Peter Fiekowsky

Peter Fiekowsky
Peter Fiekowsky
Born	(1955-08-15)August 15, 1955
Nationality	American
Education	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SB)
Occupation(s)	Writer, social entrepreneur, investor
Known for	Climate restoration

Peter Fiekowsky is an American author, physicist and founder of the field of climate restoration and author of Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race (Rivertown Books, 2022). He has founded the Foundation for Climate Restoration, Methane Action, Stable Planet Alliance, the Climate Restoration Safety & Governance Board, among others.

Education and early career

After earning an SB in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Peter Fiekowsky worked on the NASA Kuiper Airborne Observatory out of Mountain View California, then at the Fairchild/ Schlumberger Artificial Intelligence Lab in Palo Alto. In 1984, he established the machine vision company Automated Visual Inspection LLC; he holds 27 patents related to machine vision.

Activism and Social entrepreneurship

For three decades, Fiekowsky led citizen advocacy groups in the California chapter of Results.org. Fiekowsky's stated mission in life is "to leave a world we’re proud of to our children." During that time, Results funded successful projects to 1) vaccinate all the world's children by 1990; 2) develop the microfinance field to benefit half the world's population living on less than $1 a day; and 3) secure funding from the U.S. for HIV/AIDS treatment, saving millions of lives. He helped establish the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL); he designed its landmark carbon-tax study in 2012, and established CCL's "100-Year Plan" group in 2013. He is the author of Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race (Rivertown Books, 2022). Fiekowsky has invested in and advised many companies working toward climate restoration—particularly organizations advancing synthetic limestone, clean energy financing, cold fusion, ocean restoration, kelp farming, and methane oxidation. Fiekowsky lives with his wife, Sharon, in Los Altos near their children and grandchildren.

Restoring the pre-industrial climate

After 2010, when it became clear that global warming endangers the prospects of current and future generations, Fiekowsky began to research how we might restore the pre-industrial climate–the climate in which humanity thrived for thousands of years and developed agriculture and civilization. Restoring this historically safe climate, with CO2 levels around 280 parts per million (ppm) requires removing between one and two trillion tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere since Industrial Revolution began.

Net-zero alone by 2050 would lead to atmospheric CO2 levels over 450 ppm —50 percent higher than human beings have survived on a long-term basis during all of our evolution and development (300 ppm) until a hundred years ago. Net-zero represents the United Nations goal from 1990, and is no longer sufficient to safeguard the future. Fiekowsky’s current ambition is for climate activists and policymakers at all levels to expand climate goals to include both net-zero and climate restoration. Climate restoration would require removing 60 gigatons of CO2 a year and thus 1000 gigatons in 20 years (including drawing down any continued emissions). If implemented in the mid-2020s, climate restoration solutions could stabilize greenhouse gasses and achieve net-zero by 2030. Continued implementation could lead to atmospheric CO2 concentrations below 300 ppm by 2050. In 2023, Fiekowsky analyzed a variety of carbon-dioxide-removal (CDR) technologies in “Cost-Effectiveness of CDR Methods.” The paper finds that direct-air capture (DAC) and other industrial CDR methods are so costly that funding them on a climate-restoration scale would bankrupt the world economy. Even at 10 percent of their current cost, they could hobble national economies if implemented at scale. Solutions that do appear to be able to scale swiftly and inexpensively to climate-restoration scale are based on biomimicry: they replicate and accelerate natural CO2-removal processes. These include ocean iron fertilization; atmospheric methane removal; and synthetic limestone. Implementing climate-restoration solutions immediately, Fiekowsky calculates, would pull enough CO2 from the air in the next few years to enable the world to reach net-zero by 2030. From there, continued implementation could restore pre-industrial CO2 levels by 2050.

Organizations

Fiekowsky has established a number of organizations to help achieve climate restoration, including the following.

The Foundation for Climate Restoration (F4CR, est. 2017) has a mission to make climate restoration an idea whose time has come. It works with scientists, innovators, policymakers, citizens, faith leaders, activists, and students to advance the understanding and policy needed to further climate restoration. The Foundation has been instrumental in starting discussions at the Vatican and the United Nations for making climate restoration a goal.

Methane Action (est. 2021), a not-for-profit organization, convened scientific experts, environmental lawyers, philanthropists and policy experts, to accelerate the development and implementation of solutions that would reduce atmospheric methane concentrations to pre-industrial levels. Methane Action was absorbed by the non-profit Spark Climate in 2023.

The Methane Oxidation Corporation (2021) developed an operational strategy to use natural methane-removal pathways, in particular iron salt aerosol to 1) restore pre-industrial methane levels and 2) to protect against the risk of a methane burst from melting permafrost, which could potentially cause an extinction event. Today’s climatic conditions are similar to those at the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which led to the extinction of about a third of all species then on Earth. The MOC has been succeeded by Blue Dot Change.

The Stable Planet Alliance (SPA, 2021) was founded to ensure that ‘humanity flourishing’ and ‘a sustainable population’ are explicitly called for in the next set of UN Development Goals.

The Climate Restoration Safety and Governance Board (CRSGB, 2022) is designed to develop social license for climate restoration projects. It is building a structure to review, monitor and govern such projects to verify that they are safe, legal, effective, ethical, and in accord with international agreements. It focuses on engaging and educating groups affected by each project to ensure their support. Groups will include first nations, youth, and environmental and scientific organizations.

I am Humanity (2022) established the annual global Humanity Day to build and celebrate a common commitment to humanity flourishing, especially to restoring an historically safe climate for humanity and nature and a sustainable population. Its formation was a response to an academic and institutional rejection of climate restoration. It is modeled after Earth Day, which celebrates and expands a common commitment to a healthy environment, and preceded the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the associated laws cleaning US waters, lands and air.

The Grandparents Fund for Climate Restoration (2023) encourages grandparents and potential grandparents to finance climate restoration projects. Many elders have both readily available funds and a deep commitment to their grandchildren’s generation and beyond. They can represent the interests of future generations who can’t themselves vote, invest or lobby.