As James Lovelock noted, if we want to end the excess of carbon in our atmosphere, we have an easy way in biochar. Partially burn vegetation (and/or people) in a low-oxygen environment and you produce slow-decaying organic junk that you can bury and thus trap carbon.
Biochar is a fine-grained charcoal high in organic carbon and largely resistant to decomposition. It is produced from pyrolysis of plant and waste feedstocks. As a soil amendment, biochar creates a recalcitrant soil carbon pool that is carbon-negative, serving as a net withdrawal of atmospheric carbon dioxide stored in highly recalcitrant soil carbon stocks. The enhanced nutrient retention capacity of biochar-amended soil not only reduces the total fertilizer requirements but also the climate and environmental impact of croplands. Char-amended soils have shown 50 – 80 percent reductions in nitrous oxide emissions and reduced runoff of phosphorus into surface waters and leaching of nitrogen into groundwater. As a soil amendment, biochar significantly increases the efficiency of and reduces the need for traditional chemical fertilizers, while greatly enhancing crop yields. Renewable oils and gases co-produced in the pyrolysis process can be used as fuel or fuel feedstocks. Biochar thus offers promise for its soil productivity and climate benefits.
As a soil amendment, char can sequester or store the carbon in the soil for hundreds and even thousands of years in the stable char matrix. Equally important, the char improves soil fertility, thereby stimulating plant growth, which then consumes more CO2 from the atmosphere. The bio-energy produced as part of the process can be turned into electricity, process heat, ethanol, methanol, or soon, an ultra-clean liquid diesel fuel. The net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from both these products is thus reduced, making the bio-char process carbon negative and also regenerating soil fertility in the process.
We love the char. It’s a constructive, decentralized solution we could implement tomorrow.
Healthy soil is full of life, with entire communities living just below our feet. Healthy soil can retain and purify water, provide an abundance of food, and even act as way to sequester carbon dioxide. One key to getting there is amending soil with biochar. Biochar is what you get when biomass is heated in the absence of oxygen through a process called pyrolysis. When incorporated into soil, biochar provides the structural habitat needed for a rich community of micro-organisms to take hold. Incorporating biochar into soil can also act as a way to sequester carbon.
Carbon dioxide sequestration was not likely the original goal of biochar, or terra preta, developed thousands of years ago by the Native Americans in the Amazon region. But today, as we recognize the cost of emitting green house gases, we also recognize the wisdom of using biochar as micro-habitat to improve our soils. Biochar is a classic win-win scenario, a solution that can provide us with a valuable tool for fighting climate change, world hunger, poverty, and energy shortages all at the same time.
But of course — as with all human things — we have political problems motivating each other, so we won’t do it.
[...] Biochar, as a distributed solution, could stop climate change — but what about land overuse, pollution, and the simple insanity factor of too many people crammed into too small of a place? [...]
[...] Biochar. Easily made, can be decentralized, with few negative consequences if any. [...]
End Global Warming In One Easy Step:
**Stop Breeding Treadmillists To Drive The Consumer Loop of Distributionist Model Multinational Capitalism.**
We could ALL have the environment -and- the lifestyles we wanted if we simply agreed to not replace at more than 1-to-5 levels for a couple generations and adjusted immigration to zero on that basis.
-Reward- those who ‘sequester’ DNA samples as a means of securing a free-housing, leveraged utility, lifestyle closer to what they already expect as entitlement. While still having the bio-instinctive confidence that ‘someday’ their DNA would have it’s day to play.
We have the robotics technology base to make this happen. There is -incentive- to developing it rapidly to compete with slave capitalism with generational robot systems which are not throw-away militarized for a single mission but can be multitask designed from the start and simply downshifted through social roles (factory worker becomes garbage man, all on the same extension cord) as more advanced systems become available.
Most particularly, with an expert system _repairman_ robot, we have the ability to do the Dark Factory complex which a lack of union support and technical competence prevented from happening in early 80s with human oversight.
Totally automate the manufacturing process and you don’t have to ‘stage’ raw materials from X location through cheap manufacturing at Y and finally deliver it to Z for market distribution. That factor alone (ton:mile shipping) is THE BIGGEST efficiency factor _lie_ by which the up-and-down business cycle is never more serious than the pricing controlled rates for delivery of the base materials and finished commodities ‘minus adjustable labor’ value.
There are other things we could do:
Massively replace entire systems of individualized automotive ownership (insurance, registration and gas $$$$ too) in trade for automated taxis that link up and move like serpentine minitrains (low drag, short separations) for highway travel _without the lag_ of bus-stop delays. And which drive on a ‘nearest available’ radius basis from individual housing complex storage facilities to target pickups by making 1-4 housing lots per development into parking centers and recharging stations for electric vehicles. Initially, these could be manned. Within 5 years they should be designed to shift to GPS and digital street beacon markers.
Want an extra 10 grande a year to pay your bills? Buy into local cab-rental systems much like we franchise cell phones and cable TV.
Replace 10 standard vehicles with one ‘as you need it’ car and give some kind of shared-bill social benefit for TIMING your trip to coincide with others and that amount goes up again as entire trips could be made for 10-20 cents:mile.
More importantly, even with conventional lead-acid technology and a 40 mile drive limit, you will have the total battery numbers you need to make an electric nation work. Since 90% of vehicles sit unused at home, at shopping centers or at jobs for 80% of the day anyway, _they do not need those power storage cells_.
There is a small footprint windturbine that looks like an old school barber shop ‘pole’ rotating sign. Runs about 10K dollars per unit and generates about 20kwh per stand in a 25mph wind. Where I live, for the past week, we have had 40mph winds all night long. Four of those behind the roofline to meet housing covenant rules _on every house_ and you have a sudden, massive, increase in the available offload from the grid for electrics. Either to run electric car lots or to share as common heating/lighting sources. Because the wires all run to local transformer pads and monolithic battery clusters within the community, the ‘grid’ effect of a large, national, distribution system is minimalized and refurbing traditional power plants can be done on a regional need basis (lack of natural wind/sun resources or access to oil/coal delivery routes).
Again, if the pads are bought up from selective housing lots, the ground-run losses will be short and small compared to sending millions of volts crackling down open conductor powerlines.
Don’t send out subsidies to poor. Send out subsidies to the insurance companies to install these things like they do new roofs at 1/4 cost and wire them up into local network grids on the promise that all residual payments will be made through _unchanged_ electric bills until ‘hey, you’re done, it’s now 10-20% of what it was!’ the consumer pays into ‘the green zone’.
I’ve seen as much as 2hrs go by the window at <5mph speeds in dead solid gridlock because we have basically two N/S and E/W highways here. With 3+ million /and growing/ population, we have _two_ highways and the combination of urban sprawl and overbuilt secondary traffic arteries which means we cannot ‘just build more’, new.
So you tell the companies that for every employee they send home or expect at work ‘one hour later’ on a 7/8/9 vs. 4/5/6 staggered workplace rotation (still giving them roughly 5-6 hours of communal work time, more if they work in cross-regional specialties), they get a 1,000 dollars in corporate tax write off.
Now, instead of having say 2 million cars on the road at the same time, you have 1 million. 3 million people with conflicting destination goals binding up traffic becomes 1 million. And suddenly nobody is spinning a 400lb engine at 1,200rpm just to keep the metal in motion _at a 5mph creep_. If I am going to do a 5mph creap, save the steel frame and safety features. What I need is a weather shield on a golf cart.
Assign people monthly quota’d gasoline. First 40 gallons, X price. Second 20, X-times2. Third 10, X-times5. Make sure that bread winners and home makers get more than teenagers. Make sure that the rich man with the Hummer gets really soaked.
Trade teen driving privileges for grocery runs for entire streets, so that prepackaged food waiting at _warehouse stores_ (low lighting, low airconditioning, no open doors) can be picked up by 1-2 vehicles and delivered, reliably, ‘down the whole block’, once per week, with electronic banking confirming all deliveries before they leave the warehouse (no 15 year old has to beg money).
This date-expectation of absolute delivery numbers should also cut down on labor costs as only a specific number of customers will be expected per day and all orders can be filled without surge traffic. Or cashiers.
The same goes for sports and scholastic events. Ditch the 4mph yellow bus which has half empty seats for half it’s run and use _specific_, point to point routed self-transport by teens for teens. EMPOWER THEM to become more than what they view themselves as, today.
There are a lot of things that could be done, very quickly and at minimum societal impingence with greatly leveragable (i.e. social conscience as a bonus-points reward program like any credit card) communal participation advantage.
_Selling_ biocharcoal is like selling life insurance. An investment in the invisible whose rewards will happen about 200 years after it’s too-many, too-late to matter.
Think big with a look towards immediate scalar reduction in small/local projects.
Do it now while we still have a chance to at least pre-minimize the fallout to the survivors of the biocrash.
If you add to this things like communal payoff of shared mortages on a faster=less interest basis of minimum to maximum payment schedules ‘just between friends and neighbors’ and you could also potentially start in on the pending fiscal crunch as well.
One thing is certain. We have to remove the profit motive from Big Energy and Commerce to fight change at the same time we advance it within the private communities as social conscience with a payoff.
And that is going to be super hard to do with the low influence that ‘every man an individual’ has to fight the enormous conglomerates with.