Another view of Plan B

NASA Chief Scientist details ways to mitigate Peak Oil and Global Warming

…Seawater AG and Saline/seawater agriculture/algae are an important part of an approach to try and head off warming as opposed to “living in a warmer world.” Peak Oil was evidently in ‘06. With the tremendous Asian demand oil prices are expected to rise rapidly. Therefore, both from an economic AND a climate perspective we need to, SOON, replace Petroleum for transportation. The only viable candidates are hydrogen and biofuels. Hydrogen has major storage and infrastructure issues. Therefore biofuels appear to be the approach of choice going forward. Replacing oil will require tremendous capacity, which is only available for Biomass if we utilize seawater AG and Aquaculture/Algae.
…My only reservation is that if we seriously utilize Seawater Agriculture via salt plants [otherwise known as halophytes] on desert areas and aquaculture using saline/salt water to grow algae, we could greatly reduce the anthropogenic CO2 emissions by replacing petroleum, which would result in slowing the ocean rise. Other technologies such as drilled geothermal, direct solar such as solar thermal and PV and Biomass could be used to replace coal — mitigating greatly ocean rise from electricity generation. That is, there would be little need to divert the ocean rise into coastal aquifers because there would be far less of a rise. Therefore, I would advocate using part of Carl’s approach, seawater AG, initially to try and head off ocean rise.

American Public Media