Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

The Atkins plan of the low carbon world. (Guardian) 

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, Goodall abandons his usual scepticism and proposes we turn 200m hectares of "forests, savannah and croplands" into biochar plantations. Thus we would increase carbon uptake by grubbing up "wooded areas containing slow-growing trees" (that is, natural forest) and planting "faster growing species". This is environmentalism?

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

The arable area of the [world] is 1.36bn. 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 double the cropped area, trashing most of the remaining natural habitats. Read was one of the promoters of first-generation liquid biofuels, which played a major role in the rise in the price of food last year, throwing millions into malnutrition. Have these people learned nothing?

Of course they claim everything can be reconciled. Peter Read says the new plantations can be created across "land on which the occupants are not engaged in economic activity". 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.

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As Almuth Ernsting and Rachel Smolker of Biofuelwatch point out, many of the claims made for biochar don't stand up. In some cases charcoal in the soil improves plant growth, in others it suppresses it. Just burying carbon bears little relation to the farming techniques that 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 overlooked or obscured. Nor does this mean that charcoal can't be made on a small scale, from material that would otherwise go to waste. But the idea that biochar is a universal solution that 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 there is an easy way out.

Pat Donnelly : "If we poison our food supply by "wasting" carbon for an obscure climatic theory, then will we reap the whirlwind. If plants take up the buckminsterfullenes formed by burning carbon into their structure, then we and our livestock will then absorb them. Intestinal cancer anyone? Take care when you mess with my food and water!"

“Obscure climate theory” – interesting indeed, especially when you then dismiss the glaring reality our food is already heavily contaminated with chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, herbicides, insecticides and toxic fertilisers. Intestinal cancer is already in abundance as is bowel cancer, all caused by our already toxic foods.

Biochar is stupid, better to remove the cause rather than continue with the failed symptom suppression approach. The ideological human has done everything in its power to bury the problems it causes, whether in the ground or in the sea, none have worked, just made it worse. So logically burying waste is just the same as pushing it under the carpet. In the end you can't clean or walk on the carpet, then it begins to rot and your house becomes unliveable. You may be able to change the carpet and clean the floor, but you can't replace the soil with more chemicals. The same symptoms are prevalent in just about every agricultural area in the world, toxic, biologically dying soils.

Explain why climate change is an obscure theory and your verifiable supporting evidence for it being so. I think the real obscure theory is, climate change is just an unsubstantiated theory.

Biochar is A Good Thing.

And a beat up? But Rudd can deal with that.

But we have to source it, so if we wish to use coal, please ensure that the radioactive particles are taken out ok?

Timber is a better source of char, but it is the aerated carbon along with any trace minerals, that makes it so useful in organic farming. The holes in the carbon structure may self contaminate with chemicals if used in chem intensive farming.

And don't forget nano effects: nano particles are most easily formed in carbon. They are then a form of fibre that will make asbestos look like candy. The mesotheliomas are caused by cell disruption and irritation, mainly mechanical but also electrical that prevents destruction by the body of the resulting cancerous cells. If we poison our food supply by "wasting" carbon for an obscure climatic theory, then will we reap the whirlwind. If plants take up the buckminsterfullenes formed by burning carbon into their structure, then we and our livestock will then absorb them. Intestinal cancer anyone?

Take care when you mess with my food and water!

Malcolm Turnbull's name will be blessed forever by many scientists and bio-businesspeople after he thrust into the spotlight the technology that produces charcoal-based fertiliser.

As the Government battles to find acceptance for its emissions trading scheme, the Opposition Leader argues the Government's climate change effort came to a dead halt when it signed the Kyoto Protocol. Prominent among his initiatives to cut Australia's annual 570 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions is revisiting the merits of carbon sequestration's poor relative, charcoal, also called biochar.

Malcolm Turnbull is on a winner with biochar.

Lehmann is a world leader in the study of the highly fertile soils found in sites of pre-Columbian Indian occupation in the Amazon. Called terra preta, dark earth, they contain much more carbon than the soils around them. They are partly composed of a charcoal-like substance, giving rise to the theory the ancients were engaged in deliberately fertilising the ground.

Now scientists hope to work out how they did it. "It's not just the fact that we are fixing carbon – at one level you could take carbon and put it back in the coalmines – but you can put it back into the soil," Turney says. "All over the world soils are relatively impoverished, so that's what's rather nice, that you can get these other benefits as well."

It seems the only problem with bio char is that it has few vested interests backing it. You would think that the farming lobby would jump on to it.

The CFMEU is 100% behind the Tasmanian pulp mill, the continuation of clear fell logging and forest residue burn techniques. They actively campaign for anyone who supports the status quo in relation to farming, mining and forestry in Tasmania. They are no different to any ideological group, hypocritical and heavily biased to power and short term outcomes at any cost.

When I was young, it was common practice to add the ash from the fires to the vegetable garden and dig it in for better soil conditioning. Biochar is just another pie in the sky hope and attempted deflection from the reality. By the time they got around to doing anything with it, 10 years would've elapsed. As for the Kyoto protocol, nothing has changed and it never will until too late. It's all just smoke and mirrors to fool the populace into false hope.

NEW ORLEANS, April 10, 2008—Fifteen hundred years ago, tribes people from the central Amazon basin mixed their soil with charcoal derived from animal bone and tree bark. Today, at the site of this charcoal deposit, scientists have found some of the richest, most fertile soil in the world. Now this ancient, remarkably simple farming technique seems far ahead of the curve, holding promise as a carbon-negative strategy to rein in world hunger as well as greenhouse gases.

At the 235th national meeting of the American Chemical Society, scientists report that charcoal derived from heated biomass has an unprecedented ability to improve the fertility of soil — one that surpasses compost, animal manure, and other well-known soil conditioners.

They also suggest that this so-called “biochar” profoundly enhances the natural carbon seizing ability of soil. Dubbed “black gold agriculture,” scientists say this “revolutionary” farming technique can provide a cheap, straight-forward strategy to reduce greenhouse gases by trapping them in charcoal-laced soil.

Many countries are spending big money on biochar research, but here in Australia the Rudd Government is sceptical about biochar technology. While it’s pressing ahead with its controversial emissions trading scheme, biochar has been left out in the cold:

BRONWYN HERBERT: Environmentalist and former Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery, says hundreds of millions of dollars have been devoted to carbon capture in the coal sector at the expense of alternatives like biochar.

TIM FLANNERY: You can quantify it to the nearest kilogram as you make it, put it in the soil, we know it will stay there for thousands of years, we know it's safe, good for agriculture. Why wouldn't you recognise that when you're happy to recognise a technology that isn't in existence yet? Which, you're spending $600 million on just to develop.

Why are we spending $600 million on carbon sequestration and next to nothing on the scientifically proved technology of biochar?

Could it be that the Rudd government wants to save the coal industry at the expense of the planet? This $600 million could be a complete waste.

From Crikey - 10-03-09: http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20061123-Has-the-CFMEU-wedged-itself-over-coal.html

and link to CFMEU policy texts:  http://www.cfmeu.net.au/topics/2452.html

Well-informed opinion is preferable to its opposite so below is a statement from the CFMEU in relation to climate change:

Since re-invigorating its public role in the climate change debate in 2006, the CFMEU has had extensive discussions with stakeholders in the debate, including via feedback on its discussion paper launched in November 2006. The union's position paper has now been launched.

The CFMEU has been involved in the climate change issue since 1990, when it led Australian union involvement in the Federal Government's Ecologically Sustainable Development Working Groups.

In 1992 it wrote one of the first union publications on climate change (anywhere in the world) for the Australian Council of Trade Unions: The Greenhouse Effect: employment and development issues for Australians.

Also in 1992 the CFMEU represented Australian unions at the UN Earth Summit where the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted. The CFMEU was also present as part of an international union contingent in Kyoto in 1997 when the Kyoto protocol to the UNFCCC was adopted. The CFMEU did not "oppose Kyoto" (and never has). It has argued for social justice to be a key consideration in the development of climate change responses.

In 2001 the CFMEU co-wrote the climate change policy of the international union of workers in the mining and energy industries - the ICEM (see below).

From 2006, with the launch of discussions on its new climate change position paper, the CFMEU has renewed its call for all stakeholders to work together to address the threat to humanity and the environment that is posed by global warming.