A favorite technique of climate change deniers, free market fanatics, and generally cynical grumps is to trot out some factoid, learned long ago when things were different, or improperly understood all along, to refute the possibility of clean (or cleaner) energy: too expensive, impractical, won’t work. In this article from the Guardian, Chris Goodall has taken points from his new book “Ten Technologies to Save the Planet“, and provided simply understood and authoritative refutations of ten of the commonest “that’ll never work” arguments. Here’s something I’d not heard of, presented in the course of refuting the myth that “all proposed solutions to climate change need to be hi-tech”:
Biochar is an astonishing idea. Burning agricultural wastes in the absence of air leaves a charcoal composed of almost pure carbon, which can then be crushed and dug into the soil. Biochar is extremely stable and the carbon will stay in the soil unchanged for hundreds of years. The original agricultural wastes had captured CO2 from the air through the photosynthesis process; biochar is a low-tech way of sequestering carbon, effectively for ever. As importantly, biochar improves fertility in a wide variety of tropical soils. Beneficial micro-organisms seem to crowd into the pores of the small pieces of crushed charcoal.
Chris points out that low-cost stoves to produce biochar exist; a few million dollars marshalled in support of the groups making and distributing those stoves could increase the productivity of hundreds of millions of small farmers in desperately needy parts of the world, while extracting statistically significant quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere.