Can Dirt Save the Earth?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Instead they will whinge and complain and put their hands out and watch their stock die and, when rain falls again, they will take the government-aid cheques and overstock their land and continue the laziest, dumbest form of farming they could import from the cooler, wetter climes of England.
In the early chapters of the book Charles explains his story of going to university for a science degree though coming back to the farm soon after when his father passes. He listened to the experts selling the products on what to do for years before deciding it was no longer working and decided on another approach.
I don't think we can blame the farmers directly though instead big agriculture and how they manipulate the farmers and lobby the government to sell more product.
This suggests that figuring out how to manipulate nature to function more optimally, can actually be beneficial. Even merely stopping to do things that are clearly misguided seems to help. Healthy soil does all sorts of things that are beneficial. Holding carbon is part of that yes. But it also holds water. Without water nothing grows. If you fix that, bio diversity increases, the soil becomes richer, more stuff grows. Including the stuff we're interested in farming.
Much of last century was dedicated to intensive farming and short term yields without any regard whatsoever to the long term impact. None of that has to be permanent. If you read science fiction, a popular topic is terra forming. We'll have an opportunity to terra form earth long before we need to terra form somewhere else. Might be easier too and feasible.
Anyway if you need a summary: Spray cow manure on fields to encourage plant grown. Done right you can actually increase topsoil, burying older plants under newer ones and store hydrocarbons there.
Basically reverse soil erosion, with benefits in carbon dioxide capture.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170314111320.h...
I don't believe that's quite right. The article suggests that manure and fertiliser themselves release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, potentially negating any increase in sequestration due to plant growth:
Wick wanted to know if he could deliberately replicate this process on his ranch — but without manure, which, as it decomposes, can release potent greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide. The former traps about 30 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, the latter 300 times as much. As a carbon-farming tool, manure might be self-defeating.
Instead they propose that compost be used, while avoiding methods of farming that release carbon from the soil.
Jeff Creque, a onetime organic farmer, had a suggestion: Why not use compost? Compost can contain manure, but whereas manure alone can release nitrogen as nitrous oxide, the nitrogen in compost becomes locked up in complex molecules. At least in theory, that limits the escape of a powerful greenhouse gas.
Silver had thought that the compost would simply break down, releasing its carbon back into the atmosphere or, worse, produce nitrous oxide. But those emissions never occurred; moreover, judging by its chemical signature, most of the carbon moving into the soil came from the air, not the compost. The compost appeared to help the plants draw more carbon from the atmosphere than they otherwise would have.
So, manure is decaying animal excrement. Compost is decaying animal excrement plus some additional biological matter handled in such a way that certain species of bacteria take over. Basically, you turn it frequently.
What kind of bacteria take over? Aerobic ones. Now, granted, aerobic bacteria do produce greenhouse gases, but they're in the form of CO2, which really isn't so bad. By contrast, anaerobic bacteria release more potent greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrogen dioxide.
A big steaming pile of manure, left on its own, will easily be overtaken by anaerobic bacteria. With proper treatment, however, aerobic bacteria will dominate.
Worms and bugs need a balanced diet. So a farmer will, presumably, add crop and other agricultural waste to cultivate these helpful aerobics.
(I'm only a backyard horticulturalist. Gardening experts stress adding a balance of leaves, grass clippings and miscellaneous 'organic material' to one's vegie scraps for a healthy urban compost.)
Fair enough, but can that process be achieved with net-negative carbon emissions ?
I live in rural Marin County which is featured in this article and is (currently) ground zero for this kind of research. There are several ranches near mine that have adopted these practices specifically to combat climate change.[1]
After you raise the cattle (with all of the carbon emissions that entails) and then transport their manure in a large ICE truck (but not large enough to get economies of fuel efficiency like a semi on a highway would have) and then use a big tractor and/or bulldozer to unload and move it ...
You've got four or six or eight guys there at the ranch doing the labor and of course they don't live there - and the reality of Marin County land values and rents dictates that they probably live an hour or more away in Santa Rosa or Vacaville or worse. And of course they drive as large of pickup trucks as their paycheck will possibly support to transport their single body to that worksite.
And then you have to maintain the process by tilling or turning the material - again with tractors or bulldozers and again with more workers who drive to the site.
It sounds like I'm getting unfair and nit-picking here but that's the whole point: the exercise makes no sense unless it is carbon net-negative so you have to add all of these costs to the ledger.
I would be overjoyed if it penciled out, but very skeptical that it does.
https://americancarbonregistry.org/carbon-accounting/standar...
This is the idea behind this fantastic TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
We're largely focused on high-tech ways to "fix" the Earth, but the Earth has known how to do it since forever. Finding ways to use her own intelligence seems like a great idea.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2017-2-march-april/feature...
He has responded to some of them and sticks to his claims. It seems the picture is very complicated and we haven't figured it out just yet.
Hacker News accidental Christmas gift shopping tips?
That said, even if grazing does result in a net capture if carbon, that doesn't mean that the problems associated with eating beef like we do go away. There's not enough pasture to produce the amounts of meat factory farming puts out.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cows-seaweed-metha...
...I hardly ever see my desktop anyway.
At the end of the day, technology is the only thing that will fix climate issues. Anything else is simply not possible.
I have to agree that technology has to play a big part in mitigating and surviving climate change. I don't believe we have the social means to change our consumption patterns enough.
Right now, to meet the approx. 1.5 tons of CO2 per capita long-term target implied by the (inadequate) Paris accords, you basically have to be homeless in the west. Just your share of infrastructure puts you over the limit.
I don't believe for a moment we can, as a society, voluntarily reduce our quality of life to the point that our emissions would be sufficiently reduced. Any political system that tries that will collapse, because that's what happens when economic growth stops. And if your society is in upheaval, you're not going to be solving climate change, except possibly through self-destruction.
So yes, we definitely need to act, but that action needs to include some very impressive technological change, because without it, we're all but guaranteed to fail.
So basically, it's even worse than you might think. Not only do we have to cut our emissions dramatically, but we also have to invent some technology for negative emissions.
[0] https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
What actions are you suggesting?
And keep in mind that any action that reduces standard of living will cause deaths, and ultimately more emissions because people won't have spare more for environmental causes.
So bearing that in mind, what actions are you suggesting?
This is before we get to the benefits of having less climate change.
I dispute that "any action that reduces standard of living will cause deaths" -- there are all sorts of ways my life could be made worse that won't kill me.
Not really, the US has much higher GDP per capita than Europe but lower life expectancy.
Even if everyone is driving electric cars that’s just going to lower the price of gas and people will put it to other uses.
a) There is a floor to oil prices. No one will produce it for less than the cost of production, no matter how low demand falls.
b) It's possible to raise the price arbitrarily using a carbon tax, which becomes much more politically expedient once prices are already lower and fewer voters are relying on oil for their commute.