I was talking with a friend again after more than 30 years since we graduated from college about what we were doing in our lives. When I told him that I was working on how to face food production issues, global warming and climate change he told me “don’t worry we are going to be dead by them anyway because this is something that is going to happened in more than 100 years”. His answer made me realize that even him, a professional in oceanographic technology like me, was either in denial like most of the public that would rather continue “business as usual” or he actually belong to the scientist that still believe that climate change is some kind of futuristic hypothetical apocalypses thus I felt compelled to write about some of the latest information that has been release and what I have been working on in this respect. I think is important because It seems that our civilization doesn’t realize that every morning about 7 billion inhabitants in the world wakes up to start its daily routine showering, feeding and consuming all kind of products, clothing, food, gas and technology that will require taking natural resources from the earth leaving an indelible foot print that will grow even more as we dispose in to the environment all the waste generated in our entire day of consumption leaving no doubt that we would have implanted a negative ecological foot print that in one way or another affects the planet.

  

If nothing were to be happening to our world why for years, global negotiations on carbon dioxide emissions has been that two degrees Celsius is the point of no return, and the limit agreed to by negotiators at international climate talk in Paris. Or why James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the first person to warm US Congress, back in 1988, that global warming threatened the world, is warning today that it’s crazy to think that 2°C is a safe limit noting that it is a “prescription for disaster” which would lock in several meters of sea level rise by 2050. Or even worst. why Henry Jansen, PhD, Scientist Researcher at the Ministry of Agriculture and Agri-Food of Canada, Jeff Anhang research officer and environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation and member of the WorldWatch Institute and Robert Goodland retired as lead environmental adviser at the World Bank Group and awarded with the first Coolidge Memorial Medal by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for outstanding contributions to environmental conservation, have concluded that even if we were to get rid of fossil fuels immediately, but continue to use traditional methods of animal agriculture at the current scale, by 2030 we may still significantly exceed the limit of carbon dioxide need to stay below 2 °C.

I have to grant that not every scientist is fully convinced about the timing, the consequences and that Hansen´s affirmation represent a definitely conclusion that we are running out of time and we are heading towards disasters or neither that Anhang and Goodland consideration in 2007 that some of the direct and indirect sources of GHG emissions from traditional and livestock agriculture have been underestimated, some simply overlooked and some emissions sources that are already counted have been assigned to the wrong sectors were 25,048 million tons of CO2e attributable to livestock have been undercounted or overlooked, 3,000 million tons are misallocated and 22,048 million tons are entirely uncounted.

 

But what about if Hansen, Anhang and Goodland are correct? What is at stake here is the future of our children’s, our grandchildren’s, humanity and our civilization. New study proves that many of what has already been predicted about climate change will occur and other predictions that under mind the severity of the situation could be wrong. For example researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, has find that a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea. According to glaciologist and lead author Eric Rignot, of UC Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the study indicates that the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica have passed the point of no return and are already contributing significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. On the other hand FAO excludes livestock respiration from its estimate because they considered as been part of a rapidly cycling biological system, where the plant matter consumed by the animals was itself created through the conversion of atmospheric CO2 into organic compounds, and since the emitted and absorbed quantities are considered to be equivalent, livestock respiration is therefore not considered to be a net GHG source under the Kyoto Protocol. But while over time an equilibrium of CO2 may exist between the amount respired by animals and the amount photosynthesized by plants, such equilibrium has never been static and today, tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in preindustrial days, while earth’s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as most experts agree that we are losing and significantly degrading upwards of 64,751 hectares of tropical rainforest every day.

 

It is tempting to undermined or exclude one or another anthropogenic source of emissions from carbon accounting according to one’s own interests, however in reality  humanity is facing the first clear evidence of dangerous climate change and we're struggling to figure out how we're going to feed over nine billion people with limitations in natural resources or how we are going to stop the degradation of our planet´s environment in the face of a climate change that is becoming more unmistakable and destructive and the livelihoods and food security of rural and urban population will be at risk. Indeed with falling global food production systems and water shortage never before human mankind has been, on a global scale, in an unprecedented crises and will have to resolve a variety of numerous problems in order to survive as a species.

 

With no viable alternatives to produce our food without degrading the environment, sequestering and extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, there is not much we can do to preserve our civilization from alienation. We have no choice but to re-invent the way we do things. Thus overwhelmed by demographics growth and the food and water that’ll be required for and conscious of the potential danger we are facing I commit myself to conceive and design a Green Agroindustry Complex with Aquaponics as the core of an organic food production complex capable of manufacturing the food we find in Supermarkets today under any climate condition using new technologies already tested and in common use with a good track record and a design criteria base on the solutions to the most significant problems that humanity faces today: Feed over nine billion people, limitations in the availability of natural resources, the environmental degradation of our planet and an increasingly destructive climate change that must be stopped and reversed.

  

10 years after I first learned about Aquaponics and after 9 years of continues research and designs developments I finally conceived a new technological concept that complies with my design criteria with the potential to produce, in much less than the 10% of the world cultivated land, all the green, organic food that will be needed by 2050 and beyond to feed and provide clean water to an overpopulated world of over 9 billion people reducing the total water consumption for agriculture from 70% of the 2% of water currently available for humanity down to much less than half, while eliminating the environmental degradation and GHG emissions from agriculture and livestock operations by sequestering CO2 in the soil and extracting, the one remaining in the atmosphere for up to more than 10 years in a practical and profitable way achievable by massively reforesting our planet making this new technological proposal, together with the elimination of fossil fuels, an effective and realistic way to reverse climate change. www.opvillapol.wixsite.com/aquaponiasdevzla/home-colo.        

 

This new systems could transcend and be apply to other food production systems as well as other aspects of our everyday life: Unlimited green energy for cities, high efficiency insulations, gasless AC and cooler room, water source without intervene natural and manmade water reservoir but most significant an efficient Waste Management System. Following the basic principles of the Zero Waste/Use and Cradle to Cradle concepts. These systems can be an effective, sustainable and practical solution to the problem of the garbage in the cities were we produce an estimated one kilogram of solid waste per person per day generating environmental damages when methane and nitrous oxide gas is released in to the atmosphere at landfills do to the organic matter decomposed. In this regard, anaerobic digesters (or bio-digesters) represent the initial process apply to the waste. It is so efficient that in terms of CO2 equivalent emissions per ton of food waste, landfill incurred (+) 536 Kg per ton of food waste while anaerobic digesters avoid (-) 162 Kg per ton of food waste. The methane generated in the anaerobic digester is never released or burned to the atmosphere, instead Solid Oxide Fuel Cell technology is used, where an electrochemical reaction that uses biogas can provide from a basic server that roughly occupies a parking space, enough power to meet the base load needed for 160 average homes day and night without leaving a carbon foot print in the environment. This technology is successfully used in companies such as Google, Apple, NASA, Coca Cola, FedEx, AT&T, Nokia, Yahoo, Caltech Honda, Kellogg's and Panasonic among others. But even better, its electric generation capacity can be increased over five times when this technology is use to sole move air compressors to provide compress air as fuel for electric generating units that work with compress air engines. When the temperature of this air is warmed before its expansion inside the air engine the temperature of the air at the exhaust outlet drops below 0°C and beside electricity, cold air for ACs, conservation cooler rooms and clean water from condensation of the humidity in the air can be obtained. The clean water produce in the Bio-Digester undergoes two more processes to obtain potable water and the sludge in the bottom of the reactor undergoes a thermal process called Pyrolysis to obtain Bio-Char, a high-carbon residue excellent as an organic soil amendment for an effective reforestation, carbon sinks and CO2 withdraw from the atmosphere. This is possible because through photosynthesis, forest draws carbon out of the air to form carbon compounds and what the plant doesn’t need for growth is exuded through the roots to feed soil organisms. This Waste Management System is only one of the many components that make my Green Agroindustry Complex working together as one unit with a sustainability capable of generating higher profits, with low productions costs and a low initial investment that could promote world capitals to flow towards this technology reach global expansion and win the climate fight.

 

I believe that my greatest achievement hasn’t been inventing anything new, since everything was already out there. But to be able to identify existing, proven technologies and materials that at first glance looks like has nothing to do with this industry and successfully adapt them to create a new technological proposal that is poise to be one of the most transcendental initiatives to break with actual agriculture and livestock production paradigms with the potential to expand at a global scale and eliminate the negative ecological foot print that has been left by traditional food production practices in our planet. I hope to be the seed that will reach a profound change in the way we do things to create modern societies with green sustainable economies and leave a legacy for humanity and its future generations to coexist in an advance world where man happiness, in equilibrium with the environment will be the priority to preserve our Blue-Green Planet.

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