I grew up being taught El Nino isn’t a big deal and it’s just the seasons going through their normal cycle. But with Super El Nino, I finally bothered to read about climate change, and now it’s a rabbit hole I can’t get out of. I calculated my own personal carbon footprint, and I feel disgusted with myself :(
I looked up all the ways to decrease my own footprint- but now I learned that’s not enough, we also need to capture and lockup all the extra carbon that’s in the air now too.
I read about all the ways to do that, and I learned about biochar and it’s relatively the quickest way we have right now that locks carbon up for at least a century if done right.
So I thought about ways to make biochar that’s actually impactful, and of course it has to be a collective action not just the individual.
Now I’m thinking, why don’t cities adopt a biochar bin for their residents just like Stockholm? Is this something I can advocate for my own community?
Hey, I can answer this one. I did my M.Sc on amending soils with biochar.
I’m not sure what Stockholm is doing, though.
To get good recovery of biochar, you need a pretty controlled environment. It’s also energy intensive to make; you need a heat source that’s not going to produce CO2, ideally, and cut into the benefit that you’d get by sequestering carbon in the first place. Like if it takes 1 ton of waste wood fuel to make 1 ton of biochar, it’s pretty much a wash. You could use green energy I suppose, like it you had a hydro grid set up to fire whatever furnace you’re cooking the stuff in, but that’s not always available or scalable (in the sense you can do it everywhere).
You CAN make biochar crudely, and we’ve been doing so for centuries, but the rub is that your recovery quickly drops and decreases in recovery are increases in CO2 produced. I was toying with this idea to manage non-merchantable timber on mines, and using the char as a soil amendment.
Suppose everything DOES work the way we want, though. Good recovery, cheap energy, people onboard. We now have a mountain of char and no place to put it. You could go underground mines). Stockpiling it aboveground would a nightmare and massive fire hazard… Etc. Etc.
I like using char to store carbon and it’ll stay for a long time, but you can’t just capture it at the source like you can with other forms of carbon capture and storage. Those other methods don’t work well either… At least with char you have a solid to manage rather than stuffing gas underground and hoping the earth doesn’t fart.
Like a lot of things, char use like you envision is ‘we would if we could but we can’t so we wont’.
One of my happier dreams is to someday see a modern reincarnation of the CCC where it’s a bunch of youth taking a gap year or two after primary education to go out and collect invasive tumbleweeds to render it all into biochar in nice communal camps with good meals, yoga, and social bonding. Doesn’t necessarily have to be youthful types, although that’d probably provide the most return on investment. I would also love to lend my labor to a good cause like that.
i wouldn’t feel bad about your carbon footprint when your local corporation exceeds that trillion fold. regulation is by far the best way, not consumer choice. go
harassinform your local and national representatives about how climate change is bad and you care about it, and kindly ask them to regulate their #1 polluters.Be the change you want in your community. Start attending city council (or wherever you might have by you) meetings and getting involved. It’s hard for one person to charge the world but, making small changes locally can encourage others. When you inspire people, they might make changes in their own communities and it can grow. That’s how you actually change the world. Start small, build community, share ideas.
If you’re looking for small ways to improve things locally, you might enjoy [email protected] which focuses on native plants in yards instead of all mono culture grass. I did port the reddit wiki over so, the wiki in the sidebar has some good info.
The biochar part is a detail, all the other pieces need to be in place to optimize the benefit.
Carbon capture comes from planting more trees and not just leaving them there, but cutting them down when their growth rate slows and planting new ones.
Creating the bio char is a byproduct of using the plant mass to heat water for the district heating system, which is an extremely efficient method of heating homes and businesses.
Biochar as a byproduct, in contrast to landfill or burning in an oxygen rich environment comes from a method where carbon release is minimized. In landfills, it’s methane. In fire, it’s carbon dioxide.
You can advocate for local solutions! The magic here is that they found a mix that works well for local conditions. Your city or town may already be looking at things like this. If they publish a master plan or other planning documents they may include things on energy, waste, climate change, etc. They usually aren’t too detailed, but can point you to other things to look at.
That makes a lot of sense. I’ll look at my city’s website, maybe there’s some type of residential hearing I can attend or online plan I can read.
I think the most discouraging about this for me is that even though I’ve seen countless headlines about climate change, I’ve never really bothered to be curious about it until now. Now I wish I knew how to tell this to other people without sounding like alarmist.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it is not simply a matter of personal individual responsibility. The only meaningful way to address climate change humanely is to work toward dismantling global capitalism and building toward a socialist and communist new world.
Did you know that the idea of your own carbon footprint was the product of a marketing campaign from BP to divert the blame away from themselves?
