[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Woodchips With Everything

[Bill Totten]

Here comes the latest utopian catastrophe: the plan to solve climate
change with biochar

by George Monbiot

The Guardian (March 24 2009)


Whenever you hear the word miracle, you know there's trouble just around
the corner. But however many times they lead to disappointment or
disaster, the newspapers never tire of promoting miracle cures, miracle
crops, miracle fuels and miracle financial instruments. We have a
bottomless ability to disregard the laws of economics, biology and
thermodynamics when we encounter a simple solution to complex problems.
So welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the new miracle. It's a low-carbon
regime for the planet which makes the Atkins Diet look healthy:
woodchips with everything.

Biomass is suddenly the universal answer to our climate and energy
problems. Its advocates claim that it will become the primary source of
the world's heating fuel, electricity, road transport fuel (cellulosic
ethanol) and aviation fuel (bio-kerosene). Few people stop to wonder how
the planet can accommodate these demands and still produce food and
preserve wild places. Now an even crazier use of woodchips is being
promoted everywhere (including in the Guardian) {1}. The great green
miracle works like this: we turn the planet's surface into charcoal.

Sorry, not charcoal. We don't call it that any more. Now we say biochar.
The idea is that wood and crop wastes are cooked to release the volatile
components (which can be used as fuel), then the residue - the charcoal
- is buried in the soil. According to the magical thinkers who promote
it, the new miracle stops climate breakdown, replaces gas and petroleum,
improves the fertility of the soil, reduces deforestation, cuts labour,
creates employment, prevents respiratory disease and ensures that when
you drop your toast it always lands butter side up. (I invented the last
one, but give them time).

They point out that the indigenous people of the Amazon created terras
pretas (black soils) by burying charcoal over hundreds of years. These
are more fertile than the surrounding soils, and the carbon has stayed
where they put it. All we need to do is to roll this out worldwide and
the world's problems - except, for the time being, the toast conundrum -
are solved. It takes carbon out of circulation, reducing atmospheric
concentrations. It raises crop yields. If some of the carbon is produced
in efficient cooking stoves, it reduces the smoke in people's homes and
means they have to gather less fuel, curtailing deforestation {2}.

This miracle solution has suckered people who ought to know better,
including the earth systems scientist James Lovelock {3}, the eminent
climate scientist Jim Hansen {4}, the author Chris Goodall and the
climate campaigner Tim Flannery {5}. At the UN climate negotiations
beginning in Bonn on Sunday, several national governments will demand
that biochar is eligible for carbon credits, providing the financial
stimulus required to turn this into a global industry {6}. Their
proposal boils down to this: we must destroy the biosphere in order to
save it.

In his otherwise excellent book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet
(2008), Chris Goodall abandons his usual scepticism and proposes that we
turn 200 million hectares of "forests, savannah and croplands" into
biochar plantations. Thus we would increase carbon uptake, by grubbing
up "wooded areas containing slow-growing (that is, natural forest) and
planting "faster-growing species" (7). This is environmentalism?

But that's just the start of it. Carbonscape, a company which hopes to
be among the first to commercialise the technique, talks of planting 930
million hectares {8}. The energy lecturer Peter Read proposes new
biomass plantations of trees and sugar covering 1.4 billion hectares {9}.

The arable area of the United Kingdom is 5.7 million hectares, or one
245th of Read's figure. China has 104 mllion hectares of cropland. The
US has 174 million. The global total is 1.36 billion {10}. Were we to
follow Read's plan, we would either have to replace all the world's
crops with biomass plantations, causing instant global famine, or we
would have to double the cropped area of the planet, trashing most of
its remaining natural habitats. Read was one of the promoters of
first-generation liquid biofuels{11, 12}, which played a major role in
the rise in the price of food last year, throwing millions into
malnutrition. Have these people learnt nothing?

Of course they claim that everything can be reconciled. Peter Read says
that the new plantations can be created across "land on which the
occupants are not engaged in economic activity" {13}. This means land
used by subsistence farmers, pastoralists, hunters and gatherers and
anyone else who isn't producing commodities for the mass market:
poorly-defended people whose rights and title can be disregarded. Both
Read and Carbonscape speak of these places as "degraded lands". We used
to call them unimproved, or marginal. Degraded land is the new code for
natural habitat someone wants to destroy.

Goodall is even more naive. He believes we can maintain the profusion of
animals and plants in the rainforests he hopes to gut by planting a
mixture of fast-growing species, rather than a monoculture{14}. As the
Amazon ecologist Philip Fearnside has shown, a mixture does "not
substantially change the impact of very large-scale plantations from the
standpoint of biodiversity" {15}.

In their book Pulping the South (1996), Ricardo Carrere and Larry
Lohmann show what has happened in the 100 million hectares of industrial
plantations planted around the world so far{16}. Aside from trashing
biodiversity, tree plantations have dried up river catchments, caused
soil erosion when the land is ploughed for planting (which means the
loss of soil carbon), exhausted nutrients and required so many
pesticides that in some places the run-off has poisoned marine fisheries.

In Brazil and South Africa, tens of thousands of people have been thrown
off their lands, often by violent means, to create plantations. In
Thailand the military government that came to power in 1991 sought to
expel five million people. Forty thousand families were dispossessed
before the junta was overthrown. In many cases plantations cause a net
loss of employment. Working conditions are brutal, often involving debt
peonage and repeated exposure to pesticides.

As Almuth Ernsting and Rachel Smolker of Biofuelwatch point out, many of
the claims made for biochar don't stand up {17}. In some cases charcoal
in the soil improves plant growth; in others it suppresses it. Just
burying carbon bears little relationship to the complex farming
techniques of the Amazon Indians who created terras pretas. Nor is there
any guarantee that most of the buried carbon will stay in the soil. In
some cases charcoal stimulates bacterial growth, causing carbon
emissions from soils to rise. As for reducing deforestation, a stove
that burns only part of the fuel is likely to increase, not decrease,
demand for wood. There are plenty of other ways of eliminating household
smoke which don't involve turning the world's forests to cinders.

None of this is to suggest that the idea has no virtues; simply that
they are outweighed by hazards, which the promoters have either
overlooked or obscured. Nor does this mean that charcoal can't be made
on a small scale, from straw or brashings or sewage that would otherwise
go to waste. But the idea that biochar is a universal solution which can
be safely deployed on a vast scale is as misguided as Mao Zedong's Great
Leap Backwards. We clutch at straws (and other biomass) in our
desperation to believe that there is an easy way out.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/13/charcoal-carbon

2. Chris Goodall, 2008. Ten Technologies to Save the Planet.
GreenProfile, London.

3.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.500-one-last-chance-to-save-mankind.html?full=true

4. James Hansen et al, 2008. Target Atmospheric Carbon dioxide: Where
Should Humanity Aim? http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf

5.
http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/2008/03/19/tim-flannery-australian-of-the-year-2007-talks-bio-char-why-we-need-to-move-into-the-renewable-age

6. This is the AWG-LCA meeting at the UNFCCC negotiations.

7. Pages 226-227.

8. http://carbonscape.com/carbon-stories/

9. Peter Read, 2008. Biosphere carbon stock management: addressing the
threat of abrupt climate change in the next few decades: an editorial
essay. Climatic Change.
DOI 10.1007/s10584-007-9356-y

10.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/agr_ara_lan_hec-agriculture-arable-land-hectares

11. Peter Read, 20th October 2004. Good news on climate change. Abrupt
Climate Change Strategy Workshop. Press Release.
http://www.accstrategy.org/goodnews.html

12. See http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

13. Peter Read, 2008, ibid.

14. Page 228.

15. Philip M Fearnside, 1993 'Tropical Silvicultural Plantations asa
Means of Sequestering Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide', manuscript, Manaus.
Quoted in Pulping the South (see below).

16. This book is available online at
http://www.wrm.org.uy/plantations/material/pulping.html

17. Almuth Ernsting and Rachel Smolker, February 2009. Biochar for
Climate Change Mitigation: Fact or Fiction?
http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/docs/biocharbriefing.pdf

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/24/woodchips-with-everything/


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