While states like Washington are moving on their own to curb ocean acidification, national efforts are stymied by politics — and ever-rising CO 2 emissions.

When U.S. Rep. Brian Baird tried a few years ago to get his colleagues to put more money toward ocean-acidification research, few even understood the issue.

One congressman, Baird said, confused souring seas with acid rain, and asked, “Didn’t we deal with that 20 years ago?”

The corrosion of the oceans by carbon-dioxide emissions has barely made a ripple among Washington, D.C.’s power brokers. Little money gets earmarked for research. Ocean change has inspired few stabs at curbing CO 2 .

In fact, aside from West Coast lawmakers and scattered others from coastal regions, few in Congress seem to grasp the scale of the challenge, said current and retired lawmakers from both parties.

So West Coast states, led by Washington, are now forging ahead largely on their own.

“This is a profound and unprecedented threat,” said Baird, a Washington Democrat, who stepped down in 2011 and is now president of Antioch University in Seattle. “The existence of marine life as we know it could be profoundly changed by this. And we are scarcely attending to it.”

As the oceans absorb ever more CO 2 from cars and power plants, that is transforming the chemistry of the seas faster than at any time in tens of millions of years. That CO 2 makes life hard for creatures with shells and skeletons and threatens to fundamentally transform the entire marine world.

Already, acidification has wiped out billions of oyster larvae in the Pacific Northwest and is causing trouble for tiny see-through creatures called pteropods, which are critical food for birds and fish. It poses risks for important sea life, including red king crab and many fish.

But since the source of acidification is also the chief culprit driving climate change — rising CO 2 — efforts to respond at the national level get mired in global-warming politics.

So Washington state leaders are suggesting avenues for new research and are encouraging cleanup of polluted marine environments. They hope those steps will at least build resistance to acidification.

And Gov. Jay Inslee is seeking to curtail the state’s fossil-fuel emissions, hoping to show the federal government that tamping down on CO 2 can work.

“States can set a precedent,” said Brad Warren, a sustainable-fisheries proponent who served on a state panel of acidification experts in 2012. “They can provide a way to show what works and what doesn’t.”

“The existence of marine life as we know it could be profoundly changed by this. And we are scarcely attending to it.” Brian Baird Former U.S. representative from Washington

But it’s not yet clear if even local curbs are politically possible — or if they will make a difference.

During a recent meeting of a group set up by the Legislature to respond to souring waters, committee chair Martha Kongsgaard urged members to press on even if they felt overwhelmed.

“Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty — let’s all admit we are all flying half blind into an unknowable future,” Kongsgaard said.

But, she added, “One can’t get work done in fetal position.”

Unclear solutions

The list of ways acidification can impact the marine world keeps getting longer. There’s budding acceptance even by many commercial fishermen that it poses risks to jobs and their way of life.

It’s not that the solution is unclear.

If the goal is to substantially reduce acidification, CO 2 emissions need to come down. If you want a more precise picture of what’s happening in the water, more money has to go toward research. Even if both happen soon, people who rely on the sea should prepare for a different world.

Some changes to marine life are coming whether we’re ready for them or not.

“The data show that we’re seeing the symptoms of acidification arrive and progress at a much faster rate than we would have expected even just a few years ago,” said Kathryn Sullivan, acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in a recent interview. “The longer-term consequence it presents is very, very daunting.”

Yet Congress thus far has taken only baby steps.

In 2009, it passed the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act, pushed initially by New Jersey’s Rep. Frank Lautenberg, then by Baird, then-Congressman Jay Inslee and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

It required an assessment of acidification’s impacts, put money toward marine monitoring to help the Northwest’s troubled oyster industry, and called on the National Science Foundation to pay for more research.

A team of ocean scientists detailed the need: “Once the program is fully engaged, $50 million to $100 million per year is considered the minimum if scientists are to provide useful information regarding how the oceans are responding,” they wrote in March 2009.

The act only authorized $14 million to $35 million a year.

Back then, the nation was mired in recession.

“We were aware at the time that what we were asking for was inadequate,” Baird said. “We expected that would change.”

It has not.

“We’re probably crashing toward a mass-extinction event unless something changes,” said Kristy Kroeker, a research fellow with the Bodega Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, who has twice in recent years analyzed and reviewed all the research examining the biological impacts of acidification. “And right now there aren’t enough resources to figure it all out.”

The few politicians who understand the problem believe D.C. leaders are not doing enough.

“A billion people around the world depend on the ocean for food and we’re talking about opening a hole at the bottom of the ocean-food chain,” said former Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C., who served 12 years in Congress before losing his primary race in 2010.

“There’s a reason the Pentagon is worried about CO 2 ,” he added. “If you have unstable governments and people around the world not able to supply their protein needs, and you put those together, you get people migrating quickly and friction from that. It’s a real toxic stew.”

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska — whose state drives the country’s most bountiful fishing harvest, providing half the nation’s catch — spoke of the need for stable research funding and worried aloud about food-web changes.

“If the little pteropods that are out there that the salmon gobble on leave us because of what’s going on with acidification … think about what that means for our fisheries industry,” Murkowski said during an oceans forum in D.C. last spring. “It is huge for the state of Alaska.”

For many, the chief barrier is ignorance.

In part that’s because acidification is fairly new and surfaced first in Washington and Oregon — far from the corridors of power.

“I think (acidification) is a real problem,” said Democratic Congressman Sam Farr, a 20-year House veteran from California who co-chairs an ocean caucus. “But the first thing you have to do is educate people about what’s broken and needs fixing.”

As recently as 2010, only 7 percent of Americans knew ocean acidification was caused by seas absorbing CO 2 , according to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. The vast majority — 77 percent — had never even heard the term.

But even among those who understand, attempts to address acidification’s underlying cause quickly devolve into battles over approach.

Murkowski — who does not dispute human contributions to climate change — has fought the Obama administration’s efforts to tamp down on CO 2 from coal-fired power plants. She prefers congressional action, which has not happened.

Much of the easy work is already under way. Globally, the amount of CO 2 from land-clearing or timber harvest — never a huge factor — has plummeted 25 percent as deforestation declined.

The European Union is moving to cut its CO 2 emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. But emissions in China and India seem destined to rise. And while U.S. emissions fell in recent years as a result of the recession and a natural-gas boom, they rose again in 2013.

“Other than transforming our energy system, I’m not sure what we can do,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist with Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, who helped popularize the term “ocean acidification.”

“I think politicians are rational. Not until they feel that they’re going to lose votes for not acting will they start dealing with these issues. The real story is winning the hearts and minds of the average person and convincing them we have to stop using the sky as a sewer.”

Local efforts

In the meantime, more modest efforts are under way.

An international consortium is deploying ocean buoys to establish a global sea-monitoring network. Area shellfish hatcheries that supply the region’s $110 million industry now use their own specialized water-chemistry-tracking equipment.

A new University of Washington center is helping shellfish growers keep tabs on water quality and develop more sophisticated systems to warn them before marine currents flood them with seawater deadly to baby oysters. The center is also investigating the potential for water-treatment systems that could be used in shellfish hatcheries.

Private foundations have held competitions seeking both small and large solutions.

Shellfish biologist Joth Davis, of Bainbridge Island, was a finalist for a grant with the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. His team wants to grow kelp in small plots and develop markets for it. They hope seaweed could be a business that also sucks CO 2 from areas near shore, changing water chemistry while providing habitat for sea life.

“It wouldn’t be a huge solution, but you could close off or encircle bays and really target places that are important nurseries for invertebrates and fish,” he said.

A team of experts is studying whether raising clams in sea-grass beds rather than mud flats will help them avoid impacts from souring water. Some shellfish scientists hope to breed hybrid oysters and geoducks or use natural selection to create acidification-resistant strains. Some have proposed creating seed banks from corals able to withstand souring seas.

Some experts recommend protecting certain marine areas where sea creatures have developed a natural resistance to corrosive water through evolution, though fishermen are often reluctant to support making more of the sea off-limits.

Ryan Kelly, assistant professor at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington, urged the state to focus on secondary causes — such as reducing nutrients from livestock or septic tanks that flow into streams. That pollution can compound the impact of CO 2 , and reducing it might buy the region more time before acidification causes more harm.

For example, researchers estimate that 24 to 49 percent of the acidification of Hood Canal’s deepest waters comes from human CO 2 emissions. The rest is caused by organic matter — some natural, some not.

“Local causes can have local solutions that will have an immediate effect locally,” Kelly said. “And coastal waters are where people and the ocean intersect. If you are in, say, Skagit Valley, and it seems like nitrogen from dairy farms is causing problems, reducing that nitrogen load could potentially have an impact.”

And Democratic Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has committed to scaling back state CO 2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, in part by putting a price on carbon.

Little of that is easy.

Inslee remains at odds with Republican lawmakers who largely control the state Senate. They disagree on how fast and by what means to curb emissions.

And scientists and activists have unsuccessfully urged the state for years to get a better handle on the type of pollution that threatens to exacerbate acidification.

“Legitimate questions in this whole effort are ‘can we move faster’ and ‘can we get it done?’ ” Warren said. “We have to say, ‘We don’t know but we’re going to do the best we can.’ ”

And, of course, none of these local changes does anything at all to help the ocean at large.

Until the growth of CO 2 is halted, said Greg Rau, a marine chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, ocean acidification will just keep getting worse.

“That’s not a threat or a prediction,” Rau said. “It’s a promise.”

Can technological advances help acidifying seas? Many scientists are increasingly acknowledging that we can no longer afford to dismiss some gee-whiz technological fixes outright. We need to understand what, if any of it, could help. In 2012, a controversial California entrepreneur motored off the coast of British Columbia and dumped 100 metric tons of iron dust into the Pacific Ocean, hoping to spark a 4,000-square-mile plankton bloom. Scientists around the world were outraged. The broad-scale move to scrub carbon dioxide from a patch of water by stimulating plant growth took place with no input from the international community. There was little evidence to suggest the businessman even carried the right tools to test his results. Experts dubbed him a rogue and dismissed his plan for so-called iron fertilization as “disastrous,” “madness” and “insane.” But reaction to the risky, unsanctioned experiment masked a new reality: Once largely panned as cuckoo, the idea that geoengineering or technological tinkering may someday play a role in tackling the world’s CO 2 problem is no longer dismissed by mainstream scientists. In the last few years, researchers have even worked on setting global protocols to guide research. These scientists insist that reducing CO 2 is still a must to avoid global climate and ocean disruption. But with progress stalled on scaling back fossil-fuel emissions, many scientists concede the time could come when massive technological solutions are necessary. Some even argue that we need to better understand the options because a frustrated nation one day may attempt to unilaterally deploy an untested technique as happened in B.C. — but on a far larger, more dangerous scale. “I’m really surprised in the last few years how quickly some of these ideas have gone from being ‘thought experiments’ to being the kind of thing people are considering seriously and that some think might ultimately even happen,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist with Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford, who has studied geoengineering proposals. Caldeira and others see the value of massive technological fixes as an “in-case-of-emergency-break-glass kind of thing.” Jeremy Mathis, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who studies chemistry changes in the Arctic, said he would never endorse manipulating sea chemistry or global CO 2 in lieu of reducing emissions. “But at this point it makes sense to pursue all possibilities — just in case,” he said. Brad Warren, with the nonprofit Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, said it’s time to figure out what’s feasible and what’s not. “We’ve reached the stage where we can’t afford to be snooty about this stuff,” he said. “I don’t want to rely on this. I doubt many of the ideas are workable on a global scale. And I think there is real peril in believing we can engineer our way out of everything — we can manage far better through prevention. Nonetheless, we need to be looking at the whole tool kit, whether we like it or not.” Certainly, there is no shortage of ideas. And many have no shortage of problems. On a global scale, no option “has yet been demonstrated to be effective at an affordable cost, with acceptable side effects,” according to a major 2009 study by the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s academy of sciences. For starters, most plans are designed to deal exclusively with temperature increases — not the changing chemistry of the sea. That includes Bellevue inventor Nathan Myhrvold’s idea to shoot sulfur dioxide 15 miles into the sky through a hose to scatter sunlight and cool the planet, and proposals to seed ocean clouds to reflect back sunlight. Meanwhile, iron fertilization, such as the type attempted in B.C., could reduce some amount of acidification in surface waters as algae grows and sucks up CO 2 . But research suggests it may promote souring seas near the bottom as plant life dies, sinks and decays. Efforts to grind up limestone, barge it out to sea and dump it to increase ocean alkalinity would require incredible amounts of material and the energy to transport it. “I always wanted to do a calculation to show how many of the White Cliffs of Dover you would have to grind up to get enough material to really make a difference,” said Michael O’Donnell, an acidification expert with California Ocean Science Trust, which helps incorporate the best marine science in policymaking. Yet CO 2 lasts so long in the atmosphere that some computer models suggest even if emissions begin declining within a decade, that some engineered fix could still be needed just to get oceans to maintain their current chemical balance. For the moment, the most promise seems to be on smaller scales. “I wouldn’t call what I’m working on geoengineering,” said Greg Rau, a marine chemist with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “That’s misleading.” Rau has experimented with using seawater and limestone to transform the CO 2 waste in power plants into a new byproduct: calcium bicarbonate. In lab tests, he has successfully eliminated 97 percent of CO 2 , and believes the alkaline waste — if tests show it’s free from impurities — could be dumped into the sea, reducing the water’s acidity. It’s the same process some seawater aquariums use to reduce acidity. Rau suspects it would be most useful in a select few situations — such as a natural-gas-fired power plant operating near marine waters, where seawater already is used as coolant. The CO 2 from coal is filled with too many other contaminants, he said. “We’re probably not going to solve the global problem using this method,” he said. “But it could be beneficial in, say, helping some oyster beds, or in a bay or helping some coral reefs.” Some scientists and policymakers fear that focusing too much on technological fixes could draw emphasis away from reducing CO 2 . “If a scheme gets deployed and it basically works even just a little, people might relax and allow us to wind up with even higher CO 2 emissions,” said Caldeira. But he also dismisses criticism for contemplating such fixes at all. “I get a lot of people thinking I’m an advocate of deploying these things just because I want to understand them,” he said. “I’m not. But if the models say you can reduce the environmental damage, it would be irresponsible to not investigate it.” — Craig Welch