The Guardian has had a nice series of articles on that possible mitigation wonder: biochar.
The basic idea is explained here. Basically, it involves cooking wood into charcoal in order to sequester the carbon. By planting fast-growing trees, and then cooking the wood, we could potentially suck carbon out of the atmosphere.
The Guardian subsequently published several opinion pieces on the matter:
James Lovelock and Chris Goodall are for it (along with NASA climate scientist James Hansen, but he didn't write a Guardian op-ed), and George Monbiot is against it.
I'm just an uninformed layperson, but that's never stopped me from having an opinion, has it? So here's mine, and feel free to change my mind here, but as an uninformed layperson, I'm pro-biochar. Do I think we should be using biochar to the exclusion of everything else? No, of course not. And I think Monbiot brings up some good points as to where these biochar farms are going to be grown. Clearly, a lot more research and investigation needs to be done on biochar. But the reality is, I think we will need every single tool in our tool-belt to combat climate change. While geo-engineering wouldn't have been my first choice, at this point I think it may be necessary.
What do you think?
9 months ago
14 comments:
This is the first I've heard of it...
Thoughts from a botany teacher and farm kid...
Won't fast-growing trees grown in succession deplete the soil?
Won't this be sequestering other nutrients as well?
Where are we going to put all this biochar?
Just wondering...
Well, in fact the biochar could be placed in the soil itself to make the soil more fertile. From the first Guardian article:
The biochar could be placed in disused coal mines or tilled into the ground to make soil more fertile. Its porous structure is ideal for trapping nutrients and beneficial micro-organisms that help plants grow. It also improves drainage and can prevent up to 80% of greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxides and methane from escaping from the soil.
If you believe the internet, there's quite a bit of small-scall biochar going on, and I keep giving handouts on it to people I know who burn wood for fuel anyway - if you're gonna cook over an open fire, might as well do it low-oxygen. (These are all people burning scrap wood, or coppicing, anyway.) Every backyard that has a burn barrel should have one set up for low-oxygen fire, and so should every open cookfire in the world. If people are burning wood anyway, teaching biochar techniques will mitigate what they're doing.
The debate seems to be whether it's good enough to mitigate how the rest of us live too. And for that - well, it might have the same issues as Big Biodiesel. But we'll have to actually try it, to find out.
Rosa, I agree, I think we need to try out biochar to see whether or not it will work.
Erich, thanks for that information!
This is so interesting. The most comprehensive and practical carbon sequestering system I've heard of.
Some questions...
Isn't this predicated on business as usual? Cheap, available water and energy would seem to present a serious stumbling block, if predictions are to be believed. Constructing these large scale microwaves is going to require energy (read as carbon) input. And don't forget transporting the biomass to these ovens would require energy, not to mention actual infrastructure in many cases as well.
And the land? Again, if predictions are true, won't we be suffering from a loss of arable lands? Like Monbiot points out, won't this project come into conflict with agriculture?
Also, doesn't dark green plant matter actually absorb more heat energy than less vegetated areas? Off setting carbon yes, but ultimately a sum zero in trapping heat? Possibly?? I'm sure there's an equation to figure that out somewhere on them here innernets. Abbie??
Overall, though, this seems like an interesting avenue to explore!
Natalie, right, I think the lack of arable land is a concern as well ... though, hey, if we all go vegetarian, we should have plenty of land for biochar!!
And I think you're right that building the microwaves and what not would require a lot of energy. But anything we do is going to require an upfront energy investment, I think. Converting to wind and solar is also going to require an upfront energy investment. I guess the hope is that it would be worth it.
why do you think that geo-engineering would be the first kind of engineering that doesn't leave a bigger mess than the one the engineers started fixing? The geo-engineering scale is huge as are the stakes.
EJ
EJ, well that's why I think everyone approaches geo-engineering with some trepidation. But more and more, scientists are starting to say that we will likely have to try some form of geo-engineering, and of the forms I've read about, biochar seems to be one of the most innocuous.
Yeah, the hi-tech centralized biochar they're talking about in that article has all the problems of big organic, or big biodiesel, or any other centralized, industrial process.
I really think the true promise of biochar is in low-tech small-scale stuff (I was just looking on the 'net and I can't find the picture of the slash & burn biochar kiln in the Amazon I wanted to link to.)
But here are some nice stoves:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Hands-On-How-To/Biochar-Stoves.aspx
Some of them have the added benefit of putting out less particulate matter, too.
This isn't just appropriate technology for the third world, either - lots of rural people in the US and Canada still burn trash and yard waste every year. A simple, popular low-oxygen burn barrel design would turn that burning carbon-negative or carbon-neutral.
(Man, I haven't looked up biochar in months and it EXPLODED since then, I guess - the document I'm looking for was from Cornell and used to be in the top 5 on Google.)
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Not all charcoal is biochar. True biochar is the result of heating biomass in an emission free pyrolysis reactor devoid of oxygen. Biochar has been shown to be a very effective soil amendment in numerous studies in South America and Japan. It is becoming popularized enough in the US that Biochar Xtra is now even being sold on Ebay. Others are using the bio-oils derived from biochar
production to replace fossil fuels. Some folks are alarmed at the possibility of vast tracts of land being denuded to produce biochar. This is not a valid concern because, due to its very low density of from 20 to 35 pounds per cubic foot, the transport of biochar over long distances is not economically feasible.
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