I’m not familiar with the Black Sea specifically, but worldwide, yes, the vast majority of such dead zones are due to animal agriculture, which is also the leading cause of climate change.

I don’t agree with the take of the article or the premise of this geoengineering scheme either, but I thought that the article was relevant and demonstrative of misguided attempts to solve the climate crisis with such geoengineering efforts.

However, I don’t think that all geoengineering, in the loose sense of the term, is without merit. I have a geoengineering idea too. Rising sea levels are going to be a real problem if animal agriculture and other industries responsible for climate change continue business-as-usual. If anything, dumping biomass into the ocean will raise sea level even more. But what if there were a way to sequester water somewhere on land so that it couldn’t flow back out into the sea? I’m not talking about building giant freezers to bring the glaciers back, but some other method, something more practical. It wouldn’t even need to be permanent (but really, what is?) if sequestration were continuous; over time, any net increase in the amount of water sequestered on land would be of benefit for slowing sea level rise. If this method of sequestering water on land also reduced the rate of run-off from rainfall, resulting in greater sequestration in a positive feedback loop, even better! Reducing run-off would have the added bonus of reducing soil erosion, meaning less of the land would get washed out to sea where it could raise sea level even more. Reducing soil erosion above and beyond the reduction achieved by slowing run-off, such as by physically holding the soil in place, would be of even greater benefit.

It might sound far-fetched, but with all of the biodiversity in the world, there probably already exist organisms in nature that could perform a chemical reaction to convert both carbon dioxide and water into biomass, the best of both worlds! If these organisms could sequester a large enough amount of carbon dioxide and water in this way, and then keep it locked up for hundreds or even thousands of years, then that could be a huge help to solving not only rising sea levels but the current climate crisis in general! If there were a way to propagate these carbon- and water-sequestering organisms in order to scale up their effect on the environment, then geoengineering efforts could focus on finding more efficient ways of doing that instead of developing expensive and ecologically-unprecedented technologies. If propagation of carbon- and water-sequestering organisms were to take place on land currently used in ways that contribute to the climate crisis, then that would be the very best of all!

Now, how can I get R&D funding for this?