—such as afforestation (massive tree planting), complete and rapid conversion to true clean energy, and shifting our industrial/agricultural/construction processes—are, in Fiekowsky’s world view, less important than some big technological developments I wasn’t familiar with.

He identifies four industrial revolutions that meet the three criteria listed in the second point, above, plus a social trend that has long been part of the mix—and he says these, combined, could easily reduce atmospheric carbon to less than 300 ppm, with only minimal lifestyle changes. These five big innovations are:

1. Synthetic limestone that will allow carbon-negative construction (Chapter 3, pp. 83-97)
2. Seaweed and marine permaculture underwater forests (Chapter 4, pp. 98-114)
3. Iron fertilization of the oceans (Chapter 5, pp. 115-141)
4. Oxidizing methane to convert it into longer-lived but less harmful CO2 (Chapter 6, pp. 115-141)
5. Reducing the human impact on climate by reducing the size of the human population (Chapter 7, pp. 162-181; something environmentalists have been advocating since at least 1968, when Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s landmark The Population Bomb was published)

These solutions, each described in great detail in its own chapter, including the benefits, challenges, revenue streams, and investor appeal, do involve geoengineering—something I’ve been skeptical about in the more commonly discussed variations of, e.g., destroying existing weather patterns and replacing them with wild untried schemes. But the particular interventions—unlike any other geoengineering project I’ve ever heard of—are also biomimicry. Fiekowsky studied how nature has stoped previous global heat waves and then recalibrated again when it got too cold. Then he found scientists and entrepreneurs who have figured out how to replicate those eons-old models that were not engineered by humans but by oceans and continents.

While I’m not a scientist, I have done extensive reading on climate, and as far as I can tell, both the science and the business analyses are sound. His big challenge is convincing the world of his two initial points. Read the book yourself and see if you think he’s on the right track. I do.