If farms throughout the U.S. and around the world had small biochar ovens, each season they could return a portion of their waste biomass to the soil in the form of charcoal. In the process they would offset fossil fuel use for energy and fertilizers, reduce emissions from decomposition, increase food production and draw down atmospheric CO2 levels. How’s that for a win-win-win-win?
The 2007 Farm Bill created federal funding for biochar, and it’s being developed in research programs at the University of Georgia, Virginia Tech, Cornell and a handful of other universities. The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) is working to introduce ovens on the household and village level in nine developing nations, including Belize, Cameroon, India and Mongolia. The group is pressing the United Nations to make biochar projects eligible for the clean development mechanism (CDM) through which rich nations fund greenhouse gas reductions in developing countries.
Biochar has also been embraced by some big names in climate science, including James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, and James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Mind you though, biochar is not the Holy Grail of the climate change crusade. Even if it lives up to its brilliant potential and is widely deployed, researchers say there is a limit to how much CO2 it could remove from the atmosphere—about 8 parts per million (ppm) over the next 50 years. Currently global emissions add about 2 ppm to the atmosphere each year, and we are already at 385 ppm, well beyond the 350-ppm threshold that marks disaster territory, according to scientists.
But hey, the bright spots are few and far between. So, I’m enjoying this one for what it’s worth—a bit of cautious hope.
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Bart King is News Editor of SustainableBusiness.com. This column is available for syndication.
Contact bart@sustainablebusiness.com.
