Shifting to zero-carbon - by Bert Horwood

Autumn mist near Kingston Ontario Bert Horwood is a Quaker in Thousand Islands meeting, living in Kingston.

I begin with a basic proposition: My spiritual and scientific understandings must be compatible and equally open to new learning. Science tells me that climate is part of a dynamic chaotic planetary system. This means that small adjustments can trigger large changes, but that the direction and size of change is unpredictable.

The Quaker testimony to integrity tells me that whatever measures I preach to influence climate change I must also practice.

Having become tired of my failure to walk my talk, I decided to do two things: One was to strive to live with net zero carbon emissions. The other was then to discover how closely the environmental and charitable organizations I support come to carbon neutrality. The rest of this post describes these efforts. I offer it with some humility because I have learned that I am not alone nor even exemplary in these efforts.

The first and most important change in my life was reducing total carbon output. How? I try to minimize electricity consumption, turning off stand-by electronics, and purchase electricity for my domestic use from non-carbon-emitting sources (in my case this is Bullfrog Power). I buy as much local merchandise as possible. I try to travel by rail or bus, and have reduced my total travel by about half over the past decade. My automobile use has gone from 20,000 to about 9,000 km per year. I still emit significant green house gasses. Purchasing high quality reforestation offset projects removes the balance, recognizing that all offsets are problematic at best. But they are a place to start. (A good guide is Purchasing Carbon Offsets by the Suzuki Foundation and Pembina Institute.)

graphic by photobucket

There is more. I live for 5 months at a cottage and thus maintain two residences; almost two thirds of my car mileage is from driving back and forth. To get closer to zero carbon, I'll have to change to one residence. Sadly, my supermarket and credit union do little or nothing to lower my carbon. Neither the theatres I attend, nor the space my Quaker Meeting rents, use sustainable power or practice significant carbon reduction, except for tokens like low energy light bulbs. Most of the charities I normally support make only cosmetic changes, or develop grandiose plans with little action. There are some outstanding exceptions, especially among environmental legal organizations. Perhaps lawyers realize, more keenly than others, that you can not urge a practice on others which you do not yourself embrace. Some organizations indulge in "greenwashing," making small but well-publicized cosmetic changes to appear to be reducing emissions.

I am taking a fairly hard-nosed attitude to charitable organizations that do little to reduce their emissions. I withdraw support until they face up to the dilemma that they can not do good while knowingly doing harm. My refusal may be regarded as reprehensible, but I try to make up for it by donating more to truly green organizations in order to support their higher costs. So I feel that I'm on the right track.

As a culture we are not used to making sacrifices to achieve a good. A central problem is that carbon neutrality costs more. Persons of limited means can ill afford the extra costs. Charitable organizations, like individuals, have to raise more funds, or else limit their good work, if they are to pay the cost of reaching carbon neutrality. To live in carbon balance, let alone reduce the excess of carbon dioxide in the air will require many sacrificial acts as we develop radical new life styles.

What I've described has been termed "hairshirt green" activism. It's about sacrifice and doing without. I think it is a critically necessary starting point. But most people can't live joyous lives in an atmosphere of "thou shall not." A positive green activism is needed.

The work of Mike Nickerson provides an example of this. He says it is "a question of direction" and that we know what directions will lead to longterm well-being. Mike lists eight criteria which can guide positive future patterns of living:

Well-being is sustainable when activities:

• use materials in continuous cycles,
• use reliable sources of energy and
• come mainly from the qualities of being human (i.e. creativity, communication, movement, appreciation, and spiritual and intellectual development.)

Long term well-being is reduced when activities

• require continual input of non-renewable resources,
• use renewable resources faster than the rate of renewal,
• cause cumulative degradation of the environment,
• require resources in quantities that undermine the well-being of other peoples, and
• lead to the extinction of other life forms.

We don't know if climate change can be slowed, let alone reversed. We have set the planet on course toward a hotter climate, in which many will die. humans and other species. But it is surely worth trying to save those lives, including some of our grandchildren. My efforts at activism in this direction, currently of the "hairshirt" variety, are enhanced by knowing that I am getting my own practices under control. Then I can look around in good conscience and see what's next.

Climate change: a last chance to act - UNEP

Rapport PNUE/GIEC: voir le resumé en français par Louis-Gilles Francoeur, 'Changements climatiques: le pire est en train de se produire', Le Devoir 25 sep 09.

A dust storm from the outback blankets Sydney; Australian drought continues: photos by Tim Wimborne / Reuters 23 Sep 09. See also Brigid Walsh's Dustwatch Report and Australian Water Network.

Worst-case climate scenarios are already happening, according to the UNEP United Nations Environmental Program. New scientific data*, released as the G20 meet in Pittsburgh, show tipping points -- both in speed and size -- are coming much faster than previously predicted by the IPCC and may soon be irreversible. UNEP says, "It may still be [scientifically] possible to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. However, this will only happen if there is immediate, cohesive and decisive action to both cut emissions and assist vulnerable countries adapt."

Among the danger signs: GHG emissions are rising faster than ever. Warming will increase above 2-3°C, the tipping point for the complete melting of polar ice and Himalyan glaciers. Sea level will rise 2 meters or more by 2100. Ocean acidification is occurring, killing coral reef life as well as removing a major CO2 sink -- and on the California coast it is decades earlier than predicted.

If the trends continue, major climate systems will change: the monsoons of India, West Africa, and the rain system of the Amazon; with severe and irreversible drought in the US Southwest, Australia, the Mediterranean, Mid-East and Central Asia; elsewhere, irrigation and hydro power would fall sharply. Remaining "biodiversity hotspots" (reservoirs of species replenishment) would disappear. Failure of deep-ocean currents, or massive CO2 + methane release from melting permafrost, could then drive the process into the catastrophic 4-6°C range.

* Data are in UNEP's new Climate Science Compendium. See also UNEP Green New Deal update for the G20 summit Sep 2009, with details of current "green stimulus" plans of major countries; download its other publications. Nature Sep 09 has an article signed by 28 scientists warning that we are exceeding earth's capacity. Dust storms are spreading disease, says the UK Observer 27 Sep 09.

Philippine Quakers have just emailed for help after flash floods in Manila and 25 provinces in which at least 246 Filipinos died. Suburbs and villages are without food, water or power. Typhoon Ketsana is now about to hit Thailand. Activists at the UNFCCC meeting in Bangkok blame climate change.

Environmental networking: groups and strategies

Click on the illustration for the full document.

This is an attempt to map many recent trends. I welcome your comments and criticism. Feel free to share the document with others. It may help to clarify discussions about cooperation or joint action with other civil society or faith groups. If you want to find which category a group is in, open the doc in a word processor, CTRL+F and insert the name to search. The web links in the document and "further reading" will lead you to details about that group.

For a review of current Copenhagen negotiations and US climate policy, see my previous post, which includes updates.

Why they grind up baby chicks and farmers - Dailykos

The industrial model has been imposed on agriculture in recent decades. Live animals are mere "inputs". As this story shows, the family farmer is becoming an indebted serf (just like 19th c. fishermen and factory workers who were trapped by the company store: the "pluckme" or "tommy").
The system, created by giant agribusiness corporations ("integrated" monopolies) backed by banks, is sustained by government regulations, hired researchers, and political lobbyists. Those who question it are accused of being against cheap food, jobs and family farmers.

*****

Article by Jill Anderson from 10 Sep 2009 DailyKos:

A new video surfaced in the past week or so, one featuring baby male chicks being ground up alive. They were hatched to lay eggs, except males don't lay eggs. So the 50 or so percent of female chicks grow up and live for about a year in miserable conditions, laying eggs. The males' lifespans are much shorter.

Naturally, it's provoked quite a reaction by those who are outraged and sickened by the video. Industry, of course, has their own take on it. My first reaction is to talk to farmers who raise chickens to ask for their opinions on it. Many have also asked me, "Why don't they raise the male baby chicks for meat?" Ohhhh, long answer.

How They Raise Meat Birds
Meat birds (broilers) and egg laying chickens lead totally different lives, although neither are pleasant. You can see a more detailed account on the chicken industry at the link, but in brief, a company like Tyson, Perdue, or Sanderson ("integrators") contracts with individual "growers" (factory farmers) to raise the birds. The integrator provides the feed, the chicks, the meds, and the transportation. They own the birds, they write all the rules, and they tell the grower every detail of how they must raise the birds in order to keep their contracts.

The growers own the risk, the debt, the manure, and the dead birds. It's a rotten deal. I spoke to a friend who grew up on one of these farms in Missouri during the 1990's. He said they made about $14k per year in income and when they sold the place they were $100k in debt. His family's contracts lasted one year each. In order to get a new contract each year, his family might be asked to pay for expensive upgrades to their broiler houses - in his case, a new ventilation system. He told me they keep you in a cycle of debt.

The broilers tend to be a breed called the Cornish Cross, which Michael Pollan calls the most efficient way to turn corn into breast meat. A farmer on my site told me it takes 2 months to raise a Cornish Cross to the size needed for slaughter. Remember that - it's important. There will be a test later.

Also, chickens are standardized such that they can be slaughtered via machine. They are killed at the rate of 180+ per minute, mostly by a machine, because the birds are all the same size and shape more or less. There's a person there who is supposed to kill the birds that the machine misses, although they don't have 100% accuracy, so some birds enter the next phase of processing while still alive and conscious. It ain't pretty. Currently, the Humane Slaughter Act exempts poultry.

How About the Egg Laying Birds?
The birds who lay the eggs are a different breed - the White Leghorn. If you were to raise a White Leghorn to slaughter weight, it would take 4-6 months. That's 2-3 times as much time as it takes to raise a Cornish Cross. THAT is why they don't raise the male chicks for meat. Instead, they grind 'em up.

About 95% of females go into battery cages to lay eggs (about 5% of the U.S. market is cage-free). You can see a picture of these here. Several European countries have outlawed these cages and the entire EU is phasing them out by 2012. The birds have about as much space as a piece of 8x11 paper and they cannot spread their wings or engage in natural behaviors like dust bathing.

Because chickens have a "pecking order" and will peck other chickens to death, the birds are debeaked - the tips of their beaks are cut off. When chickens are raised with more space and less stress, they are far less likely to peck one another. It's entirely possible to raise birds for eggs without debeaking them, but that would require keeping them in humane conditions.

The egg-laying birds live for about a year. According to the Humane Society:

Once their productivity wanes, typically after 1-2 years, the hens are "depopulated," and many experience broken bones as they are removed from the cages. The birds are either killed by gassing on the farm or after long-distance transport to a slaughter plant, where they experience further stress and trauma associated with shackling, electrical water-bath stunning, and throat-cutting. Throughout the commercial egg industry, the welfare of birds is severely impaired.

Why They Grind Up Male Chicks
As you can see here, it's a simple question of profitability. Is it cheaper to raise male birds up for meat and sell them, or to grind them up? It's cheapest to grind them up. They don't grow fast enough to provide maximum profitability to the industry. Here's what a farmer on my blog had to say about this practice:

Personally I think it's incumbent on us as livestock keepers and people responsible for the support of the breeder industry, to treat and handle our animals with respect, they deserve it, they feed us, clothe us, put a roof over our heads, give us money to go on vacation, etc. They do so by giving up their lives at our request, on our schedule. We should be thankful for that and not forget who is supporting us.

That's why I'm more horrified at the debeaking machine, cage layer farms, confinement hog farms, etc. than I am at the auger, at least that's a quick death. Personally, I see those cockerels being killed as day olds more as incredibly wasteful of a life than anything else...

The thing that really floors me is that the industry absolutely doesn't understand why the general public gets upset at seeing these videos. People in the public, I'm sure, looks at videos like these and say to themselves "If I were to do this to puppies and kittens I'd go to prison, be fined, and be prohibited from ever owning an animal again". Actually if you were caught treating a horse or a cow this way and you weren't licensed as a business, you'd probably be treated the same. And yet, a company like Hi-Line is not only not fined, etc. but are applauded as an efficient business by industry and government. By God, they're just "Feeding the world".

The only thing that Hi-Line is doing wrong, by industry standards and government regulation, as far as animal husbandry and cruelty goes, is letting some of those chicks go through the sanitizer and leaving some to die on the factory floor.

What You Can Do Politically
The big battleground right now is Ohio. Huge surprise, right? Same as with the freakin' Presidential elections. They are the #2 egg producing state and the Humane Society is trying to ban battery cages. Big Ag has decided to play offense and they have a ballot initiative on this year's ballot. It's called Issue 2 and it would establish an industry-dominated board to decide animal welfare issues. Standing with the Humane Society against Issue 2 are the Ohio Farmers Union, the Ohio Environmental Stewardship Alliance, and the Ohio Sierra Club.

What You Can Do At Home
The best thing you can do is to get some chickens for your backyard! This is a growing trend, as they are fun pets, they eat bugs and kitchen scraps, they produce a high quality fertilizer (manure), and they lay eggs. I wrote up a post about backyard chickens for folks who are just starting out, but there are numerous websites, books, and magazines on the topic with far more information than I can provide.

If getting your own chickens is a little too extreme for you, check out a site like eatwellguide.org or localharvest.org to find a humane source of eggs near you. Otherwise, cage-free eggs or free-range eggs from the store might be your best bet. Even if they aren't ideal, they are still better than the alternative. And if you find those eggs expensive, you might wish to just plain old decrease your egg consumption. Check out vegan recipes to find ways to cook without eggs (even if you don't plan to go vegan).

*****

NY Times report 4 Oct 09 "Woman's shattered life..." shows even worse problems in the beef industry due to profiteering, corporate lobbying, and lax government inspection.

See also Wikipedia on corporate farming, contract farming, industrial agriculture, US Center for Food Safety's publication Corporate Lies (2002); Jill Anderson's blog La Vida Locavore and Toronto Food Policy Council's Foodforethought.net; the 90 min documentaries Our Daily Bread (Germany 2005) and Food Inc. (USA 2009).

Biochar - by Joanna Santa Barbara

Joanna Santa Barbara is a peace and ecological activist living in Atamai, a sustainable village in New Zealand which incorporates many of the recommended practices, including biochar and organic gardening. See her Atamai blog and Transition Aotearoa (TransitionTowns NZ). Her article first appeared in Peace Magazine 25.2 (Apr-June 2009)
*****
James Lovelock, remarkable for his just-in-time discovery of the ozone hole, and then for his fruitful Gaia hypothesis (that the Earth is a complex interacting system which self-regulates to preserve life), was recently interviewed on mitigation of climate change.[1] At nearly 90, he pulls no punches. It is too late to contain carbon emissions, he says. Trying to sequester carbon dioxide in underground caverns is a waste of time, and there is little to be hoped for from alternatives to fossil fuel energy.

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.

What? And we've been agonizing over fossil fuel emissions, carbon tax, alternative energy and so on? We just have to bury charcoal? Let's examine this proposal, beginning with the carbon cycle.

Carbon cycle

Two of the greenhouses gases threatening the health of the biosphere as they accumulate in the atmosphere are carbon molecules - carbon dioxide and methane. Methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its global warming action. The third main component of greenhouse gases is nitrous oxide (8% and 298 times as potent), which we will discuss later. Carbon in various forms resides in the deep layers of the earth; in the surface, biologically active soil; in the ocean, both deep and shallow levels; in the layer of plant and animal material on the surface of the earth; and in the atmosphere.

In the deep layers of the earth and of the ocean, there is little movement of carbon, except when humans unearth it as fossil fuels and send it into the atmosphere. Between the atmosphere and the shallow ocean, the soil and the living beings of the biosphere, there is continual exchange of carbon.

This is the carbon cycle. Our problem is that human activity has altered the carbon cycle in ways that have increased atmospheric carbon. Carbon dioxide and methane, together with water vapor and nitrous oxide, act to trap radiant sun energy near the Earth's surface. This is causing climate change.

Human impact on carbon cycle

The human activity contributing to this change is:

• Burning fossil fuels, sending carbon into the atmosphere
• Deforestation (reduction of volume of trees whose living matter holds a large amount of carbon stable for tens or hundreds of years)
• Exposure of bare soil, leading to soil carbon returning to the atmosphere faster. Tilling the soil speeds up this process.
• Grazing of millions of domestic animals, most of whom produce large quantities of methane due to their mode of digestion. Soil degradation with loss of carbon also occurs.

It looks as if our modes of growing food, feed for animals, fuel, and fibre are part of the problem. It's not only burning fossil fuels. Our forestry and agricultural methods need to be part of the solution. Stopping deforestation, returning land to ecosystem restoration, "no till" agriculture, new methods of grazing and animal management that mitigate the worst greenhouse gas effects, and especially organic methods of food production are important parts of problem-solving. These will all keep more carbon in the soil and in living organisms and less in the atmosphere.

But Lovelock and others suggest we can go much further in restoring carbon cycle proportions (between soil, living organisms and atmosphere) that support life as we know it. The idea is to turn agricultural waste, which otherwise would decay and release carbon to the atmosphere, into charcoal, which is highly concentrated carbon, and bury it. Carbon in this form is relatively non-biodegradable, and remains stable for thousands of years. It would be the equivalent of returning to the earth some of the carbon we've mined and put in the atmosphere.

illustration courtesy of EHP online

Biochar

This form of carbon is called "biochar." It is made by burning organic (mainly plant) material at a low temperature with little oxygen. Pre-Columbian Amazonians made biochar by burning plant material in pits covered with earth. They then mixed it with compost and soil to create what European colonists called "terra preta," or dark earth. They were not attempting to reduce greenhouse gases, so why did they do this?

Biochar has numerous benign properties the Amazonians made use of: it increases availability of soil nutrients, thus reducing the need for fertilizer and increasing productivity; it helps retain water; it reduces deforestation, because by converting from "slash and burn" to "slash and char," soil fertility remains satisfactory in a given site for much longer. And, it turns out, it decreases emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, the other greenhouse gases. In modern kilns, the manufacture of biochar can produce both oil and gas used for energy purposes. Several different technologies are under trial in low income countries to power cooking stoves and ovens, as well as to enrich soil. One type uses gas from the making of biochar to power cooking stoves. Another type uses small household stoves to both make biochar and cook food.[2] These endeavors may increase human health by reducing indoor smoke from inefficient open wood fires.

Beyond soil enrichment needs, can carbon be buried in the earth at a scale that would make a difference to atmospheric carbon? According to Sara Scherr and Sajal Sthapit in the 2009 State of the World Report,[3]

"There is a global production potential of 594 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in biochar per year, simply by using waste materials such as forest and milling residues, rice husks, groundnut shells, and urban waste. Far more could be generated by planting and converting trees..."

Advocates calculate that if biochar additions were applied at this rate on just 10 percent of the world's cropland (about 150 million hectares), this method could store 29 billion tons of CO₂-equivalent, offsetting nearly all the emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Four cautions must be borne in mind: firstly that making biochar on this scale by modern methods would require enormous investment in kilns in all agricultural areas of the globe. Considering the many co-benefits, including poverty alleviation, this could be considered an excellent investment. There are many current projects running on exactly these assumptions (see sidebar boxes). One new idea is to use big microwave ovens. If biochar were made by the ancient methods, some of its benefits would be retained, but the potential for energy generation would be lost.

The second caution is that continued soil fertility depends on nutrients being returned to the soil that would be burned in biochar production. There is current research aiming to understand what proportions of plant material can be turned to biochar without incurring deficiencies. The New Zealand government has funded two professorships in biochar, one to pursue its behavior in soil, and one to study the process of turning plant material to biochar. The long-term soil fertility effects of modern biochar are not yet known.

Thirdly, the dynamics of charcoal-humus mix are not well understood. A ten-year experiment with buried carbon in boreal forests showed more rapid decomposition of humus and release of below-ground carbon in carbon dioxide, thus partially offsetting the benefits of biochar as a long-term carbon sink.[5] In addition, it is not yet clear that modern biochar remains as stable as Amazonian biochar.

Fourthly, to produce enough biomass to make a difference to atmospheric carbon may mean land use conversion, for example, forest clearing in order to plant "energy crops."

Clearing of forests or grasslands to make way for energy crop monoculture results in large quantities of emissions, reduces future sink capacity and causes further collapse of ecosystems and the biodiversity on which we depend for climate regulation. As widespread freshwater shortages are predicted, the regulation of rainfall by healthy forests and soils becomes increasingly critical, and the allotment of water for irrigation of energy crops more unsustainable.[6]

In addition, such land conversion may displace indigenous people from so-called "marginal lands."

Biochar has some prestigious supporters. Besides Lovelock, Tim Flannery, Professor of Earth Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and author of The Weathermakers said,

"Biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity's environmental future."[7]

Atamai: Joanna's home is at centre left (click to enlarge)

Nitrous Oxide and the Nitrogen cycle

Now we must return to the third greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. It is nearly 300 times as potent in climate change effects as carbon dioxide but is present in smaller quantities. Fossil fuel burning has resulted in a 6 or 7-fold increase in oxides of nitrogen (including nitrous oxide) in the atmosphere. Other increases have been caused by manufactured agricultural fertilizers (a major effect), burning plant material, and cattle management methods. Nitrous oxide not only acts as a greenhouse gas, but affects human health in two other ways. It depletes the ozone layer (thus causing skin cancer) in the upper atmosphere, and in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, it increases ozone concentrations (thus contributing to respiratory illness.) This is a pretty bad actor. How do we respond?

Getting nitrous oxide out of the atmosphere

We need to stop burning fossil fuels and stop making artificial nitrogen fertilizers. Once again, organic horticulture practices come to the rescue. They greatly cut fossil fuel use in growing food, and entirely eliminate artificial fertilizer use. Biochar production would replace the high oxygen burning of plant material which sends nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

Implications for the ordinary worried citizen:

• Stop using fossil fuels and keep on with political advocacy in this area.
• Buy organic food. It could be proposed that the health of the planet is a much more important reason to do this than individual health benefits. Better still, grow your own and add biochar to your soil.
• Stop eating meat, or choose meat, such as chicken, whose production causes less greenhouse gas emissions.
• Cut back on dairy products.
• Support forest protection and restoration, locally and in other countries.
• Support small-scale biochar projects where you can find them.[8]

Although burying biochar as a climate change mitigation project seems both closer to natural processes than other "geo-engineering" proposals, and has more long-term evidence behind it, there are still many unanswered questions about its sustainability. We need to watch closely as this knowledge emerges and to apply what is useful as soon as possible. The time is short. Let's hope the knowledge emerges soon.

Case studies

In Egypt, over 20 million tonnes of rice straw are burned annually after the harvest, contributing to air pollution. The ash residue increases soil salinity, decreasing fertility. Researchers from the University of Mansura in Egypt and the University of Copenhagen are working on a rice straw gasifier which will produce fuel gas (syngas) and biochar. The gas will power flatbread baking ovens, and the biochar will be returned to the fields to increase soil fertility and water retention. This project will involve five villages.

The Mongolian Biochar Initiative is working with small-scale herders, vegetable growers, women farmers, and forestry workers at an individual and community level. The aim is to produce biochar to increase income, improve soil fertility, and combat global warming. They are using family-level low technology biochar production units based on feedstock common to rural Mongolia. The hope is to reduce desertification currently affecting the land. There is also the intention to make the stoves suitable for cooking and to replace current methods of using wood and dung for cooking and heating. The cleaner-burning stoves will also be introduced into urban areas where currently wood-burning causes serious smog in the winter months.4

Metta Spencer has pointed out the huge amount of wood biomass (living and recently living material) in trees destroyed by the pine beetle in western Canada and the US. Their conversion to biochar and use as soil amendment would be a big process that could be contribute significantly to mitigation of climate change and to impending unemployment with the global economic recession.

Notes

1 Gaia Vince. One last chance to save mankind: an interview with James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis. New Scientist Jan.21, 2009.
2 The International Biochar Initiative: www.biochar-international.org/projectsandprograms/9countryprojects.html
3 Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit. Farming and Land Use to Cool the Planet. In State of the World: Into a Warming World. 2009:Worldwatch Institute.
4 www.biochar-international.org/projectsandprograms/9countryprojects.html
5 Wardle DA, Nilsson M-C, Zackrisson O. 2008. Fire-derived charcoal causes loss of forest humus. Science 320:629.
6 Ernsting A, Smolker R. Feb., 2009. Biochar for Climate Change Mitigation: Fact or Fiction? www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/docs/biocharbriefing.pdf. This is a major critique of what the writers call the "biochar lobby." They liken it to the intense and premature enthusiasm with which large-scale biofuel manufacture was adopted, only to have it recognized, some years later, that this is a serious ecological and economic mistake. See "additional info" below.
7 www.biochar-international.org/timflannery.html
8 www.biochar-international.org

Additional info

147 environmental organizations are protesting the danger of biochar megaprojects: See this article on the megaprojects. IBI lobbyists urged negociators at Bonn talks in April leading up to Copenhagen COP-15 to allow industrial biochar projects under CDM -- part of the new round of "casino capitalism" that cap-and-trade threatens to unleash. Ecologists warn that

• vast areas of land could be converted to new plantations, repeating and deepening the agrofuel vs food crisis,
• small farmers would be driven off their lands, and
• major polluters will continue their earth-threatening activities, while collecting carbon credits.

The "industrial-biochar" lobby includes IES, GLOBE-EU, GLOBE-EUROPE, the European Economic and Social Committee and EurActiv, Biochar Europe (which includes Shell, JP Morgan Chase, a carbon offsetting company, and the Centre for Rural Innovations), Dynamotive, Best Energies, Eprida, Heartland Bioenergy. Friends among the COP-15 states are the business-friendly Australian Liberal opposition. governing NZ Nationals and Canada's Conservatives, Brazil's Embrapa, the Indonesian palm oil association (GAPKI), and the Bolivian Agribusiness company Desarollos Agricolas.

Unfortunately, university researchers with eyes on large corporate funders, as well as climate scientists James Hansen, Johannes Lehmann, Peter Read, and Tim Flannery also support the International Biochar Initiative (IBI), which uses small projects to camouflage its mammoth geo-engineering plans.

Small is beautiful: One alternative is small-scale biochar produced in smokeless kitchen stoves, and thus reduces respiratory disease among women children and "brown cloud" pollution while improving small farms. James Bruges (architect, eco-village planner) in The Big Earth Book (2nd rev ed. 2008, Sawdays ISBN: 978-1-906136-12-3) recommends SCAD: a biochar project in Indian villages, led by Prof Ravi Kumar of Mysore University, supported by Schumacher College and a small UK charity Salt of the Earth (SOTE).

In the dumps -- Beverly Shepard

Sorting some very old boxes of papers, I discovered a September 1974 article in the [Hamilton Ont] Spectator about a newly formed environmental organization called the Garbage Coalition. How I became a spokesperson for that organization I can’t recall.

The article quotes me as saying the amount of garbage “must be reduced” and backing up the assertion with statistics. I had a one-year-old son and was pregnant with my second child. How did I find time to be such an activist? It must have been important to me. No doubt it was, 35 years ago, and -- guess what? -- it still is.

The only real difference is that a great many more people, groups, and levels of government have become concerned about the issue of waste and its disposal. Working for a solution is no longer just the province of splinter groups of radical weirdos. We’ve all heard “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle.” And yet there are still people who think it’s just fine for us to produce 5 containers of garbage per household each week and pile it sky-high. It astounds and depresses me.

After many years of trying to explain and inform, people still don’t get it. A recent letter to the Spectator suggested the Brantford model of waste disposal: let people produce five containers of garbage a week, pile it high on 200 acres, burn off the methane emitted, and all will be well. Oh, no.

The truth is that the matter of waste disposal is just the tip of -- shall I say, the dump? It’s just one small aspect of the prevailing problem. What’s really going on with a garbage dump like that? Whenever a new layer of garbage goes on, I am told, it is covered with clean earth. Where does that earth come from? From somewhere else, where it could have been used for food production, but now it is a garbage cover. The garbage, as it decomposes, emits methane gas. Is that all? What else leaches or evaporates out of piles of refuse which was collected in black garbage bags that could have contained anything? Good soil is being changed to a mix of soil and compostable and non-compostable, degradable (perhaps with nasty by- products) and non-degradable waste which will take many generations to be useful again, if in fact it ever is. And -- perhaps most distressing of all -- people are being taught that waste and wastefulness don’t matter.

So if waste disposal is just one small aspect of the prevailing problem, then what IS the prevailing problem? The problem is that the planet is finite and everything on it is finite also, but human society is acting as though it were endless. Where does the waste come from? A small amount of it is organic waste, but for the most part it is all the stuff that we acquire and either never use or stop using. It’s packaging, disposables, planned-obsolescent objects. Everything that falls into these sorts of categories was manufactured. Manufacturing uses mineral resources, organic resources, energy resources - all finite. Manufacturing pollutes air and water -- air and water are finite as well. Manufacturing uses up land (yes, also finite) -- usually, land on which food was once grown, or trees grew, using carbon dioxide and emitting oxygen.

The waste which is the final product may, in the fullness of time, return its constituents to the earth in a way and a condition which would render them useful once more to earth’s inhabitants, but this is unlikely to occur until well after human beings have ceased to exist, if we continue with our present lifestyles, and quite probably after human beings have eliminated numerous other species as well.

There are other aspects to the whole complex web of our materialistic, wasteful, acquisitive society. Automobiles and roads are a major part of the western lifestyle which endangers earth’s survival. Paving farmland, putting greenhouse gases and toxins into the air (read: climate change) as we manufacture and as we use cars, depleting the oil resources of the earth (for which some societies are willing to wage war) -- these are all intimately connected, and it makes me a little crazy when I hear people talk as though coming up with a rationalization for any one of them will somehow make it all okay. It’s never going to be okay -- it’s a sure route to disaster.

I am not an innocent in this situation. I own manufactured objects. I heat my house. I drive a car. But I do try. I still abide by all those bits of advice I offered in 1974, to reduce -- the number of things I buy, the amount of packaging, the things which contain the most non-renewable resources, etc.; to use them as long as possible, maintaining and repairing them, and to find other uses if they become unsuitable for the intended use; and, when both these are not enough, and there is waste, to recycle. I combine my errands to make the maximum use of every trip I take in my car, and I use public transit when I can. I clean with vinegar and baking soda. I don’t put chemicals on my garden. I grow native plants suited to our climate and rainfall. I hang my laundry in the sun. And so on and so on.

If everyone tried as hard as some of us do, the outlook for our planet would be better. And if we all did as well at living sustainably as the best among us do, the outlook would be even better. But the outlook will never be ideal until we achieve a balance, and continual growth is not balance. As long as the world regards a growth economy as the only healthy economy, we will continue to stress our habitation toward destruction.

Businesses are in the business of producing what people will buy, and if it looks as though people may have bought enough of something, business changes it a little bit. What we have is now out of style, or not state-of-the-art, or doesn’t work anymore, or can’t be repaired for less than the cost of a new one. So we buy more; business manufactures more; the economy grows; the resources shrink. It is stunning to think of how many people simply do not acknowledge that this can’t go on.

This seems like a terrible time - in the midst of a severe recession - to talk of a steady state economy. Manufacturers are failing; people are losing their jobs; everyone is worried. I can hear the protests: We have to grow! It’s the only way to survive! We’ve come too far along the path we’re on to turn back now!

Maybe so. Maybe we’re simply incapable of fixing it. Maybe we’ve doomed ourselves. But, although there are many, many ways human beings have put themselves outside the influence of evolutionary pressures, nullifying natural selection by the very effective expedient of becoming unnatural, as a biologist I sometimes think we will eventually have to surrender to our natural state as biological beings; we’ll have to adapt to our environment, which is wholly contained on this planet. Could it be that a recession is nature’s way of saying we don’t need so many cars? So many factories? So much travel?

Rachel Carson famously quoted Albert Schweitzer in her dedication to him of her book Silent Spring: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” But Albert Schweitzer also said, “Because I have confidence in the power of Truth and of the spirit, I believe in the future of mankind.” And, “All that I have to say to the world and to mankind is contained in the notion, reverence for life.”

Not just your life or my life, but the whole interconnected web of life, every living thing, including “the living rock” and “living waters”, dependent on each other and responsible for each other. It’s not just about a tall garbage dump. It’s everything and all of us.

Photo courtesy of the Guardian: the world's most polluted river, the Citarum near Bandung, Indonesia, due for a $500 million cleanup.