Amerika

One of the most important green-related interviews went unnoticed by most:

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste – which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering – into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.

The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won’t do it.

I think it’s wrong to assume we’ll survive 2° C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4° C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It’s happening again.

I don’t think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what’s coming up.

New Scientist

A 90% cull might leave us with an environment.

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?

Humanity needs to make these decisions, but we can’t for a single reason: doing what’s right is unpopular, and we’re all so divided on values that we need to curry favor with the mob by offering it things it already likes.

And as always with a mob, no one is to blame!

Tags: biochar, climate change, ecocide, global warming, overpopulation