First Things First

Last night, I was fortunate to hear Dr. Sara Via, a University of Maryland biologist, give her talk on "Ecology of the Soil" to my county's Master Gardeners. She recommended a 2016 paper from Nature entitled Climate-Smart Soils. One of the gems in this paper is the decision tree it offers for the coolest things to do with agricultural land, depending on its nature and condition. It says that marginal lands should be planted in perennials, and histosols (soils containing high organic matter, i.e. former bogs) should be restored to wetlands. Aside from those cases, the paper proffers a hierarchy of various measures that can be taken to improve soil health, such as cover cropping and no-till. The final measure in the hierarchy - adding soil amendments, such as biochar - is not based on the soil condition, but on the availability of the amendment - the more, the merrier (though 2" of compost per year may be a good upper bound).

This decision tree clarifies matters greatly for those who want to practice climate-smart horticulture at any level; from garden to farm-scale. Once I learned about biochar and began making it, my interest in gardening bloomed (along with many more flowers). Along the way, I have learned the importance of many of the other conditional steps in the decision tree that also help to sequester carbon and other greenhouse gases.

Early in my gardening avocation, I was taught that the first thing a landscaper needs to deal with is stormwater. That dictum makes good sense - all the more after getting trained as a Master Watershed Steward. The epiphany for me was that by learning and practicing key disciplines, e.g. stormwater management, composting, and biochar, I would be able to maximize my success in gardening. Similarly, if one wishes to maximize their contribution to improving the climate, there are key practices to follow, depending on the situation. The result, invariably, will be healthier soil - so the payoff and gauges of success are close at hand, though yield increases may not necessarily be as immediate as might be obtained by following ecologically harmful regimens. Dr. Via pointed out that monitoring your soil's health with a do-it-yourself tool called a soil health card is a good way to track progress.

When you take an approach, such as biochar, as the cornerstone of your efforts, it might lead you to wonder how it fits into the grander scheme of climate change mitigations. Project Drawdown's website makes schematics available to assist in that conception. The schematic in the area of Food solutions contains (among other land-use topics) high level categories that encapsulate the decision tree measures just discussed. The Conservation Agriculture / Regenerative Agriculture (CA - Reg Ag) category is particularly germane to croplands. With the guidance of the decision tree above, the soil health card, and the bigger picture of food solutions, my efforts at carbon sequestration through gardening should become even more efficacious.

Carbon Nation

It is fortunate that Project Drawdown left CO2 capture and storage (CCS) out of their solution set, because the IPCC left us with a mixed bag by including it as a key element among their recommended approaches*. Environmentally-minded organizations such as the Post-Carbon Institute (PCI) are all too happy to explain that CCS doesn't pencil out when you consider such fixed costs as a network of pipelines in the U.S. equal to that of the entire oil industry. As implied by their name, however, the Post-Carbon Institute discounts the value of all of the extra tight oil that might be recovered and burned by enhanced oil recovery using all the captured CO2. Considering how polluting coal and other industrial combustion processes can be, it makes sense if you can exchange the CO2 output for a more clean-burning petroleum product, but the extra pipelines and other CCS components required really does cause it to look like CCS would be a net economic loss (until oil prices rise). The fact that the energy industry is begging for more subsidies to jumpstart CCS does not help their case.

Stanford Prof. Mark Jacobson, whose transition to renewables plan is embraced as the mainstay of the Green (Party) New Deal, also excludes CCS. Richard Heinberg of PCI nonetheless criticizes Jacobson's reliance on underground heat storage technologies unproven at scales needed for his plan. Both Jacobson's and CCS's scaling problems are constrained by access to storage deep underground and, in the case of CCS, sometimes hundreds of miles from the source.

Photo by Eden, Janine and Jim

It is typical of our disconnection from nature that a less brutal means of sequestering captured carbon wouldn't attract more interest. Biochar can be a coproduct of electricity production when using biomass as an input. Rather than pipe it deep into the ground, burying biochar a few inches below the surface of farmland would be all that is needed to sequester the carbon. Unlike CCS, biochar is scalable up or down, befitting the feedstock availability and soil characteristics in a locale. While not a stand-alone replacement for current fossil fuel electricity, biochar-producing power plants should be pursued before the riskier CCS plants that have already wasted billions of dollars in pilot programs and never captured any carbon. Further investments or subsidies in CCS power plants would quite likely fall short, leading to expansion of more carbon spewing fossil-fueled electricity, with the carbon capture piece set aside as too expensive or difficult to complete.

*According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, the overall cost of a global climate mitigation strategy without CCS is higher than a strategy with CCS in every scenario, and many models cannot limit likely warming to below 2 °C without CCS. (U.S. DOE Report, Jan. 2017, pg. 7)

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

Loosening the Grip of the Grid

One of the distinctions made by zero waste advocates is that incineration of waste to reduce landfill use exacerbates pollution. Waste industry apologists credit Maryland Governor Larry Hogan's decision to withdraw limits on landfill expansion as an effort to avoid shifting the burden to incinerators.

That might be a defensible position if Maryland's landfill gas emissions were well controlled and not the highest human-caused source of methane in the state. Fortunately, the U.S. Appeals Court rode to the rescue in their recent ruling against the EPA's delay tactics on oil and gas well methane emissions. Since the EPA has also postponed the implementation of new landfill gas emissions requirements, expect that the court will also find that decision to be unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious. More landfills will then be required to incorporate gas collection and control systems. This should serve to pressure states to become more waste conscious.

Waste consciousness should not be left to government regulators. Citizens should police their own waste streams rather than shift the burden to government and industries. Energy and waste management businesses should absolutely be required to cut emissions from their operations, but individual households may find it economical to stop relying on those profiteers and find more DIY solutions.

Such solutions are not hard to find. Humanure composting is not a first world concept, but it makes economical sense. For other organic waste, a quick Google search led me to what appears to be an economical household replacement for capturing landfill gas emissions: a solution that would pay for itself by turning your "waste" into fertilizer and cooking gas. That biogas could also be used to purify water if you add a Stirling engine generator and water distiller, as inventor Dean Kamen and DEKA Research have been doing for the third world with their Slingshot system. The biogas generator may not be functional in the very cold months (though a straw bale enclosure next to one wall of the house might alleviate that), but I would probably only use it for outdoor cooking in seasonable periods anyway. If anyone out there knows my wife, please drop hints to her about what a great invention HomeBiogas is.

Drawdown - Guidance for Policymakers

In The Humanure Handbook, Joseph Jenkins assails our habit of wasting things.

We have kitchen “waste,” garden “waste,” agricultural “waste,” human “waste,” municipal “waste,” “biowaste,” and on and on. Yet, our long-term survival requires us to learn to live in harmony with our host planet. This also requires that we understand natural cycles and incorporate them into our day to day lives. In essence, this means that we humans must attempt to eliminate waste altogether. 

In Don DeLillo's novel, Underworld, the waste underlying modern life resurfaces throughout the tale. The advocates at eco-cycle Solutions are all about solving the waste problem. They and the folks at Trash-Free Maryland were surely disappointed when Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced an end to Maryland's Plan to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle Nearly All Waste Generated in Maryland by 2040.

Stepping away from waste reduction is a mistake. We can benefit both economically and environmentally by improving industrial and residential recycling. According to research in the Drawdown project, household and industrial recycling each have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2.77 GtCO2 eq if practiced globally. They also bring lifetime savings of $71 billion apiece. Those savings do not even include related solutions such as paper recycling, biochar, and composting. The solutions to global warming in Drawdown are posited as

“no regrets” solutions—actions that make sense to take regardless of their climate impact since they have intrinsic benefits to communities and economies. 

Hogan's decision to set aside the zero waste plan may be defensible if he, instead, prioritizes other, higher ranking solutions in the Drawdown list. There are several for him to choose from. They will all be needed soon, so he shouldn't neglect waste reduction for long.

Save up to $100K through this Eco-lifestyle Adjustment

Slums constitute the living arrangement for one-fourth of today's world population. In the least developed countries, those living in slums exceed three-fourths of the population. Any urban area can descend quickly into slumdom when water and sewerage stop functioning. This can happen in any urban environment where the electric supply is lost for a week or where general mayhem prevails. Take Yemen, for instance. Facing a crisis of war, famine, and social collapse, 14 million people there lack access to safe drinking water or sanitation. The conditions are ripe for outbreaks of disease, which is currently appearing in the form of the most massive cholera epidemic this century. 

Cholera is spread by ingestion of Vibrio cholerae, which lives in the water where infected people have released sewage. If not quickly and properly treated, it can cause death in 50 to 60% of those infected. Currently, the number of cases in Yemen is 200,000 carriers of the bacteria. In the 2008 - 2009 Zimbabwe epidemic, the average infected individual transmitted the disease to 1.1 - 2.7 others. Those statistics are the reproduction rate (R₀) of the disease. Predictions of 300,000 new cases in Yemen by August must use the lower of these rates.

It is conceivable that conditions in the U.S. could deteriorate to bring about local outbreaks of cholera or one of the other many diseases associated with lack of clean water and sanitation. Sewer systems are susceptible, but a heavy septic system load in a concentrated area could also become a major source. My own neighborhood is reputed to have 70% of its septic systems in a failed condition (my own included) with a 2000% overload to the watershed due to the concentration of homes. 

If you are one of the approximately one-third of homeowners in the U.S. with a septic system, it would behoove you financially to limit your inputs. The typical septic system fails after 15 to 30 years of service. Replacing it might cost up to $20,000 (not to mention the effect of heavy machinery on areas of your property you never planned for). Extending the life of a septic system by using biodegradable soaps and having the tank pumped every three to five years helps, but an unconventional measure that could allow your system to last a lifetime is to not use it for sewage, period. This simple lifestyle adjustment could save you $100,000 over a lifetime.

Loveable Loo - well worth the $400. Detailed instructions included. (An $18 economy unit also works fine.)

Instead of using your drinking water to flush away sewage, take up meticulous composting with your bodily byproducts. Joseph Jenkins tells you all about it in The Humanure Handbook. In the process, do everything necessary to avoid spreading of pathogens to your environment. Don't let your septic system get to the point that mine is, where it is a major health hazard. Humanure composting, even done half well, is better than this. 

Fortunately, when I found out that my septic system had failed, I was already well along with my humanure collection and composting program. With a little luck, I can restore my drain lines to the point that they will drain "greywater" for several more years and all of our sewage will go into the humanure toilets for composting with the biochar, coffee grounds, and small wood chips that I generously smother it with. If you think that sounds slummy, just wait until your community's water or electricity stops flowing.

You Can't Be Green Enough These Days

Helpful as their contributions are, the efforts of most established agricultural literacy organizations do not extend to encouraging young people to take up farming. Aside from the Future Farmers of America (which I've always seen as geared to keeping the kids down on the farm) and 4-H, organizations like National Agriculture in the Classroom and the American Farm Bureau Foundation seem to be geared toward PR for agribusiness. The mission of FoodCorps is somewhat better because it involves children in gardening and appreciating healthy, fresh food that they help to grow.

Though all those organizations raise agricultural literacy, none of their programs will prepare the next generation of adults for what they are about to face. For that, permaculture education must be emphasized. Big Ag will go away with deindustrialization. Folks are going to have to know how to provide for themselves without relying on lengthy, automated supply chains.

Since the public school system does not appear to recognize the need to prepare the young for a hardscrabble future, permaculture schools are doing what they can to make up for it. One program that is heavily youth oriented is John Liu's ecosystem restoration camps. Their proposition seems to be, 'come and help heal the land, and we will teach you some vitally useful things.' Those things include formal permaculture training.

By Eatswords

There are also children's programs teaching permaculture. If only the lower income schools adopt this curricula, wealth inequities will shift in favor of today's poor once the economy collapses into agrarianism. The good news is that there is a curriculum offered online that parents can take along with their children. Agricultural literacy must set a higher bar than just getting kids to realize that chocolate milk doesn't come straight from the cow's udder.