Enter Russ George, an American entrepreneur who has fulfilled Myhrvolds’s dictum and become the world’s first geo-vigilante. This summer, it has just been revealed, George dumped a hundred tons of iron sulfate into the Pacific Ocean about two hundred nautical miles west of the Canadian islands of Haida Gwaii, triggering a ten-thousand-square-kilometre plankton bloom. In theory, the approach is not as nutty as it sounds: blooms like that are capable of sucking large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and eventually sequestering it deep in the ocean. (This is not George’s first try at this experiment: he has long sought to create lucrative carbon credits to trade on international markets. According to the Guardian, which first reported the story, George had been chief executive of a company called Planktos Inc.:
