Go get your grassroots on 7

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1. 

   Jonas Posted 2:33 am
   18 Jun 2008

   CoolLet's recap Hansen's points.
   According to him, we need to invest in the following four things:
   
   
   an end to coal without CCS
   
   reforestation/afforestation in the tropics
   
   biochar (agrichar, terra preta) and soil carbon sequestration; a transition from slash-and-burn to slash-and-char
   
   biomass coupled to CCS
   
   
   Let's do it!

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2. 

   lorna salzman Posted 7:26 am
   18 Jun 2008

   McKibben 350 campaignThis campaign seems focused on an international effort to create a global climate treaty that transcends Kyoto. Honestly, I don't understand this thrust. Our biggest challenge is to turn our own government around, climate-wise. Until and unless we do, why expend energy on  a future global treaty that will have to be agreed on and ratified by hundreds of other countries? The USA has the chief responsibility for mitigating global warming, via our congress in Washington DC. But what has come out of congress so far (the Boxer bill) has no basis in science and if passed next year will condemn us to utter failure. Its provision of an 80% CO2 reduction by 2050 means a paltry 2% point reduction in emissions each year. Together with the ill-advised and subversive plan for carbon trading, this means existing coal plants will continue to operate for their lifetime. Add on to that the proposed subsidies and tax breaks for carbon sequestration (which is unlikely to prove feasible on a global scale), and we face a full-scale unabated coal-based global energy economy. McKibben would be better off finding a concrete target: supporting carbon taxes, stopping carbon trading and subsidies, and focusing on stopping coal in its tracks. He needs a detailed legislative energy agenda to back all of this up, not just homilies about international solidarity. Time is too short for virtual campaigns.

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3. 

   LGT Posted 7:43 am
   18 Jun 2008

   350 or 450?"What would the future be like for my daughter?"
   http://feww.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/350-or-450ppm/

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4. 

   billgee Posted 8:10 am
   18 Jun 2008

   Hooray Hansen & McKibbenFor offering Hope when there is none

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5. 

   Wolverine Posted 9:53 am
   18 Jun 2008

   Is 350 Low Enough?If the graph on this video is correct, the CO2 concentration in our atmosphere needs to be lowered way below 350 ppm.

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6. 

   hapa Posted 1:53 pm
   18 Jun 2008

   is it s/low enough?@wolverine: reading through hansen et al materials you see that there is a range of values they believe are somewhere near right and 350 is the high end of them and each mention of 350, the right to lower that number in future is retained.
   at the same time 350 is something like the maxed-out physically possible of today's knowledge and equipment. cut human emissions to zero without starving millions of people; capture and store 50 ppm as cost-effectively as we can.
   @lorna: every regional and national government, every organization, every group, everyone -- using 350 as a guideline -- has to throw out giant piles of "answers" they've accumulated for use over the next 40-100 years.
   for instance, the EPA said last year that the L-W bill would stabilize at about 481 ppm if the world followed its example. combine that with the california finding that to meet "80% by 2050" goals, a carbon market would only go 40% of the way there, and you have a lot of dead excuses lying around.
   i really think knowing where you're going is important to people.

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7. 

   Pangolin Posted 4:37 pm
   18 Jun 2008

   That's a bag of charcoal to bury....for each gallon of gas that we burn if we hope to equalize past and present driving. Assuming that a gallon of gas releases 2.4kg of carbon and assuming that you want to get to a negative carbon value then burying a 4kg bag of Cowboy brand charcoal as biochar just about gets you there.
   Add the six dollar cost of the bag of charcoal to your $4.50 (local) cost of a gallon of gas and each gallon of gas would cost about $11.
   Some of that cost could be deferred economically because biochar would reduce fertilizer and water use on fields but it could have other costs that we are unaware of.
   This paper, The Charcoal Vision: A Win-Win-Win Scenario for Simultaneously Producing Bioenergy, Permanently Sequestering Carbon, while Improving Soil and Water Quality states in the abstract: "Assuming the United States can sustainably produce 1.1 x 109 Mg of biomass at 10% moisture annually from harvestable forest and crop lands (Perlack et al., 2005), then, national implementation of The Charcoal Vision would generate enough bio-oil to displace 1.91 billion barrels of fossil fuel oil per year (Fig. 1 ). This is about 25% of the current U.S. annual oil consumption and this would offset 224 Tg of fossil fuel C emissions to the atmosphere per year. Furthermore, assuming that fixed C in the charcoal (Bryan, 2006) is not biologically degraded; application of the charcoal to soils would sequester 139 Tg of C per year. The combined C credit for fossil fuel displacement and permanent sequestration, 363 Tg per year, is 10% of the average annual U.S. emissions of CO2-C." (emphasis mine-Pangolin)
   That doesn't leave much room for the happy motoring utopia to be fossil fueled if we can only offset 10% of our current emissions via biochar. We either have to pay everybody else to bury char too or drastically reduce emissions, probably both.
   To do this kind of mass geo-engineering without risking a total environmental clusterduck then large plots of char amended soils have to be laid out in various zones, crop rotations and climates and observed over multi-year periods. Try explaining that to Congress.
   I'm a great advocate of biochar and Terra Preta but I fear that at some point there will be a rush to implement after a particularly nasty severe weather event and damn the consequences. I'd prefer that we had a knowledge base to work with.
   
   Put the Carbon Back

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