Comments Peter Donovan has made

Soil is somewhat renewable

Good points Tom. As Rattan Lal has pointed out recently, there is little use in spending millions developing seeds and varieties where there is no soil left to grow them. Few of our major philanthropic organizations, and no big economic sectors, are interested in soil.

However, "Peak soil" is not a very good analogy to peak oil. The rate of oil formation is quite slow. In some cases, soil can be built rapidly, particularly the organic matter component. At Twitchell Island in California, the USGS has built two feet that you can stand on in 10 years, in a managed wetland. This is mainly carbon captured from the atmosphere by photosynthesis.

Also, good soils capture and store water, zillions of acre feet of it. There's about as much water on the planet now as ever. It's not leaking off into space or into the center of the earth. The problem with water is typically a problem of soil, which when degraded cannot capture and hold water very well. It's not levees that protect against floods, it's the infiltration rate and runoff rate of the soil surface. We typically blame falling water tables on excess pumping, instead of the excess evaporation and lack of recharge provided by degraded soils.

Over the last 50 years some strands of alternative agriculture have demonstrated how one can use atmospheric carbon and solar energy to build, rapidly, the water-holding soils that can feed people well.

soilcarboncoalition.org

edges

Do your best mowing around the edges. That is what your neighbors will see the easiest. If it's neatly mowed around the edges, and sort of gradually builds up toward the middle, it still will look pretty good.

The electric portable netting made by Premier Fence Co. and Kenlove will contain sheep and goats nicely, it's easy to move, and offers a pretty good defense against neighborhood dogs if you connect it to a good energizer.

soilcarboncoalition.org

cutting co2 emissions won't do it

Maywa, some good points, but as the fourth assessment FAQ section 10.3 of IPCC states, even 100% reductions in co2 emissions in 2007 will only reduce atmospheric ppm by about 40 ppm by the year 2100. That means that 100% reductions will maintain what James Hansen calls dangerous levels not just for a few years, but for generations!

Cutting emissions will help with energy independence, and that's a big deal. But expecting it to solve climate change by itself is a gallant cavalry charge into the barbed wire.

Enhancing the biological carbon cycle will be more effective, and help with the food crisis as well. This will require a transformation of agriculture, but the models are already there.

soilcarboncoalition.org

good post

hey Pangolin, good job.

We're a new nonprofit that wants to see soil organic matter as the center of gravity of future farm bills, etc. What do you recommend?

http://soilcarboncoalition.org

managingwholes.net

photovoltaics and surface energy budgets

David, do you know why almost nobody is considering the effect of photovoltaics on surface energy budgets?

Briefly: The earth's temperature is controlled by the optical characteristics of the atmosphere (clouds and greenhouse gases etc.) as well as by the optical reflectivity of the various planetary surfaces (albedo). A change of a few percent in overall albedo will have drastic effects.

Photovoltaic panels, being typically dark, turn more watts per square meter into heat than they do into electrical energy. The carbon they save over say coal fired electricity may be canceled out by their heating effect due to their low albedo.

Especially for desert areas, I think most people are ignoring the greater potential of solar thermal power.  

managingwholes.net

no one at the helm

Candidates may have positions on some of the shallower issues, but often not the deeper ones. We are conditioned to believe that someone is thinking about this, someone is working on a policy that makes sense, someone has a good policy in their pocket, but I think we all need to face the fact that there is NO ONE AT THE HELM, as Allan Savory noted recently.

This is true not only in politics and policy, but also in science. As global warming forces our attention to the carbon cycle or water cycle, our disciplinary, individualist, thing-oriented science is having a hard time catching up and reorienting itself to processes, relationships, and wholes.

In this situation, the leadership needs to come from the grassroots. This makes for a very difficult situation--those who are considered experts, but who have no real leadership, are then pitted against practical people who are showing new possibilities.

The people who have discovered how to rapidly take carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into soil organic matter (an essential part of any effective reponse to global warming) are not the environmental organizations, not the government, not the NRCS, not USDA, not university scientists.  They are practitioners of various types of alternative agriculture, who have often dissented from the orthodoxies of the various experts. This often poses problems for the experts, who are not usually accustomed to sharing power with people whom they consider nonexperts.

So yes, we face an enormous political challenge. At the same time, we have many many citizens who care deeply about the kinds of lives they and their children will have. There are many, including farmers, who are not happy with the present situation and its possibilities.

managingwholes.net

We're forgetting photosynthesis again

There is another side to global warming besides the fossil-fuel emissions side. That is the deteriorated state of the carbon cycle, the water cycle, and the solar energy capture by green plants.

We can't run our engines in reverse to suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere. CCS is unproven, energy intensive, and if tried will result in a huge disposal problem.

If we could transform most of our land management, and sharply reduce fossil fuels, we'd have a good chance. See PRIORITY ONE: Together We Can Beat Global Warming and managingwholes.net for details.On Is geoengineering worth a second look? posted 2 years, 1 month ago 8 Responses

big markets need protection

There is often a community of interest between the fossil carbon lobby and some common "environmental protection" causes. Logging restrictions help protect the enormous market for petroleum-based plastics. The anti-nuclear movement was a huge gift to the coal industry.

Allan Yeomans's book PRIORITY ONE: Together We Can Beat Global Warming offers many examples of how the fossil carbon lobby tries to protect its markets, for example electric utility price manipulation leading to the bankruptcy of LUZ, one of the pioneer solar thermal providers who built the Mojave plant.

Without serious competitors, the coal industry might better convince Congress to ladle out billions for CCS. Carbon capture takes a lot of energy, and the American coal industry is willing to provide that extra 40% or so. Kind of neat how that works.On Coal industry insider tapped to kill Cape Wind posted 2 years, 2 months ago 3 Responses

balance?

Seth Godin noted a while back that it only takes the flimsiest excuse for a person or corporation NOT to do something new. But to stop what they have always done takes a lawsuit or something of similar magnitude.

Thus the coal companies have it made. They don't need to pay journalists to defend the status quo, it happens automatically. Every little fear about nuclear proliferation, or about any kind of alternate energy, turns into a defense of coal proliferation.On Buoys posted 2 years, 3 months ago 1 Response

good book on coal

David: An explosive book that reveals in plain language the lowdown on coal is Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming by Allan Yeomans. (Disclosure: I'm the US publisher, doing it because it had to be done.)

Developing our carbon sinks in the soil could reclaim excess atmospheric carbon with low expense and huge benefits to all people. The coal, oil, gas, and agrochemical marketers, along with their politicos and nonprofits, do not want anyone to realize this. "Clean coal" is Harry Potter science, but a great way to market more coal.

I've not met anyone who has read Yeomans's book and remained unaffected. In a fight against coal, don't overlook this resource.

One of the troubles with coal is that it is hard to just drop it from the energy portfolio. We have to replace it. The Yeomans book is refreshingly, uncomfortably frank on what this is likely to entail. Whether or not you agree with his solution, it helps peel away the denial that is so common.On Listen up posted 2 years, 3 months ago 5 Responses

soil the solution

That trees make lousy offsets may be unpopular but it is correct. Trees hold carbon, but not that much, and for not that long before decay or fire returns it to the atmosphere. Making a tree into a valuable wood floor will hold the carbon out of the atmosphere for another century or so. Making a tree into a house, or a library, or something else of value, is the best way to watch over the carbon.

Soil, even in its presently depleted state, holds more carbon than the atmosphere and all the world's vegetation combined. The best thing about soil is that it's a proven sink, we influence it greatly, and soil carbon is a tremendous asset as organic matter. We can feed soil with carbon using perennial grasses (mainly in temperate climates) using current solar energy. It's proven, it works.  Let's not use it to offset more fossil fuel burning. Let's use it to stop global warming.

Details at www.biospheremedia.org On Smacking down a bad idea posted 2 years, 4 months ago 5 Responses