8 ms·

A soil-science revolution upends plans to fight climate change

190 points by theafh 5y ago

8note 5y ago
I'm surprised that they didn't find long lasting plastics in the soils
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Maybe they didn't look for it?
nine_k 5y ago
Money quote: «But over the past 10 years or so, soil science has undergone a quiet revolution, akin to what would happen if, in physics, relativity or quantum mechanics were overthrown. ... Soil researchers have concluded that even the largest, most complex molecules can be quickly devoured by soil’s abundant and voracious microbes. The magic molecule you can just stick in the soil and expect to stay there may not exist. ... The consequences go far beyond carbon sequestration strategies. Major climate models such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based on this outdated understanding of soil. Several recent studies indicate that those models are underestimating the total amount of carbon that will be released from soil in a warming climate. In addition, computer models that predict the greenhouse gas impacts of farming practices — predictions that are being used in carbon markets — are probably overly optimistic about soil’s ability to trap and hold on to carbon.»
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- beerandt 5y ago
  This is being used beneficially at some superfund sites- they basically wait for some natural microbe to emerge that neutralizes or otherwise treats the prevailing contaminant, sample it, figure out how to maximize it's metabolism, then devise a way to assist the in situ conditions to become ideal. Maybe some wells, pumps, plants, or chemicals are installed/introduced, and then it's just a monitoring expense.
  - blingscramble 5y ago
    This is an approach I have seen first hand in my professional life. We have isolated multiple strains of beneficial microbes from contaminated sites (primarily hydrocarbons) for use in remediation efforts. These microbes are very capable and have abilities beyond say the degradation of benzene…for instance they provide nitrogen fixation or phosphate solubilization or other plant promoting activities which allows us to use the same isolates in agriculture to promote a more sustainable production system. I believe microbes play and will continue to play a fundamental role as we find the balance between lowering the impact of commercial agriculture while ensuring the agronomics of said production.
Jenkins2000 5y ago
Is biochar a potential solution?
- legulere 5y ago
  The first study I found on google seems to suggest that biochar lasts for a pretty long time but also decomposes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038071713004653 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00380...
  - Jenkins2000 5y ago
    If I'm reading that correctly, they say it should last about 4,000 years which should get us pretty far.
- kickout 5y ago
  Bluntly, yes it is.
omegaworks 5y ago
Makes sense, and underscores why the loss of permafrost is catastrophic. Cold conditions impede the activity of microbes that metabolize soil.
waterheater 5y ago
"One teaspoon of healthy soil contains more bacteria, fungi and other microbes than there are humans on Earth. Those hungry organisms can make soil a difficult place to store carbon over long periods of time." The natural respiration of soil microbes is small compared to how much carbon can be naturally sequestered in healthy soil due to sustainable agricultural practices. Healthy soil is well-known to hold substantial amounts of carbon, right along side such organisms. The development of unsustainable agricultural practices (monocultures, single-planting seasons, letting fields lie fallow, tilling, chemical sprays, essentially Monsanto's entire business model) has destroyed soil biodiversity and health. Healthy soil can absorb an inch of rain every few minutes. Fields flood (and crops are subsequently lost) because the ground is hard and crusty, preventing soil absorption. If more cropland soil had the healthy consistency of cottage cheese, flooding wouldn't be an issue. Yes, forced carbon sequestration might not work in the presence of healthy soil. However, fixing the deficient soils created across the world from unsustainable industrial agriculture practices will naturally sequester carbon. I would love to know exactly how much carbon no longer is trapped in our soils that once was due to the last 100+ years of unsustainable industrialized agriculture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://microbiometer.com/improving-soil-health-and-carbon-content/ https://microbiometer.com/improving-soil-health-and-carbon-c...
- jbotz 5y ago
  As someone who has practiced (or tried to) sustainable agriculture in the tropics, I have to say that I've long ago become dubious about the whole idea of storing carbon in the soil. I think in cold climates, under dense forest growth, maybe more carbon accumulates than the microbial life can consume, up to a point, but in the tropics that sure doesn't seem to be the case. Most of the soils I've seen have essentially no carbon content below the first few centimeters... all the nutrients are in the litter layer above the soil, and most of the native plants will grow their feeder roots right into that litter (mulch). With a lot of effort and a lot of mulch, you can start to accumulate a bit more carbon in the soil, and a lot of crop plants sure appreciate that, but by far most of your mulch is going to disappear amazingly fast if you don't keep applying more, and then that bit of soil carbon quickly disappears, too. You can't build those deep, black, "healthy" soils you see in temperate climates in the tropics. At a guess I would say 99% of the carbon in tropical rain forests is in the living matter. And the problem is that with global heating, the tropics are on march toward the poles.
aaron695 5y ago
> Indeed, radioactive dating measurements suggest that some amount of carbon can stay in the soil for centuries. This is the only quote that matters. We literally know it works. Yet the world is so so broken the facts don't matter. We have the observable working model, but the environmental industrial complex needs to keep its minions in a constant state of panic which allows it to keep its control. A healthy human being would see this article as how amazing our understanding of soil science is getting. Just last week there was an article on increasing plant root length and increasing productivity that's working in field tests. Increasing soil depth just a little in farmland is a huge change. Nothing is upended. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9 This is interesting around invasive species https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15769 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15769
- DennisP 5y ago
  What that quote doesn't tell me: if I bury carbon today, will 99% or 1% of it stay for centuries?
  - aaron695 5y ago
    Exactly. That should be the most basic starting level. And obviously we don't need centuries, 50 years is enough. It's all set up for fear.
phkahler 5y ago
This totally ignores what happens to dead biomass in the very long term. It turns into coal. If that's not sequestering carbon I don't know what is.
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
  Isn't coal from before dead biomass could be decomposed?
  - collaborative 5y ago
    Yes
    - FooHentai 5y ago
      While there's a hypothesis that lack of lignin-eating bacteria/fungi spurred greater coal formation at one time in earth's history, there's not much evidence supporting it. Rather, general conditions during the paleozoic/mesazoic periods (shifting waters, tectonic movement) likely lent themselves to accelerated coal formation as plant matter was disturbed, submerged, and interred in greater amounts than occurs today.
  - FooHentai 5y ago
    No. There are two prevailing theories of how coal is formed - Drift or In-Situ but in both, coal is plant matter decayed (via bacteria, fungi etc) into peat. The peat then undergoes the transition to various coal forms (Lignite, Bituminous, Anthracite) due to pressure as it sits underground. It's a very slow process, but ongoing.
    - 8bitsrule 5y ago
      Once I visited a lignite coal mine in western NoDak. The owner was fond of showing a collection of semi-fossilized root balls and tree-parts that were dug out along with the coal. Dates to 55-65Mya. It was being strip-mined, and it was close to the surface too. "Western North Dakota contains an estimated 351 billion tons of lignite, the single largest deposit of lignite known in the world... enough to last for over 800 years..." - https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/Mineral/nd_coalnew.asp https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/Mineral/nd_coalnew.asp
strait 5y ago
Another example of an article selectively picking bits and pieces to support a sensational and false conclusion. The discussion of oxygen exposure was conveniently left out. Why focus so much on the concept of recalcitrant carbon when microbes will break down rock and even petrochemicals under the right conditions? Oxygen is a dominant factor in accelerated decomposition. Carbon is continually sequestered in healthy soils where plant roots will die back periodically, both seasonally and from grazing action. Much of the spent root carbon is sequestered in the soil as the limited local oxygen is used in partial decomposition, replaced with gases that serve to preserve and dilute whatever small amount of oxygen may later infiltrate the soil, depending on depth in soil. This is the same concept seen when lacto-fermenting vegetables in a jar. Enough salts would effectively halt decomposition, but just a fraction of the salt is needed when the CO2 generated from the lacto bacteria flushes out the oxygen. The rising acid and falling oxygen gradually drive the microbial activity toward zero.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Lack of oxygen may make it even worse. Evolution of methane from decaying organic matter in soil in an anoxic environment would be much worse than CO2 in terms of global warming. However, I’m not a soil scientist.
  - strait 5y ago
    Methane production requires nearly a total anoxic environment. Even trace amounts of oxygen are enough for substantial suppression. Decaying roots, even if they were deeper, would be exposed to at least a little oxygen throughout the early decay process (unless continually flooded with water). Once the roots have decayed to a stage where they are more decay resistant, there would naturally be even less local oxygen, but they would also be in a state not favorable for substantial methane production. The chemistry seems complicated. To create methane, you need hydrogen, which is a byproduct of previous anaerobic microbe activity. Think lots of fresh plant material decomposing in an anaerobic environment.
jbotz 5y ago
There is one way of storing carbon in the soil for the long term: biochar[0]. Biochar is organic matter heated anaerobically (pyrolysis) until it turns into something like charcoal. Biochar is stable for a long time. You can then bury that in the soil... it seems to improve the soil by providing surface area for soil micro-organisms and to store nutrients. This could be done on a very large scale, and pyrolysis can actually be energy positive because you can burn the hydrogen that's released to perform the pyrolysis and still have energy left over. This may be one of our best options, and we should accelerate more research in that area. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
- chris_va 5y ago
  > still have energy left over ... if it's dry biomass. Too much humidity might tip that the other way, unless I am doing the math wrong. Looking at CA's forests right now, that might not be a problem :/
  - greggyb 5y ago
    Once bootstrapped, the excess energy can go into kiln drying the input for the next batch.
- steve_adams_86 5y ago
  It doesn't automatically improve all soil, does it? As I recall it increases the pH level, which may or may not benefit the soil in that biome, or for the given use of the soil if you're growing food there.
  - jasonlaramburu 5y ago
    The southern US traditionally has moderately acidic soils. Low soil pH is increasingly a problem in the Midwest as well due to poor agricultural practices.
  - navi0 5y ago
    This is an important point to consider. The agricultural studies I’ve seen typically apply 80% compost and 20% biochar to degraded soils because biochar is alkaline. It can also be made less alkaline with better, more sophisticated production technologies (i.e., reactors) that minimize ash.
hosh 5y ago
Biochar. It lasts for at least a couple thousand years, and is considered a long-lasting soil amendment. The presence of biochar creates habitats for those microbes and conserves nutrients, making the soil fertile, even in areas like the Amazon where rainfall normally washes away nutrient accumulations. It can be made with processes that sequesters carbon, both in the charring stage (via gassifier designs optimized towards sequestering) and during the inoculation stage where it can capture greenhouse gases emitted by a compost pile.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  This sounds really interesting. Do you have any reading recommendations (links or books)?
  - Jenkins2000 5y ago
    I found these videos very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svNg5w7WY0k&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svNg5w7WY0k&t=5s This is on my to-do list: http://climatechangeacademy.com/courses/carbon-removal/4 http://climatechangeacademy.com/courses/carbon-removal/4 https://bootup.airminers.org/ https://bootup.airminers.org/ I found a lot of information from comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822694
  - kaybe 5y ago
    I can also recommend this wikipedia article and its surroundings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
  - hosh 5y ago
    As others have noted, the wikipedia entry is a great resource. I was introduced to it on this podcast episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-future/id1494403834?i=1000466849140 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-f...
  - Jedd 5y ago
    Burn, by Albert Bates and Kathleen Draper (2019) - goes into the multitude of ways biochar can be utilised. It's a bit heavy, but in a good (here's the research that backs us up) way. https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/burn/ https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/burn/
kumarski 5y ago
The soil exhaustion per a kilowatt hour given the planet's primary energy consumption is problematic and doesn't shift. 3-5% of all natural gas is used for nitrogen fertilizer production and 50% of the food mankind eats requires it. When all the folks keen on approaching mankind's environmental problems think from a framework of minimizing CO2 emissions, they often miss out on things like nitrogen trifluoride and sulfur hexafluoride, which have significant global warming potential and are used more frequently as institutions use the objective function of (min(CO2 emissions)).
doggodaddo78 5y ago
A pipe-dream like planting trees. GM bio CCS using aquatic life is the way to go because the carbon can be easily sunk fown into deep trenches without worrying about it returning the the carbon cycle.
- goatse-4-this 5y ago
  Have you ever stopped to think that there might be more than one reason to plant trees?
adam0c 5y ago
TL;DR Lets bury our carbon waste using plants, not address the issues that we're burning fossil fuels and creating carbon waste at an increasingly alarming rate or focus on renewable clean recyclable energy...
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Hm. I perfectly understand cynicism, because I'm very good at it myself. (At least I think so.) However, in this case I'm of a different opinion. Let's put aside the sluggishness of going totally green/eco/sustainable/whatever for a moment and think about what would happen if we managed to do it in an instant, like now. Then this would still be a usable and sensible thing to do, because right now it looks like we are very, very late to the game, and every little thing counts. In my opinion this would even make sense if produced as sort of artificial zeolites produced by atmospheric carbon capture by whichever industrial process, even nuclear powered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite edit: thinking about it, though slightly off-topic in this context is another path to carbon sequestration I remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vesta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vesta via spreading this stuff on beaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine Green Beaches! For your amusement: The Fifth Element-Green 1m4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFeLDc2CzOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFeLDc2CzOs Word Up? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZjAantupsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZjAantupsA 4m39s
danecjensen 5y ago
well at least we can all agree the climate models are wrong.

190 points by theafh 5y ago

8note 5y ago

I'm surprised that they didn't find long lasting plastics in the soils

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Maybe they didn't look for it?

nine_k 5y ago

Money quote: «But over the past 10 years or so, soil science has undergone a quiet revolution, akin to what would happen if, in physics, relativity or quantum mechanics were overthrown. ... Soil researchers have concluded that even the largest, most complex molecules can be quickly devoured by soil’s abundant and voracious microbes. The magic molecule you can just stick in the soil and expect to stay there may not exist. ... The consequences go far beyond carbon sequestration strategies. Major climate models such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based on this outdated understanding of soil. Several recent studies indicate that those models are underestimating the total amount of carbon that will be released from soil in a warming climate. In addition, computer models that predict the greenhouse gas impacts of farming practices — predictions that are being used in carbon markets — are probably overly optimistic about soil’s ability to trap and hold on to carbon.»

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
beerandt 5y ago
This is being used beneficially at some superfund sites- they basically wait for some natural microbe to emerge that neutralizes or otherwise treats the prevailing contaminant, sample it, figure out how to maximize it's metabolism, then devise a way to assist the in situ conditions to become ideal. Maybe some wells, pumps, plants, or chemicals are installed/introduced, and then it's just a monitoring expense.
- blingscramble 5y ago
  This is an approach I have seen first hand in my professional life. We have isolated multiple strains of beneficial microbes from contaminated sites (primarily hydrocarbons) for use in remediation efforts. These microbes are very capable and have abilities beyond say the degradation of benzene…for instance they provide nitrogen fixation or phosphate solubilization or other plant promoting activities which allows us to use the same isolates in agriculture to promote a more sustainable production system. I believe microbes play and will continue to play a fundamental role as we find the balance between lowering the impact of commercial agriculture while ensuring the agronomics of said production.

Jenkins2000 5y ago

Is biochar a potential solution?

legulere 5y ago
The first study I found on google seems to suggest that biochar lasts for a pretty long time but also decomposes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038071713004653 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00380...
- Jenkins2000 5y ago
  If I'm reading that correctly, they say it should last about 4,000 years which should get us pretty far.
kickout 5y ago
Bluntly, yes it is.

omegaworks 5y ago

Makes sense, and underscores why the loss of permafrost is catastrophic. Cold conditions impede the activity of microbes that metabolize soil.

waterheater 5y ago

"One teaspoon of healthy soil contains more bacteria, fungi and other microbes than there are humans on Earth. Those hungry organisms can make soil a difficult place to store carbon over long periods of time." The natural respiration of soil microbes is small compared to how much carbon can be naturally sequestered in healthy soil due to sustainable agricultural practices. Healthy soil is well-known to hold substantial amounts of carbon, right along side such organisms. The development of unsustainable agricultural practices (monocultures, single-planting seasons, letting fields lie fallow, tilling, chemical sprays, essentially Monsanto's entire business model) has destroyed soil biodiversity and health. Healthy soil can absorb an inch of rain every few minutes. Fields flood (and crops are subsequently lost) because the ground is hard and crusty, preventing soil absorption. If more cropland soil had the healthy consistency of cottage cheese, flooding wouldn't be an issue. Yes, forced carbon sequestration might not work in the presence of healthy soil. However, fixing the deficient soils created across the world from unsustainable industrial agriculture practices will naturally sequester carbon. I would love to know exactly how much carbon no longer is trapped in our soils that once was due to the last 100+ years of unsustainable industrialized agriculture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://microbiometer.com/improving-soil-health-and-carbon-content/ https://microbiometer.com/improving-soil-health-and-carbon-c...

jbotz 5y ago
As someone who has practiced (or tried to) sustainable agriculture in the tropics, I have to say that I've long ago become dubious about the whole idea of storing carbon in the soil. I think in cold climates, under dense forest growth, maybe more carbon accumulates than the microbial life can consume, up to a point, but in the tropics that sure doesn't seem to be the case. Most of the soils I've seen have essentially no carbon content below the first few centimeters... all the nutrients are in the litter layer above the soil, and most of the native plants will grow their feeder roots right into that litter (mulch). With a lot of effort and a lot of mulch, you can start to accumulate a bit more carbon in the soil, and a lot of crop plants sure appreciate that, but by far most of your mulch is going to disappear amazingly fast if you don't keep applying more, and then that bit of soil carbon quickly disappears, too. You can't build those deep, black, "healthy" soils you see in temperate climates in the tropics. At a guess I would say 99% of the carbon in tropical rain forests is in the living matter. And the problem is that with global heating, the tropics are on march toward the poles.

aaron695 5y ago

> Indeed, radioactive dating measurements suggest that some amount of carbon can stay in the soil for centuries. This is the only quote that matters. We literally know it works. Yet the world is so so broken the facts don't matter. We have the observable working model, but the environmental industrial complex needs to keep its minions in a constant state of panic which allows it to keep its control. A healthy human being would see this article as how amazing our understanding of soil science is getting. Just last week there was an article on increasing plant root length and increasing productivity that's working in field tests. Increasing soil depth just a little in farmland is a huge change. Nothing is upended. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9 This is interesting around invasive species https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15769 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15769

DennisP 5y ago
What that quote doesn't tell me: if I bury carbon today, will 99% or 1% of it stay for centuries?
- aaron695 5y ago
  Exactly. That should be the most basic starting level. And obviously we don't need centuries, 50 years is enough. It's all set up for fear.

phkahler 5y ago

This totally ignores what happens to dead biomass in the very long term. It turns into coal. If that's not sequestering carbon I don't know what is.

CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
Isn't coal from before dead biomass could be decomposed?
- collaborative 5y ago
  Yes
  - FooHentai 5y ago
    While there's a hypothesis that lack of lignin-eating bacteria/fungi spurred greater coal formation at one time in earth's history, there's not much evidence supporting it. Rather, general conditions during the paleozoic/mesazoic periods (shifting waters, tectonic movement) likely lent themselves to accelerated coal formation as plant matter was disturbed, submerged, and interred in greater amounts than occurs today.
- FooHentai 5y ago
  No. There are two prevailing theories of how coal is formed - Drift or In-Situ but in both, coal is plant matter decayed (via bacteria, fungi etc) into peat. The peat then undergoes the transition to various coal forms (Lignite, Bituminous, Anthracite) due to pressure as it sits underground. It's a very slow process, but ongoing.
  - 8bitsrule 5y ago
    Once I visited a lignite coal mine in western NoDak. The owner was fond of showing a collection of semi-fossilized root balls and tree-parts that were dug out along with the coal. Dates to 55-65Mya. It was being strip-mined, and it was close to the surface too. "Western North Dakota contains an estimated 351 billion tons of lignite, the single largest deposit of lignite known in the world... enough to last for over 800 years..." - https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/Mineral/nd_coalnew.asp https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/Mineral/nd_coalnew.asp

strait 5y ago

Another example of an article selectively picking bits and pieces to support a sensational and false conclusion. The discussion of oxygen exposure was conveniently left out. Why focus so much on the concept of recalcitrant carbon when microbes will break down rock and even petrochemicals under the right conditions? Oxygen is a dominant factor in accelerated decomposition. Carbon is continually sequestered in healthy soils where plant roots will die back periodically, both seasonally and from grazing action. Much of the spent root carbon is sequestered in the soil as the limited local oxygen is used in partial decomposition, replaced with gases that serve to preserve and dilute whatever small amount of oxygen may later infiltrate the soil, depending on depth in soil. This is the same concept seen when lacto-fermenting vegetables in a jar. Enough salts would effectively halt decomposition, but just a fraction of the salt is needed when the CO2 generated from the lacto bacteria flushes out the oxygen. The rising acid and falling oxygen gradually drive the microbial activity toward zero.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Lack of oxygen may make it even worse. Evolution of methane from decaying organic matter in soil in an anoxic environment would be much worse than CO2 in terms of global warming. However, I’m not a soil scientist.
- strait 5y ago
  Methane production requires nearly a total anoxic environment. Even trace amounts of oxygen are enough for substantial suppression. Decaying roots, even if they were deeper, would be exposed to at least a little oxygen throughout the early decay process (unless continually flooded with water). Once the roots have decayed to a stage where they are more decay resistant, there would naturally be even less local oxygen, but they would also be in a state not favorable for substantial methane production. The chemistry seems complicated. To create methane, you need hydrogen, which is a byproduct of previous anaerobic microbe activity. Think lots of fresh plant material decomposing in an anaerobic environment.

jbotz 5y ago

There is one way of storing carbon in the soil for the long term: biochar[0]. Biochar is organic matter heated anaerobically (pyrolysis) until it turns into something like charcoal. Biochar is stable for a long time. You can then bury that in the soil... it seems to improve the soil by providing surface area for soil micro-organisms and to store nutrients. This could be done on a very large scale, and pyrolysis can actually be energy positive because you can burn the hydrogen that's released to perform the pyrolysis and still have energy left over. This may be one of our best options, and we should accelerate more research in that area. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

chris_va 5y ago
> still have energy left over ... if it's dry biomass. Too much humidity might tip that the other way, unless I am doing the math wrong. Looking at CA's forests right now, that might not be a problem :/
- greggyb 5y ago
  Once bootstrapped, the excess energy can go into kiln drying the input for the next batch.
steve_adams_86 5y ago
It doesn't automatically improve all soil, does it? As I recall it increases the pH level, which may or may not benefit the soil in that biome, or for the given use of the soil if you're growing food there.
- jasonlaramburu 5y ago
  The southern US traditionally has moderately acidic soils. Low soil pH is increasingly a problem in the Midwest as well due to poor agricultural practices.
- navi0 5y ago
  This is an important point to consider. The agricultural studies I’ve seen typically apply 80% compost and 20% biochar to degraded soils because biochar is alkaline. It can also be made less alkaline with better, more sophisticated production technologies (i.e., reactors) that minimize ash.

hosh 5y ago

Biochar. It lasts for at least a couple thousand years, and is considered a long-lasting soil amendment. The presence of biochar creates habitats for those microbes and conserves nutrients, making the soil fertile, even in areas like the Amazon where rainfall normally washes away nutrient accumulations. It can be made with processes that sequesters carbon, both in the charring stage (via gassifier designs optimized towards sequestering) and during the inoculation stage where it can capture greenhouse gases emitted by a compost pile.

throwaway894345 5y ago
This sounds really interesting. Do you have any reading recommendations (links or books)?
- Jenkins2000 5y ago
  I found these videos very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svNg5w7WY0k&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svNg5w7WY0k&t=5s This is on my to-do list: http://climatechangeacademy.com/courses/carbon-removal/4 http://climatechangeacademy.com/courses/carbon-removal/4 https://bootup.airminers.org/ https://bootup.airminers.org/ I found a lot of information from comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822694
- kaybe 5y ago
  I can also recommend this wikipedia article and its surroundings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
- hosh 5y ago
  As others have noted, the wikipedia entry is a great resource. I was introduced to it on this podcast episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-future/id1494403834?i=1000466849140 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-f...
- Jedd 5y ago
  Burn, by Albert Bates and Kathleen Draper (2019) - goes into the multitude of ways biochar can be utilised. It's a bit heavy, but in a good (here's the research that backs us up) way. https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/burn/ https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/burn/

kumarski 5y ago

The soil exhaustion per a kilowatt hour given the planet's primary energy consumption is problematic and doesn't shift. 3-5% of all natural gas is used for nitrogen fertilizer production and 50% of the food mankind eats requires it. When all the folks keen on approaching mankind's environmental problems think from a framework of minimizing CO2 emissions, they often miss out on things like nitrogen trifluoride and sulfur hexafluoride, which have significant global warming potential and are used more frequently as institutions use the objective function of (min(CO2 emissions)).

doggodaddo78 5y ago

A pipe-dream like planting trees. GM bio CCS using aquatic life is the way to go because the carbon can be easily sunk fown into deep trenches without worrying about it returning the the carbon cycle.

goatse-4-this 5y ago
Have you ever stopped to think that there might be more than one reason to plant trees?

adam0c 5y ago

TL;DR Lets bury our carbon waste using plants, not address the issues that we're burning fossil fuels and creating carbon waste at an increasingly alarming rate or focus on renewable clean recyclable energy...

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Hm. I perfectly understand cynicism, because I'm very good at it myself. (At least I think so.) However, in this case I'm of a different opinion. Let's put aside the sluggishness of going totally green/eco/sustainable/whatever for a moment and think about what would happen if we managed to do it in an instant, like now. Then this would still be a usable and sensible thing to do, because right now it looks like we are very, very late to the game, and every little thing counts. In my opinion this would even make sense if produced as sort of artificial zeolites produced by atmospheric carbon capture by whichever industrial process, even nuclear powered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite edit: thinking about it, though slightly off-topic in this context is another path to carbon sequestration I remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vesta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vesta via spreading this stuff on beaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine Green Beaches! For your amusement: The Fifth Element-Green 1m4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFeLDc2CzOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFeLDc2CzOs Word Up? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZjAantupsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZjAantupsA 4m39s

danecjensen 5y ago

well at least we can all agree the climate models are wrong.