Climate, Biochar and Agriculture

Industrial agriculture naturally wants sequestration credits, but no emissions caps, out of any nationwide or global climate policy deals.

In no particular order, here are my thoughts on that: They're going to get what they want. If by some miracle they didn't, all the costs would be passed on to individual producers, and probably double-charged to consumers as exactly the sort of 'spite tax' that corporate kneebiters love to enact on the public. The only way factory farming operations could claim to be sequestering carbon would be through lying, and I'm sure Congress is working hard to come up with a way to facilitate their mendacity. They're going to get what they want.

On the other side, you have a very important-sounding think tank saying that agricultural emissions should certainly be regulated, and by the way, most of those emissions are in poor countries and it's very inconvenient that there are so many small producers.

Yeah, dang, those inconvenient small producers. When I hear people grumbling about them, I know that centralized, industrial agriculture will soon be offered as the panacea for all the world's food system ills.

Then, you have a collection of apparently grassroots groups getting together to oppose industrial biochar, which is being proposed as a sequestration credit measure in global climate talks. As you might have gathered, I'm a huge fan of the potential of biochar. But they make some good points, such as:

... Many share concerns that this technology would lead to vast areas of land being converted to new plantations, thus repeating the unfolding disasters which agrofuels cause. They point out that large scale financial incentives for biochar or other soil sequestration could result in large scale land conversion and displacement of people.

... Almuth Ernsting from Biofuelwatch states: "Large-scale support for biochar is premature and dangerous. Claims that biochar is retained permanently in soils and increases fertility are based on Terra Preta soils in Amazonia, which were made by indigenous peoples hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Those farmers used biodiverse organic residues and compost, as well as charcoal. Modern biochar is not the same. Some companies are making biochar out of municipal waste and tyres, others promote using biochar to scrub flue gases from coal burners and then using this combination as a fertilizer. Some plan to use giant microwave ovens to char trees ­ justifying this by pointing to ancient Amazonian soils is absurd." ...

I empathize with their concerns in part because some of the things that the Biofuel Watch biochar factsheet points out are things that I'd noticed myself when reviewing the literature a couple years ago. Terra preta wasn't 'just' soil with added charcoal, but a rich, possibly composted material, that included a lot of food waste and fish bones. The type of organic feedstock you use alters the properties of the char, and the soil type you're adding it to also matters. It seems to actively promote the leaching of inorganic fertilizers, even though it appears to help retain the nutrients from organic soil amendments. Lastly as regards the research, no one has performed a full profile of the soil organisms that inhabit Terra preta, or can say how much of its long-term properties depend on them.

Though I also appreciate their views because it's true that any large scale land-use transformation runs the risk of expanding monocrop agriculture and displacing the small farmers that are held in such contempt, even though they are often among the few bright spots in the quest for sustainability. They're right to apply some of the same land footprint concerns to biochar production that it's sensible to apply to biofuel.

And also, it's true that all kinds of nasty burnt things, like coal fly ash or cement kiln and steel furnace dust are added to agricultural soil amendments right now. These are things that shouldn't be near our food, as they carry heavy toxic payloads along with any beneficial nutrients they may contain. Any municipal waste processed as biochar could have similar problems.

I still think biochar could be a great addition to the mix of things to throw at our climate catastrophe, but if I should have learned anything over the past decade, it's that there's nothing so well-intentioned that it can't be screwed up beyond all recognition in the implementation phase.

What to do?

Think before acting, that's what. A climate policy that rewards the people who got us into this mess, decreases the viability of small farming operations, reduces biodiversity or displaces rural populations in the developing world is going to create as many problems as it tries to solve. And it probably won't really solve much.