----- Original Message ----- From: David Yarrow To: danny day Cc: alan page Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 8:29 AM Subject: Re: Dr. Hansen and associates, please fully disavow industrial biochar
yes, there is serious transcontinental backlash underway against the idea of industrial biochar. and with good reason, i think. we have too many examples of doing a great idea stupid. or, to rephrase in the specific context, industrial solutions won't solve our industrial-created troubles. a corollary idea is that truly wise thinkers are rare. and too many people are single shot, silver bullet thinkers: we must make enough biochar to sequester enough carbon to offset all our emissions and fix global warming. i've had disagreements with folks who believe making biochar from trees is our ideal way to implement a modern terra preta strategy, convinced that ancient indigenous amazon tribes cleared the forest and charcoaled the trees. this is almost a reflex, since most people's idea of charcoal is hardwood char for cooking, and few have heard of making char from anything else. and further, it's an american tradition: before coal mining became industrial scale, most eastern forests were cleared and burned in heaps to make potash and char for industry. first of all, i doubt hardwood trees are our best source of biomass to char. last year i had the chore to bust up char made from woody underbrush. very hot, sweaty job that took quite a while. on the other hand, last year we made char from softwood, corn stalks, weeds, leaves, straw, hay, horse manure, and weathered boards. that stuff crumbles to powder in your hand -- and likely is more attractive habitat for microbes. cleared forest land sprouts with vigorous, dense non-woody underbrush and weeds that can be easily cleared and charred every year. second, any sensible shift to renewable energy begins with "reduce" -- energy & resource conservation. 25 years ago i coined the phrase "more is better, but less is best." buckminster fuller, who learned system design on board naval vessels said "do more with less." we can't sustain our current extravagant consumption of energy no matter what energy source we exploit. this is not a technological issue -- it is a moral and ethical challenge. how much is enough? our first response must be to consume less, share more and leave more for future generations. third, early in geological evolution, micro-organisms in sea and soil generated the earth's atmosphere by their respiration, and maintain the composition of gases necessary for more advanced, complex life forms. microbes form the basal tissue of earth's lungs whose breathing in & out to sustain the atmosphere. together with microbes, trees and forests evolved later as earth's secondary lung tissue to sustain the atmosphere to stabilize climate and moderate weather. trees and microbes are also earth's primary engine to create new topsoil. cutting forests to cure climate change is like surgical removal of lungs to fix respiratory disease -- like the poverbial cutting off your nose to spite your face. the wise response is to regenerate our trees and forests to restore and strengthen this crucial respiratory function of the biosphere, not initiate a new cycle of deforestation and soil degradation. however, that said, forests today are in catastrophic condition due to decades of bad, exploitative forestry practices. left alone, forests will slowly regenerate, but in our onrushing global warming emergency, intelligent intervention can accelerate forest regeneration. benign neglect is not an option. at the least, selective cutting to remove chaotic undergrowth and excess sapling trees can upgrade forests while we generate significant streams of biomass for carbon negative energy and biochar, and create vast new job markets. then we have functional forests plus energy, fertile soil and sustainable economic recovery. such "timber stand improvement" is an excellent first step toward an intelligent practice of sustainable forest stewardship. as an ancient forest advocate, the idea of degrading the complex biotic diversity of these sylvan communities into tree factories to chip up into biochar & bioenergy is unacceptable -- another example of "stuck on stupid." so i share the outrage against plantation forestry to feed industrial biochar production. i believe we can have both mature forests and biochar & bioenergy production in a sensible, balanced strategy. toward this urgent possibility, i plan to develop a broader definition of "carbon negative" to embrace ancient forests and conservation grasslands as well as biochar strategy. so, i started www.ancientforests.us and at our fall biochar symposium i hope to have a speaker outline an intelligent strategy for forest stewardship that includes soil restoration with biochar, rock dust, sea minerals and inoculants. the current trouble is i don't know anyone who can advocate such and approach, but i just rejoined ENTS (eastern native tree society: www.nativetreesociety.org) and initiated an email inquiry with alan page. i hope by the november symposium we will have something solid to say about how to effect a successful carbon negative marriage of forest stewardship with biochar & bioenergy extraction. given all else i am doing, this seems unrealistically ambitious. but perhaps if i think and meditate and write a bit on this, others will appear to carry this idea into fuller expression and action. i can only do my best to advocate and advance this line of thought. and pray. for a green & peaceful planet, David Yarrow Turtle EyeLand Sanctuary 44 Gilligan Rd, East Greenbush, NY 12061 cell: 518-881-6632 www.carbon-negative.us www.ancientforests.us www.nutrient-dense.info www.OnondagaVesica.info www.OnondagaLakePeaceFestival.org www.farmandfood.org www.SeaAgri.com www.TurtleEyeland.org www.dyarrow.org ----- Original Message ----- From: danny day To: David Yarrow Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 9:52 PM Subject: Fwd: Dr. Hansen and associates, please fully disavow industrial biochar I have gotten 200 of these emails being distributed by someone who thinks biochar totals equal the amounts of sequestion. Danny Day, President, EPRIDA ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Enni Seuri <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 1:59 PM Subject: Dr. Hansen and associates, please fully disavow industrial biochar Dear Dr. Hansen, I am writing to request that you disavow your public support for industrial biochar as a geoengineering solution to climate change. It is critical that quick techno-fixes not be used as an excuse to delay emission cuts from coal and land degradation, and other required personal sacrifices and social changes. Given that your statements and scientific studies have been eagerly used by biochar industry boosters, it is important that you clearly state you do NOT support biochar production from increased industrial plantation agriculture. In your paper "Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?" you did not make fairly simple straight forward estimates of the amount of land and biomass waste required to provide for your illustrative biochar proposal. I note that neither in the paper nor in the appendix do you produce an estimate for the amount of plant material required to achieve your proposed carbon "drawdown of ~8 ppm or more in half a century", or seek to determine how much of this could reasonably be expected to be provided by agricultural or forestry wastes, and how much would by necessity come from industrial tree plantations. This omission is a serious oversight that has facilitated significant misappropriation of your name to promote industrial biochar, and thus may lead to significant ecological harm. Estimates provided elsewhere suggest that your biochar proposal would require waste products equivalent to annual dedicated biomass production across 80 million hectares. Do such quantities of available waste exist? And how much of it is genuinely waste, and not earmarked for composting, soil fertilization, animal bedding, cooking fuel and other ecologically and socially important existing uses of biomass residues? In response to earlier questioning, you have replied that "Broadly speaking, our climate change mitigation scenarios are strictly illustrative in nature." This comes from the climate scientist upon whose every word much of the world awaits with baited breath. You did not need to "assert or imply plantations should be grown specifically for biochar, or that reforestation should be at the expense of food crops, pristine ecosystems or substantially inhabited land." Your own facts and figures, when examined, do so for you. It will be virtually impossible to industrially use biomass waste for biochar while eliminating its production from further intensification of agriculture, deforestation, and otherwise increasing the industrial burden upon terrestrial ecosystems, particularly if biochar is accepted for inclusion in carbon markets. Further, this protest urges you to more fully examine and promote protection of old forests. Ending primary forest destruction and promoting restoration of old growth forests would appear to be second only to ending coal as a climate change mitigation strategy. Why are you so outspoken on coal but not on sufficient terrestrial ecological issues regarding climate change? Given recent science that indicates that 25% of the Earth's land surface is being degraded (not 15% as previously thought), it is professionally irresponsible to even hint at geoengineering solutions that would require hundreds of millions of additional industrial tree plantations to fully implement. The path to ecological sustainability is not further geoengineering technofixes, but rather an end to human cutting and burning, and a return to sustainable living based upon steady state use of natural capital. Sir, have you proposed a biochar target which cannot be met by the means you propose? Is so, please remedy the situation. As you have said before to others, I and many others encourage you to keep your eye upon the ball, and work to dramatically reduce emissions from both coal AND land degradation -- the two keystone responses to threatened abrupt and runaway climate change. Whether you intended to or not, your "illustrative" example of biochar has been seized upon by others to support a massive geoengineering of the Earth's land mass to produce biochar. Given this situation, and lack of general public understanding of scientific nuance, you have a responsibility to publicly disavow industrial biochar on the industrial scale being proposed. We expect you to do so immediately. Sincerely, Enni Seuri Finland [email protected] cc: Pushker Kharecha, Chris Goodall, Johannes Lehmann, Stephen Joseph, BEST Energies, Danny Day/EPRIDA, Jim Fournier/BioChar Engineering, UNFCCC Secretariat, Open Atmospheric Science Journal --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org Send email to [email protected] Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees?hl=en To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
