Hunting Cattle

After reading through most of Cows Save the Planet and other Improbable ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth by Judith D. Schwartz, my main takeaway is that which the author probably intended by her choice of book title: stop eating beef unless it was grazed rotationally. Through numerous visits to ranchers who take the effort to move their herds to graze intensively one area at a time, Schwartz makes a convincing case that there is no better way to enrich large tracts of soil. If it were possible to increase the cattle population by herding in this fashion, the world would be a better place.

Can they save the planet? Maybe they can get us most of the way there if we also follow through with the 18 other solutions that precede managed grazing on Drawdown's list of 100 things that need to be done. They point out there that managed grazing, "does not address the methane emissions generated by ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats, etc.), which ferment cellulose in their digestive systems and break it down with methane-emitting microbes." If you look down the list to #72, however, you can find something that does address that particular biological shortcoming - biochar. There is movement afoot for biochar to be allowed in animal feed in the U.S. Chickens are likely to be given the nod first, but cows should be included not long thereafter. Canada may be leading the U.S. in permitting these changes. Europe is ahead of both.

In cattle, methane is mainly generated in the rumen, i.e. the first bovine stomach. It comes out mostly from the front end. By altering the enzyme and microbe environment in the rumen, a small percentage of biochar in a ruminant's feed can alleviate some of that gas while solving a host of other animal health imbalances. Hey, if cows are going to save the planet, we should do something for them, right?

Either way, managed grazing still pencils out in the black when you do the carbon accounting. With this in mind, I checked out the list of suppliers to my local farmstand, Chesapeake's Bounty, and noticed that at least three (Grand View Farm, Monnett Farm, and P. A. Bowen Farmstead) are holistic grazers. If I don't find what I want at the Bounty, Monnett sells at the California, MD farmers' market April through November.

With the prices for this beef running about double what the grocery stores charge, I am strongly considering buying a side of beef the way Dad used to do. That way you save about 3 to 4 dollars a pound, but you need three big coolers to bring it home and lots of freezer space. The cuts are vacuum packed and last for a year or more. Even as an 8-year-old, I had the sense that buying this much meat at one time was pretty macho. So what if it's the closest I'll ever get to hauling home a kill from the hunt? I imagine the feeling will be pretty much the same.

The Meaning of Your Life

The U.S. is as cold as ICE when it comes to refugee resettlement. The Harumph administration is blocking access to immigrants and cutting the number of  refugee slots to the lowest since 1980. World population growth (about 70% since 1980) alone should justify an increasing allowance, but the trend has been downward since the beginning of Ronald Reagan's term. People still immigrate, but they do so illegally. It happens all over the world. Most refugees end up in city tenements, not in camps.

Hats off to sanctuary cities for being proactive in making room for immigrants. The choice to offer refuge is primarily humanitarian, but also involves security considerations, cultural impacts, and a little-discussed aspect that affects the chances of continued existence for all people everywhere -- the global human footprint.

In a harsh way, migration driven by climate change and its social and environmental repercussions can contribute to correcting the problems of overpopulation, global warming, and loss of biodiversity. The natural tendency for desperate people to relocate to cities leaves a smaller human footprint elsewhere. We should not hinder this tendency, but encourage it by offering succor to refugees in cities here and abroad. The more people we can get to leave the countryside, the better chance we have of nature battling back to make life sustainable on Earth.

The visionary Kim Stanley Robinson describes how this would work. I was particularly enamored of his consideration of drawing down atmospheric CO2:

Meanwhile, cities will always rely on landscapes much vaster than their own footprints. Agriculture will have to be made carbon neutral; indeed, it will be important to create some carbon-negative flows, drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and fixing it into the land, either permanently or temporarily; we can’t afford to be too picky about that now, because we will be safest if we can get the CO2 level in the atmosphere back down to 350 parts per million. All these working landscapes should exist alongside that so-called empty land (though really it’s only almost empty – empty of people – most of the time). (Emphasis mine)

This provision allows for a priestly class of carbon farmers to live and work outside the confines of a city. Yet, this idea goes far beyond even stopping global warming. Read the whole Robinson article so the title of this post can sink in. To explore the project to preserve half the planet, the Half-Earth Project has a data-rich interactive globe on their website. Whether our role is to help make cities livable for billions more or to make the wider world livable to the rest of life, we all have our work cut out for us.

Only War can Save Us Now

When Senator John McCain ridiculed Navy Secretary Ray Mabus by stating, “You are the Secretary of the Navy, not the Secretary of Energy,” over his efforts to shift the Navy to a "Green Fleet," I was  glad I hadn't voted for him for President. Mabus had the right idea about using the military to address the energy-cum-climate crisis, he just didn't take it far enough. In fact, the military can be excused for burning through our last drops of oil, as long as they do it for the sake of stopping egregious greenhouse gas pollution that could soon kill us all.

A Green friend of mine seemed a little perplexed when she heard that my background included diplomas from two war colleges. She asked, "what do you study at a war college?" to which I tritely replied, "how to make war.  A useful skill ... if you happen to find yourself in one." In terms of our current plight, the problem with war is not that it is the epitome of wasted energy, but that it is undertaken for the sake of feeding our energy addiction. Any power that threatens a fossil-fuel dependent economic paradigm is who we tend to fight.

We have come to the point that the only thing that will save the current crop of humans from widespread die-off is a rapid reorientation to reducing our collective carbon footprint and reversing whatever damage we can. Perhaps even more urgently, we need to exclude the built environment from squatting on the most sensitive ecological areas and half of the earth's landmass. Short of going to war, that all involves too much self-imposed hardship. Make a war out of it, and patriotic fervor overcomes that chariness.

No other human enterprise is as effective as war in eliciting heroic activity by vast numbers of participants. War is the only institution capable of commanding great numbers of people to willingly endure suffering for the sake of victory. All the Green solutions put forth for overcoming our climate crisis involve widespread physical hardship, which can only be self-imposed through a warring mentality. (Geoengineering solutions' appeal is their supposed avoidance of hardship, but they carry potentially catastrophic risk or are unsustainable.)

The war we need is not the pitiful "War on Climate Change" of past administrations. Almost nobody joins a war so ephemeral. War must have physical objectives and culminate in the breaking of an enemy's will. War can be fought in cyberspace, but it has its foundation in meatspace. It must be carried out militarily, not by a loose-knit gaggle of volunteers.

Game theory would probably help in planning the War Against Climate Pollution. Just as we had to do all the second guessing required to prevent a nuclear war and understand how to execute one, we should model actions, effects, and reactions of forcing other countries' hands in an effort to prevent runaway greenhouse gas emissions. Game theory would also show us how much fossil fueled power we could cede in winding down our own emissions as others relinquish theirs.

Diplomacy should lead in attempting to resolve causes of excess pollution. Information exchanges and economic arrangements should also be set up before resorting to military action. After sufficient warning, military actions, if necessary, should be initially strategic and carried out with cyber weapons to, for example, shut down production at a plant producing HFC's.  If the violations don't cease, kinetic attacks could be used. Bloodshed should be avoided as much as possible. Strong arming is the main approach.

Targeted infrastructure would include coal power plants, oil refineries, concrete plants, fertilizer factories,and other point sources of pollution. What we are interdicting here are actually weapons of mass destruction, when you consider how greenhouse gas emissions added to the current inventory may push temperatures past the level of human tolerance. We should avoid taking on countries having the ability to fight back in any serious way. Escalation is not what we want. It detracts from the real goal - stopping pollution.

However, such a self-righteous war on pollution from the U.S. will not last unless we begin taking a stand on reducing our own emissions. We have to stick to the Paris Agreement, ratified, rejected, or not. The military can stay strong for as long as needed to complete the mission, but they too will have to diminish once things settle down and other great powers dispense with their own ambitions. As the world burns, the folly of dominance and colonialism will become evident. There is no need to fear dominance by China or Russia. Any incursion on their parts would be short-lived as distance becomes more tyrannical with the elimination of U.S. oil exports and the end of global trade. Ultimately, the only way to win this war is to lose the same things we seek to deny others.

Once we have stopped reliance on fossil fuels, everyone can then carry on with their decidedly more physically demanding lives, sharing stories around the TLUD of how they fought and won in the war against the Polluters. Their young listeners will look to the day when they can match these deeds of glory by pushing out the Squatters.

Going Tropical

I've got rain on the brain. After listening to a local presentation last week on "Gardening in a Changing Climate," the monsoon arrived on cue. We have received 15" of rain in the past week. Normal is 4" for the entire month. More intense storms are an expected consequence of global warming and increased rainfall in the Mid-Atlantic states is the general outlook from climate models.

Time to brush up my knowledge forest gardening, but more particularly agroforestry (or its more ecological cousin, climate eco-forestry). Trees need a lot of water and, with our increasing rainfall, growing trees should be easier here. Ironically, my understanding of sustainable forestry leads me to conclude that I have too many trees growing on most of my property. That is, they, like people, over-propagate when left unattended, making life more difficult for all of them. Culling selected trees to grow mushrooms and make biochar will open up space for many of the more desirable trees and for planting new species.

The species added could be selected for their usefulness as food, lumber, fuel, or in making biochar and even bio-oils. All of these have potential to draw down atmospheric CO2. For example, according to a 2014 study, building with wood could reduce annual global emissions of carbon dioxide by 14 to 31 percent. Another, more recent, study estimates that drawdown to the 1.5 ⁰C increase stated as the Paris agreement goal is completely within the capacity of a biocarbon-producing world if everyone does their part with the land under their care. According to Project Drawdown, an acre of multistrata agroforestry can achieve rates of carbon sequestration that are comparable to those of afforestation (ranked 15th by Drawdown ) and forest restoration—2.8 tons per acre per year, on average. This fits my situation well, since multistrata systems are well suited to steep slopes.

My choice for a biocarbon crop might be bamboo. According to Albert Bates, bamboo is the second fastest growing plant on Earth, after microalgae. It will double its biomass every year if conditions are right. Running varieties can expand as far out from their base in one year as they are tall, and do it again the next year, and the next. Some edible shoot running types that would be good in zone 7b are the 10' Chishima-zasa (Sasa kurilensis) and the 30' Sweetshoot Bamboo (Phyllostachys dulcis).  They grow in full sun or partial shade and make great barriers - just the thing to avoid panic attacks by neighbors over distant sightings of my flame cap kiln or TLUD oven in operation.

Buying Time

When you hear the name, "Doomsday Clock," of the gauge used by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to warn that the end is nigh, it leads you to think that these scientists are doomers. Scientists are actually some of the most optimistic people. The Scientists are using the clock to show how modern civilization is flirting with widespread disaster and permanent collapse. The latest developments put our risk as high as it has ever been.

What the doomsday clock is purporting to show is that we are not doomed (yet). Were the clock to ever reach midnight, we would be. The clock currently tells us that we are nearing the brink, but climate change can still be reversed in time and  nations can still control the nuclear genie. James Anderson, a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard who earned his stripes by pointing out how chlorofluorocarbons were depleting the ozone layer, tells us that there is much less time than we would like to believe.

According to Anderson, the Arctic ice cap is on pace to melt entirely by 2023. When that goes, the permafrost will melt, a tipping point which is not included in IPCC models. As the Greenland ice sheet slides into the ocean, sea level rises 23 feet. Anderson maintains that stopping greenhouse gas emissions is not by itself enough to prevent these near-term changes to Earth's systems. He calls for an all out effort to direct resources toward drawing down atmospheric carbon with some added geoengineering in the form of deflecting sunlight from the poles.

Let governments and institutions do what they will. I doubt they will transform industry as quickly as Professor Anderson says is needed. For those of my generation who are retired, who are not involved in the major muscle movements to end fossil fuel use and draw down carbon, I encourage you to learn how to make and use biochar. It's catching fire around the world and may be one thing that buys the world more time to realize its predicament and make decisions that will allow humankind to continue to dwell upon the earth.

Letting Off Steam over Leaky Pipes

Being skeptical of the natural gas boom and, in particular, Dominion-Cove Point's ability to operate for very long, if at all, due to a diminishing reserve of natural gas to export, working to prevent this from happening has not been high on my agenda. However, if tonight's Maryland Public Service Commission hearing in my town was of any help in slowing the runaway train of this plant's start-up, I will be pleased.

I addressed the commission tonight with regard to the changes sought by Dominion alleviating the limits on how much volatile organic compounds (VOCs) could be discharged from leaky pipes and valves. My major points pertained to the need for the commission to not make a rushed decision and to consider amending or rewriting the procedures for leak monitoring and repair.

It would surprise me if the Commission takes action on these recommendations, but I enjoyed having the opportunity to address the public with some cogent observations. If my recommendations were adopted, I could see the ultimate result being impacts to Dominion's bottom line, since it would require more attention to stopping large leaks promptly instead of at the convenience of the plant's shutdown schedule.

If the Commission accepts Dominion's proposed changes as is, then I could see the result being major health hazards occasionally realized, impacting vulnerable members of the community who live in the area where plumes drift outside the plant boundaries.

All-in-all, I think the liquefaction plant's over 2 Megatons of annual greenhouse gas emissions is the main problem, rather than the 20 tons or so of annual VOC's. Nevertheless, I managed to pull off my best public speech ever and hope there will be more opportunities to exercise a talent that has heretofore felt to be wanting.

The Mid-Atlantic's Coming Green Revolution

In establishing the Healthy Soils Program, Maryland has begun to officially view soil in terms of biological populations, organic content, structure and water-holding capacity, and carbon sequestration. Everybody wants healthy soil, but for the past 70 years, conventional agriculturalists have been satisfied merely with healthy crops. Food for those crops has been supplied by chemicals known to help them grow. The soil fell into neglect, and in the process, we lost a lot of carbon from the soil and released a lot of nitrous oxide through chemical production. The Healthy Soils Program, then, is a way to recover from this unforeseen consequence of the Green Revolution by reducing the severity of our recent interventions in soil fertility.

In promoting healthy soils, Dr. Sara Via brings out a few principles farmers and gardeners should follow. I have annotated them here with my comments for gardeners:

• Rotate crops - some crops, e.g. tomatoes, should be rotated over 3 or more years
• Limit soil disturbance - soil structure is preserved thereby; use a broadfork to input OM
• Limit chemical inputs - e.g. phosphorus, since an excess will subdue mycorrhizae
• Increase biological diversity - compost increases soil biodiversity; biochar multiplies that
• Keep the soil covered - keep your garden dressed (like the one in Eden)
• Maintain live roots - when the roots die, mycorrhizae die back, too (90% of plants use MR)

  

  Photo by Tamera Clark

These may turn out to be Maryland's fundamental principles for healthy soil agriculture, as they support the four objectives in the new legislation.

Another way to increase soil microbial and faunal biomass, porous soil structure, and carbon sequestration is to add biochar, which Dr. Via also acknowledges in her talks. Among organic growers, biochar is still somewhat arcane; less so with the permaculture crowd. It is going to take a while, however, before most Maryland farmers adopt it unless the Healthy Soils Program adds incentives to do so.

Neighboring West Virginia, on the other hand, has become a potential beehive of biochar activity, stemming from the Appalachian Biochar Innovation Conference held this month that brought together makers and users of many stripes, as well as government and academic leaders. One of the largest potential applications there is in mining remediation. Strip mines and missing mountaintops could be restored to vegetative growth (ironically) with real clean coal, i.e. biochar made from dried manure. Joseph Kapp, Eastern West Virginia Community and Technical College's Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and organizer of the conference, is ready to form a working group for the state to move ahead with biochar in its many applications. It was electrifying to be in the room when the upwelling of consensus was voiced by attendees that this is now a big part of their vision in a state long sullied by dirty coal and other chemical industries.

Like Maryland with their Healthy Soil advocates, West Virginia is starting with a small group of perceptive and determined people. Between us and climate conscious states like New York, a New Green Revolution may soon grow in the Mid-Atlantic region; all the more so if the U.S. Biochar Initiative (USBI) symposium takes place in Pennsylvania next year as rumored.

Drawing Down - 3rd World Style

If  you are the independent type, third world solutions, otherwise known as appropriate technology, can be pretty great. The Drawdown project sees the biggest benefit of small methane generating anaerobic digesters in parts of the world where wood fired cookstoves are commonplace. Distributed digesters in the Drawdown model are fed livestock manure exclusively. Paul Hawkins' group estimates that 36.5% of manure in Asia is currently being run through small digesters and that we can bring that percentage up to 52.6% for all regions of the world where agriculture is dominated by small farms. For the rest of the world, they estimate much greater savings through the use of industrial sized anaerobic digesters. Yet, in marketing their product to the first world, HomeBiogas claims, even without displacing a cookstove, that their food scrap fed digester will save as much GHG emissions as if you stopped driving a car. In my case, it would also save on electricity to run cooking appliances and electricity to cool the house from the heat of those appliances.

Everyone's situation is different, but if you don't rely on a biodigester for recycling your kitchen waste, it may still be better to consider ways to do it yourself - the "it" here being greenhouse gas reduction. Composting of manures, food, and garden refuse are all ways to reduce waste, but they can also reduce greenhouse gas emissions if done properly. The key thing is to keep compost piles aerated. The hard way to do that is by turning the pile frequently enough to avoid anoxia in the pile while also avoiding outbursts of ammonia and methane in the process of turning it. The easy way is by lacing the pile with biochar which is full of microscopic air pockets. I still do some turning and churning of my non-manure compost, but all the piles get about 5 gallons of biochar or more (much more in the case of humanure compost which needs extra pore space in the pile). Sometimes I finish off a pile by giving it time in the tumbler for a few weeks where it gets a lot of air exchange.

If you happen to be a little higher up in the food chain, adding 0.5 to 1% of biochar in the feed for poultry and livestock could reduce enteric methane emissions dramatically. Putting charcoal in feed is not new, but it is being researched more rigorously. The amount of GHG emissions that could be reduced this way is astonishing since it comes with potentially reduced N2O emissions from manure, improved animal health, accelerated feed conversion, as well as biochar's innate sequestration of carbon.

Two solutions you won't find in Drawdown's list are Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) and clean coal. Biomass energy is included as a transitional solution, but does not include any carbon capture, which turns out, like clean coal, to be technically infeasible. If the examples of alternative approaches described above are any indication, however, at the grassroots level, we can still drawdown significant amounts of CO2 by using the means at our disposal. It may surprise many experts to see some of these turn out to be major contributors to limiting global warming.

cells by Penfold_xxx

Stepping on the Gas toward a Clean Energy Future

In a more regionalized economy, the distributed nature of renewable electrical power sources will be helpful to maintaining grid stability. That will be especially important if the country's current three grid system is broken up along regional lines. Base load generation, from thermal, hydro, and nuclear plants will be reduced within the smaller grids because of reductions in fossil fuel usage. The net effect will be less stable electrical grids, but owners of facility/building power sources will enjoy more reliable power than those who are grid-dependent.

Photo by Chuck Coker

The reason fossil fuel usage may decrease is that industry and society are waking up to the imperative of reducing carbon emissions. In a sign that the economics now favor a shift to renewable power, even influential Republicans are lobbying for measures to push for a clean energy economy. Meeting with the head of President Donald T Rump's National Economic Council Gary Cohn, former Secretary of State James Baker represented the Climate Leadership Council (CLC) in their call for a carbon tax, which even T.,Rex supported when he was at Exxon. Maybe Dr. James Hansen and the Citizen's Climate Lobby (CCL) have been clever enough to make the august team of Republicans on the CLC believe that this proposal is their own idea, but it is good to know that there is some bilateral support for it.

The proposal is coming early enough in the ramp-up of the Rump administration that it could be put into play by Cohn, formerly President of Goldman-Sachs which recently made a case to investors that a low-carbon economy is likely (driven largely by disruptive technologies in the electrical and transportation sectors). If it gets no play there, Congress has been hearing a lot about the idea from CCL and will probably be hearing from CLC now, too. The carbon tax could become a Republican-sponsored bill that Congress would be willing to force on the administration. Donald T Rump, in turn, could use an agreement to sign the bill as a bargaining chip to eliminate the Clean Power Plan and other EPA regulations, thereby saving face. Additionally, he would be able take credit for sticking to our Paris Treaty obligations, thus saving him the trouble and international censure from backing out.

For you and I, this carbon tax would mean more income (rebates) but, also equally more expensive energy. Burning fuel, either directly or indirectly, will be like maintaining a smoking habit. The taxes forcing tobacco prices to be so high are quite enough to deter people who know the value of a buck. If the government could also stop subsidizing fossil fuels, they would really be convincing, but that's probably too much to ask.

Battles Aplenty

Not only was it surprising to see so many turn out for the Women's March on Washington, D.C., but the numbers in other cities across the U.S. were astonishing, too. Many cities then rallied protesters last night over the President's decision to green light two big oil pipeline projects, one of which (Dakota Access) is 90% complete. Then, today Greenpeace acrobats hung a big "Resist!" banner off a crane near the White House. Widespread protests look like they will be a distinguishing characteristic of the Trump era.

There are actually numerous pipeline resistance movements ongoing across the country, some over oil, others over gas pipelines. Aside from these projects' failure to address indigenous peoples' concerns, adding fossil fuel infrastructure would rarely be worth the environmental cost at this point in Earth's feverish condition. If, however, there is an either/or choice between burning coal or natural gas, the decision would be more nuanced. Since 2006, the United States alone has averaged more than 300 pipeline spills a year, and technology to predict and monitor leaks is notoriously unreliable. Pipelines and roads also break up wild habitat. Keystone XL comes with the even more detrimental problem of transporting tar sand.

The fact that pipelines (and roads under tRump's infrastructure strategy) are owned privately violates the rights of landowners when eminent domain is applied. It is the continuous, linear nature of pipelines that makes them the most politically, as well as physically, vulnerable subsystem of fuel extraction. On the other hand, if the industry has sunk investment into drilling, storing, and refining, there may be more sympathy by government to help the companies involved link everything up. While there may be holdouts one any given route, there are many possible routes to take. Therefore, pipelines are unlikely to be a complete show stopper for fuel extraction.

Ideally, infrastructure projects will be shut down well before pipes are being laid. From the standpoint of reducing buy-in by government entities, preventing construction of high value subsystems, e.g. refineries, would be better than blocking a pipeline. We found that to be too hard with the Cove Point LNG Plant expansion, but local efforts elsewhere have succeeded in preventing LNG export facilities from going forward. An even more widespread intervention would be to legislate against activities that cause excessive environmental damage. If you live in my state, perhaps the most effective action against expanding fossil fuel infrastructure would be Don't Frack Maryland. There are many subsystems to target in infrastructure intervention campaigns and many external factors that can be influenced. We have plenty of battlefields to choose from. Let us choose our battles wisely.

Carbon Profligates Should Share the Wealth

At the Conference of Parties (COP) 22 in Marrakesh, Morocco, the question of reparations for climate damage by developed countries may come up again after it became a sticking point in Copenhagen and was finessed out of the agreement in Paris. The Green Party of the U.S., while it embraces environmental justice, doesn't take it that far. Nor is it necessary. To begin with, pushing for countries to compensate others for their losses doesn't get at the source of the emissions at a level that will incite prompt remedial action. It is also questionable justice if parties are retroactively punished for lawful actions.

Dr. James Hansen by Global Justice Now

At COP 21, Dr. James Hansen made it clear that the treaty would not be enforceable and that putting a fee on emissions would be a preferable approach. Rather than exact transfers from one country to another, the carbon fees would be collected internally and distributed to the respective citizens of the country of the carbon profiteering corporation. The fee would thus become revenue neutral with regard to each country's treasury. It would also be an opportunity to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, as countries would pass the money on to those with lesser emissions. Economist Thomas Piketty would approve. The Green Party echos Hansen in their 2016 Platform statement:

Enact a Fee & Dividend system on fossil fuels to enable the free market to include the environmental costs of their extraction and use. These fees shall be applied as far upstream as possible, either when fuel passes from extraction to refining, distribution or consumption; or when it first enters the United States' jurisdiction. The carbon fee will initially be small, a dime per kilogram of carbon, to avoid creating a shock to the economy. The fee will be increased by 10% each year that global atmospheric carbon dioxide content is greater than 350 ppm, decreased 10% each year it's less than 300 ppm, and repealed entirely when it falls below 250 ppm.

The beauty of this approach is that it could address two dire problems - greenhouse gasses and widespread indebtedness - with a single mechanism. It also places the burden of payment where it belongs - with those who are at the root cause of the additional carbon emissions. Those people are relatively wealthy, and the principle way that wealth has become so divergent in this age is through leveraging of fossil energy resources. Thus have the rich become richer, and the poor, poorer. Without fossil fuels, the wealth effect would still apply, however economic growth would be much slower or nil in the long run, making the absolute differences between rich and poor much smaller.

Yesterday, the state of Washington failed to pass a ballot initiative to tax carbon in a revenue neutral arrangement. The old guard environmental movement there seems to have gotten mired in the intricacies of Washington's tax system. The state that should be leading this movement is the one with the most millionaires per square mile - Maryland. It might be surprising to see how easily we can achieve our goal of 40% reduction by 2030 without targeting specific industries, and instead, putting the burden on individuals and companies that turn out to be carbon intensive. As one of the few states that voted decisively against D Trump, perhaps we will manage to turn Green by the next round and gain a proud legacy for posterity by leading on this issue.

Collapse's Silver Lining

Photo by Lynne Hand

Maryland's Energy Administration can claim the lion's share of the progress in greenhouse gas reduction for the state over the past seven years, though several facets of the EmPOWER Maryland Program are led by other agencies. Transportation, which emits roughly one-third of the state's greenhouse gases, has not been a major contributor to Maryland's success in pursuit of the 2020 mandated emissions reductions. Greenhouse gases emitted by vehicles has decreased, but not at a rate that would make the 25% reduction anticipated by the Maryland Commission on Climate Change. Page 40 of MDOT's annual attainment report has a bar graph that cuts through a lot of obfuscation.

Ironically, Maryland will probably meet not only the 2020 target for greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, but also the additional 15% reduction mandated by the 2016 version of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act. You may think that electric vehicles will be a big part of the reason, but I am thinking more in terms of the slowdown in the economy that will come about when the central banks have lost all control of the financial system. The Great Recession had the salutary effect of lowering GHG emissions. It appears that nature has a different view of goodness than the majority of humans, at least as measured by the greenhouse effect. While many will see the collapse of the financial system (coming soon to an economy near you) as a catastrophe, take comfort in the thought that it may also be the salvation of the world.

Bay Burps

Laura Lapham, et. al., authors of the paper referenced in my previous post state that the methane bubbles suspected to be lurking under the pycnocline are 85% oxidized by the time the layers of the Chesapeake Bay mix in autumn. This leaves 15% of the methane free to circulate into the atmosphere when the final mixing occurs.

Termed "fall turnover," this mixing sometimes occurs as quickly as overnight when air temperatures drop and wind increases wave action. A quick fall turnover, like a tropical storm surge, can result in sudden bursts of methane from the bay. At 15% of the inventory, the amount available is only about half of the hypothetical storm release noted previously. That is only 23 Aliso Canyon incidents spread around the bay, happening overnight (vice 100 days).

Turnover usually does not occur all at once everywhere in the bay, so chances of this much of a release are small, but with wild weather swings from climate change, it is more likely that all the local turnovers will still add up to something close to turnover en masse.

Measurements of surface methane releases showed that there is significant flux into the atmosphere from the bay even when there is no major storm or turnover. What my educated guess adds up to is about (23 + 47) = 70 Aliso Canyon equivalents every 3 years or, on average, 7/3 Tg = 2.33 Tg CH4 annually contributed by the Chesapeake Bay, which is about 6 times the amount spewed annually from the city of Los Angeles.

We've long known that estuaries emit methane disproportionately more than their relative geographic extents, but the inclusion of heretofore unnoticed sub-pycnocline burps makes the Chesapeake Bay, and other polluted water bodies with similar methane-storing mechanisms, even larger concerns in the fight against global warming.

Photo by Jason R. Berg

Saving the Bay = Saving the Planet

In addition to sequestering carbon, biochar's capacity for reducing nutrient leaching from cultivated land makes it an especially valuable weapon against global warming around estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay. Other measures are necessary, but in terms of longevity, they are band-aids compared to biochar.  Biochar can throw global warming a one-two punch when prodigiously applied in the Chesapeake's watershed. The carbon sequestration aspect is pretty straightforward, but the nutrient leaching/global warming connection needs more explanation.

In spring and summer, the Chesapeake Bay, due to seasonal changes in its upper and lower water density profiles, is a storehouse of methane-generating detritus in its cold, dense, oxygen-starved lower strata. As hurricane season swings into full gear in mid-summer, a strong storm can bring about the phenomenon know as wind set-up which pushes water level higher on the western shore of the bay and an upwelling of water from the lower layer, pulling methane from the underneath the pycnocline and bringing it to the surface.

From Chesapeake Bay: Introduction to an Ecosystem, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, 1995.

Research by Laura Lapham, Lauren Gelesh, Kathleen Marshall, and +William Boicourt published in February under the title "Methane concentrations increase in bottom waters during summertime anoxia in the highly eutrophic estuary, Chesapeake Bay, U.S.A.", hypothesizes that the methane in the sediment begins to escape into the water and collects under the pycnocline where conditions are anoxic enough to prevent it from oxidizing into more benign substances. When a storm comes through before the methane has a chance to mix with upper layers in the cooling autumn, the sudden upwelling of this methane sends a portion of it into the atmosphere.

We already know that estuaries throughout the world contribute something like 3% of total methane to the atmosphere without the large pulses just described. In such an event, however, the Chesapeake Bay (the U.S.A.'s largest estuary) could almost double that figure, were all the sub-pycnocline gas bubbles to escape. Hurricanes and tropical storms have impacted my Maryland home near the Bay about once every three years, of late. It is worth considering that major storms in late summer, when methane buildup is at its peak, may cause methane bursts of this magnitude.

To grasp the magnitude of such an event, let's say just one-third of the Bay's methane inventory were to bubble out during a major storm in mid-August. That would be 47 times the amount released over a 100 day period in the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak!  (Aliso Canyon incident emitted 0.1 Tg. - the largest such leak ever in the U.S.  Based on annual total worldwide CH4 emissions of 469 Tg, a 1% increase from Chesapeake Bay would be 4.7 Tg.)

We cannot shift the burden of climate change to ocean estuaries and blame the Chesapeake Bay for emitting all these greenhouse gases. These episodes would not occur if the Chesapeake Bay were in a healthy condition in which the lower strata maintained adequate oxygen year-round. This is anthropogenic and the cause is mainly excess nutrients and uncontrolled runoff. The tendency of storm intensity to increase as global temperatures warm also gives this punishing sequence of events a positive feedback quality. To stop it, we need to not only think about how to reduce the concentration of atmospheric CO2, but also how to clean up the water draining into our major estuaries.

Saving the Bay with Sewage

With the increase in heavy rain events (the past two weeks here, for example), the chances of having a wastewater treatment plant overflow to the watershed are growing. These incidents occur often enough for us to understand how devastating they are to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. All of the efforts going into reduce nonpoint source pollution can be obviated in a day by the point source pollution of a major overflow incident. Reporting of incidents is easy to check on the state's database.

Nonetheless, the suggestions by the University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science to reverse a decades-long trend of deteriorating conditions in Calvert County's tidal waters still emphasized nonpoint source measures, such as upgrades to septic systems and riparian buffers. That's where I come in, as perhaps the first Master Watershed Steward in Calvert County (once I complete the Watershed Steward's Academy this fall and capstone project sometime next year). The role of a Watershed Steward is to educate residents and encourage measures to mitigate nonpoint source pollution of the watershed.

Aside from the usual arsenal of methods to correct various nonpoint source problems, I'm hoping to introduce biochar in buried compost filters and bunker spawn in future projects.

Photo by sandwichgirl  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Back on the topic of wastewater treatment, Biocharo  (+Kathleen Draper) posted her ideas for the top ten ways to scale up biochar production without inviting deforestation.  The number one underutilized feedstock is sewage sludge. Here in Calvert County, our dried sewage sludge is trucked off to Virginia where they find a way to turn it into fertilizer. While there may be some pollution problems with that approach, making the sludge into biochar should correct them. Not only that, we could use county-owned land right near the Appeal sewage treatment plant to set up a pyrolysis facility. Combined with pyrolysis of yard and lumber waste, this would give the county a growing income stream and save on trucking costs of sludge sent off to Virginia. Even if the local agricultural market isn't ready for it by then, there is plenty of use we could make of biochar as a stormwater management tool, while getting carbon sequestration credit for the state's greenhouse gas reduction plan.

Get Ready for Life in the Slow Lane

Besides lower emissions from electricity generation, the Maryland Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Plan puts transportation improvements at the top of the list of measures that we expect to help us achieve the mandated reductions. The principal improvements in transportation are in fuel economy and in cleaner vehicles.

The relative amount of greenhouse gases emitted by road transportation in Maryland is 28%. Yet, the amount of reduction predicted for these sources by 2020 is just 15%. Not only is the goal not proportionate to the problem, but the expectation is a bit high. The fuel economy goals are based partly on CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) projections. While the CAFE of light vehicles improved by 7 mpg to ~ 35 mpg since the turn of the century, the federal standard for 2025 would require an additional 15 mpg improvement, i.e. twice the improvement in half the time. The law of diminishing returns might have a problem with that.

In spite of CAFE's rose-colored looking glass, Maryland's projections could well turn out accurate for other reasons. Politicians could finally sell gas tax increases to their constituents while the oil price is still low for the next year or so. When oil prices and gasoline climb back to the unaffordable level, driving will fall off. Vehicle miles traveled is somewhat inelastic vs. gasoline prices, but an increasingly impoverished public is left with little choice but to economize.

Now that my wife and I have economized to the hilt by running our 2000 Honda Odyssey well past its natural lifespan (transmission hasn't worked right for the past two years), we are down to one vehicle, which is fine. We will probably trade in our 2012 Chevy Sonic for a slightly larger used car and cargo trailer. One criteria is that fuel economy will be 32 mpg or better. That limits our choices pretty quickly.

Having an economical vehicle is good for now, but a day is coming when that will be an oxymoron. The commitment to keep global temperature rise to less than 2 C will necessitate that a lot more of us rely on other means to move about and carry stuff. Let's hope that other means will be an electric vehicle.

Remedial Reading for the Maryland Climate Change Commission

Before we can expect the Maryland Commission on Climate Change to take biochar seriously as a carbon sequestration tool, we have to educate them more on the mechanisms which make it such a favorable option. In the latest update to the Maryland Greenhouse Gas Reduction Plan, biochar is cited as a promising emerging technology, but carbon farming is given only 0.4% credit for reductions planned by 2020. The real potential of biochar alone is more like 12%.

The Emerging Technologies Appendix does not mention biochar, but the 2015 plan update has a paragraph in the Emerging Technologies chapter, saying

biochar is made "by heating vegetation slow without oxygen" 

(it's made by heating a carbonaceous biomass, e.g. wood, ag waste, manure, fast or slow with little or no oxygen, depending on the process). Inputs could be "lumber waste, dried corn stalks and other 168 Maryland Department of the Environment plan residues." 

"The resulting biochar... can be placed in the soil as fertilizer." 

(It is a soil amendment, which improves many soil properties, including preservation and reduction of added fertilizers.) 

"However there are some risks to keep in mind to ensure that it remains carbon negative and doesn’t harm the soil it is meant to be fertilizing." 

Rarely would biochar cause lasting harm to soil. The long term benefits would outweigh short-term yield reductions. 

"Biochar must be used in soils of similar pH or else it can have a negative effect on soil fertility." 

Biochar could change pH in the short-run, but these changes are predictable, depending on the biochar feedstock and production method, and it can be applied discriminately. 

"If the biochar is made from forest ecosystems, the result could be a net increase in greenhouse gases." 

That final jab is the bugaboo that many biochar skeptics raise, fearing deforestation as an industrial means of obtain biochar feedstock. Sustainable forestry should trump biochar production as a general principle in crafting environmental regulations, but the two are far from mutually exclusive. It's also a reason why economies of scale should not be allowed to run rampant in the biochar industry. 

Positive publicity about biochar is growing. An authoritative article in Nature last week pointed out that the theoretical potential for soil to sequester carbon is 80% of the rate at which it is currently being added to the atmosphere by humans. That sure makes the Maryland Climate Change Commission carbon farming target of 0.4% look weak. The French initiative, 4 pour 1000, adopted by several other countries at the Paris climate conference, to increase soil carbon 0.4% through carbon farming is another inducement to put biochar on the entrée menu.

It's NOT Alright Now - In fact it's a Gas

Pointing out that liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipped overseas causes more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than domestically burning an equally energetic amount of coal omits the fact that, in Maryland's case, we are the second largest exporter of coal in the country. A case could be made that exporting LNG will be less carbon polluting than exporting coal if the coal shipments were set to decrease as LNG shipments increased. Since Arch Coal just filed for bankruptcy and President Obama has made the executive decision to ban coal extraction on federal lands, it's becoming more likely that the trend of decreasing coal exports will continue, lending support to this rationalization for LNG exports.

No more coal allowed out of 30% of U.S. ground

Obversely, while Maryland's endogenous electricity generation from natural gas amounts to only 5 to 15% of its total generating capacity, 44% of Maryland's electricity comes from outside the state. The U.S., as a whole, relies on natural gas for at least 27% of it's electricity generation.  As coal declines and natural gas prices slump, the amount of U.S. capacity for generating electricity from the former is likely to decline, raising the reliance on natural gas and exposing large sections of the country (including Maryland) to dramatic price swings in electricity. The reputation of natural gas (fracked gas, especially) is sullied each week by infrastructure failures that cause egregious violations of public health and safety. We should do our best to divest ourselves of gas power, while taking additional measures to prevent leaks like the catastrophe in California.

Keep the Home Fires Burning

Most analyses of the greenhouse gas emissions problem hold the precept that we cannot quickly reduce our use of energy.  Hence, the introduction of technology to displace fossil fuel usage with more sustainable sources must serve as a substitute source of energy.  Oftentimes, the substitute is nearly as polluting as the original, or of dubious marginal value since it is difficult to estimate emissions from all potential sources.

Likewise, it is difficult to estimate the contribution of ecosystems to CO2 reduction.  This is why biochar is struggling to be recognized as an important, if small, part of the solution to the problem of global warming.  Biochar is made with little, if any, production of useful energy compared to incineration of biomass, which produces little, if any, biochar.  This is why the National Academy of Sciences gave biochar such short shrift in their recent study of carbon sequestration approaches. Maryland, unfortunately, adopted this study as the basis for sequestration in their climate action plan.

In order to embrace biochar, you have to allow for the possibility that satisfaction can come through many avenues.  Power may not be any more satisfying than assurance of abundant harvests along with restoration of biodiversity and soil health.  Electricity to power an ever more computerized lifestyle may be less satisfying to millions than lungs working to be filled with fresh air, while growing crops to fuel muscles demanding a more intrinsic energy source.

Energy is more fungible than biochar, but not as much as you might think.  Biochar's uses continue to expand beyond even the 55 identified by Ithaka Institute in 2013.  How can such a useful resource be overlooked, simply because it is not a significant source of energy?

Yet, were the world economy to break down today and trade in fossil fuels slow to a trickle, what would many people resort to?  Ubiquitous small outdoor fires for cooking and cleaning would turn into a climate and ecological disaster.  There are better ways to apply current technology to burning of wood. Coupling these with the production of biochar will help insulate us from climate change, peak oil, and financial folly.

Playing with Fire

I am proud to be a Marylander just for the simple fact that our state is a leader in the fight against climate change.  Maryland's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act (GGRA) rivals the plans of such progressive states as Switzerland in the rapidity envisioned for reducing emissions to fight global warming.  Since GGRA was enacted in 2009, Maryland has actually reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions faster than required by the plan, which calls for a 25% reduction of the 2006 level of emissions by 2020.  We are now at the point where an update to the plan is needed, as the Act must be reapproved in 2016.

Insofar as the real importance of Maryland's plan is not in drawing down emissions, but in showing other states how it is possible to do so while growing the economy, the GGRA is laudable. I do, however, have my reservations as to motives and the ultimate outcome.  It's not that Maryland is just so small as to have little bearing on global warming, it's that, at this point in the game (and more so in 2020, when other states might begin catching on), we cannot reduce atmospheric CO2 enough, fast enough to avoid catastrophe unless we immediately abandon business as usual (and/or put all our hopes in a "hail Mary" geo-engineering program).  By "business as usual," I include the reliance on economic growth for sustainment of the economy.  A major result of capitalistic, exponential growth is that it drives us deeper into fossil fuel dependence, while these limited resources become ever more expensive and environmentally harmful to extract.

Case in point: the Cove Point LNG export facility.  One of the most frequent concerns raised in public hearings held by the Maryland Climate Change Commission was the amount of GHG that would be induced by the facility's operations. Calculations show that this total would negate more than half of the GHG reduction progress made throughout the state since 2006 when the final results of the GGRA are tallied after 2020.  This effect was not included in the GGRA Plan Update, in spite of public input.  Even if it had, much of the effect would be masked by the fact that a good portion of those emissions are "off-shored," either to other states where the gas is shipped from, or to the end users overseas.

To be fair, it seems that Maryland is not in the least in control of whether the Cove Point expansion takes place. The climate commission considered it to be too much of a hot potato to even address it, and even climate-friendly Governor O'Malley wouldn't challenge it during his term.  This gives me little hope that the District Court of Appeals in Columbia, MD will rule favorably toward the environmental petitioners in their suit to require the FERC to re-evaluate their decision to allow the Cove Point expansion.

It's not that the powers that be really care whether Maryland's economy grows under business-as-usual, it's that they want to continue the bubble economy at the national level as long as possible, at least until it becomes apparent that we have no hope to avoid human extinction other than a "hail Mary" play.