I grew up being taught El Nino isn’t a big deal and it’s just the seasons going through their normal cycle. But with Super El Nino, I finally bothered to read about climate change, and now it’s a rabbit hole I can’t get out of. I calculated my own personal carbon footprint, and I feel disgusted with myself :(
I looked up all the ways to decrease my own footprint- but now I learned that’s not enough, we also need to capture and lockup all the extra carbon that’s in the air now too.
I read about all the ways to do that, and I learned about biochar and it’s relatively the quickest way we have right now that locks carbon up for at least a century if done right.
So I thought about ways to make biochar that’s actually impactful, and of course it has to be a collective action not just the individual.
Now I’m thinking, why don’t cities adopt a biochar bin for their residents just like Stockholm? Is this something I can advocate for my own community?
Biochar is a totally valid way to fix carbon, yeah. There’s not enough trees in cities to make a dent, but if you think bigger, there’s potential.
However, nobody wants to personally pay for that, so there’s no way to employ people doing it. It’s kind of the same answer to every climate change inaction question.
It’s not even a money problem. In whatever non-market economy, there still wouldn’t be the will to divert resources to it, because 90% of people just don’t care that much.
i wouldn’t feel bad about your carbon footprint when your local corporation exceeds that trillion fold. regulation is by far the best way, not consumer choice. go
harassinform your local and national representatives about how climate change is bad and you care about it, and kindly ask them to regulate their #1 polluters.OP’s figure would include their share all the industry that exists to make them things.
point being that one, or even 100000 people going full eco conscious would barely make a dent; while placing some barriers over corporations would hopefully reduce emissions substantially without sacrificing consumer convenience.
Without sacrificing consumer convenience? Well, that seems pretty ambitious. The typical Western lifestyle is just carbon-intensive.
But yes, everyone trying to solve it on their own isn’t really fair. Policy would be needed. Unfortunately, that seems to be hard to set up, as well. (There just isn’t much uplifting to say here, unfortunately)
i am of course, talking in general, but many products can be made more sustainably without sacrificing quality, the method of looking for the most cost-effective way; while good for corporations, it is pretty wasteful.
preferably both policy, and consumer consciousness. starting with anything that’s single use for no reason, society forgot that recycling is third in the hierarchy, below reducing and reusing. wouldn’t it be nice if i could just buy ice cream and put it into a tub that i brought from home instead of having 10 identical, perfectly good plastic tubs that are to be thrown into trash? generally there’s too much plastic wrapping for products.
You really should include more expensive as a consumer inconvenience. Given the same budget, that means something gets cut out. (If you don’t like money, that all works in terms or raw resources or labour, too)
Unnecessary single-use packaging is a point that could be improved for the same (overall) price, and policies about that are gradually coming in where I live. The thing is that reusable packaging tends to be a lot more emission producing, and many people don’t actually reuse it properly. It solves waste footprint, more than carbon footprint.
There are other things that would solve the problem for a similar or smaller price, and that hopefully will happen, but they amount to a significant change of lifestyle. Mass transit instead of cars, denser cities, plant-centric diets, long-lasting, repairable, but fewer and less impulse-buyable household goods and clothes. You end up with people living a lifestyle that, while still fine, is a bit more like they would have in the past, or in middle-income countries.
True, true
Did you know that the idea of your own carbon footprint was the product of a marketing campaign from BP to divert the blame away from themselves?
Hey, I can answer this one. I did my M.Sc on amending soils with biochar.
I’m not sure what Stockholm is doing, though.
To get good recovery of biochar, you need a pretty controlled environment. It’s also energy intensive to make; you need a heat source that’s not going to produce CO2, ideally, and cut into the benefit that you’d get by sequestering carbon in the first place. Like if it takes 1 ton of waste wood fuel to make 1 ton of biochar, it’s pretty much a wash. You could use green energy I suppose, like it you had a hydro grid set up to fire whatever furnace you’re cooking the stuff in, but that’s not always available or scalable (in the sense you can do it everywhere).
You CAN make biochar crudely, and we’ve been doing so for centuries, but the rub is that your recovery quickly drops and decreases in recovery are increases in CO2 produced. I was toying with this idea to manage non-merchantable timber on mines, and using the char as a soil amendment.
Suppose everything DOES work the way we want, though. Good recovery, cheap energy, people onboard. We now have a mountain of char and no place to put it. You could go underground mines). Stockpiling it aboveground would a nightmare and massive fire hazard… Etc. Etc.
I like using char to store carbon and it’ll stay for a long time, but you can’t just capture it at the source like you can with other forms of carbon capture and storage. Those other methods don’t work well either… At least with char you have a solid to manage rather than stuffing gas underground and hoping the earth doesn’t fart.
Like a lot of things, char use like you envision is ‘we would if we could but we can’t so we wont’.
It’s also energy intensive to make; you need a heat source that’s not going to produce CO2, ideally, and cut into the benefit that you’d get by sequestering carbon in the first place
Wait, isn’t charcoalisation an exothermic process? Am I remembering that wrong?
You get gas by products you can use to keep things going but it’s a lot of energy to dry the feedstock if needed and get it up to temperature. Again, you can make char crudely, but it’s environmental benefit drops quickly.
Ah, right, the drying. Green wood is, like, mostly water. You can season wood outdoors, but it takes many months, so then you have the cost of the space as well. Usually they just use a drying kiln for lumber, in modern practice.
I think about this stuff fairly often, so I was pretty sure about the chemistry. I wasn’t trying to argue, or undermine you, there. Sorry if it came across that way.
No, all good. It’s been a while since I thought about char, and honestly a lot do my stuff was based on ‘what does it do?’
I did my M.Sc on amending soils with biochar
We now have a mountain of char and no place to put it
Please explain why tilling that mountain into the soil is not an option :D
Because soils in and of themselves are generally productive. Aerating soils (tilling) boosts the microbial community, making it consume organic matter in the soil. Biochar is highly stable, so it wouldn’t be consumed, but instead the existing organic matter, which acts as the massive pool nutrients would then be consumed. So what you’d see, is a priming effect at least a few years, followed by a drop in soil productivity.
Biochar is useful as a soil amendment in the right conditions, but its effect is really situational and highly dependent on cooking temperatures and feedstock. I used stuff cooked around 380C in an attempt to allow for some of the feedstock’s more available carbon forms to be accessible to microbes. It didn’t really work like that, but I ended up with an N boost in my soils, which we suspected was due to proving more microbial habitat (due to char surface area).
It’s also really good at catching and holding onto leaching metals, and nitrogen too, in the right conditions
My dad makes it from twigs in a paint can, that he puts in his woodstove. He mixes it with leaf mulch and household compost to amend his garden. He’s been doing this for years, and his garden seems nice and productive. Any tips or things to watch out for? I have considered that there could be a point where he should stop adding biochar.
Just watch the pH. Hotter chars are more basic. The benefit you’re seeing is probably due to increased water holding capacity and the microbe habitat I mention earlier.
The biochar part is a detail, all the other pieces need to be in place to optimize the benefit.
Carbon capture comes from planting more trees and not just leaving them there, but cutting them down when their growth rate slows and planting new ones.
Creating the bio char is a byproduct of using the plant mass to heat water for the district heating system, which is an extremely efficient method of heating homes and businesses.
Biochar as a byproduct, in contrast to landfill or burning in an oxygen rich environment comes from a method where carbon release is minimized. In landfills, it’s methane. In fire, it’s carbon dioxide.
You can advocate for local solutions! The magic here is that they found a mix that works well for local conditions. Your city or town may already be looking at things like this. If they publish a master plan or other planning documents they may include things on energy, waste, climate change, etc. They usually aren’t too detailed, but can point you to other things to look at.
That makes a lot of sense. I’ll look at my city’s website, maybe there’s some type of residential hearing I can attend or online plan I can read.
I think the most discouraging about this for me is that even though I’ve seen countless headlines about climate change, I’ve never really bothered to be curious about it until now. Now I wish I knew how to tell this to other people without sounding like alarmist.
It’s also not quite right. If you’re burning wood thoroughly for power you get pure ash, which is just carbon neutral. You get charcoal in campfires because they’re inefficient, and even then it’s mostly ash. Carbon neutral is still better than fossil fuels, though!
I think the most discouraging about this for me is that even though I’ve seen countless headlines about climate change, I’ve never really bothered to be curious about it until now. Now I wish I knew how to tell this to other people without sounding like alarmist.
FWIW, it makes me feel better that there’s people like you out there, who just didn’t know the whole story yet, and who could still change and improve. Way too many people don’t want to know inconvenient things.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it is not simply a matter of personal individual responsibility. The only meaningful way to address climate change humanely is to work toward dismantling global capitalism and building toward a socialist and communist new world.
Okay, so how do you meaningfully do that IRL?
It sounds great, but you get one inch towards the practical end of things, and all the sudden there seems to be a not a lot on offer.
I admit the left in the imperial core has little to offer presently, but we have to start somewhere, and that usually means looking if there are any socialist orgs or anarchist mutual aid groups in your area to get involved in. Also it never hurts to read the theories and accounts of successful revolutionaries and those that inspired them.
One of my happier dreams is to someday see a modern reincarnation of the CCC where it’s a bunch of youth taking a gap year or two after primary education to go out and collect invasive tumbleweeds to render it all into biochar in nice communal camps with good meals, yoga, and social bonding. Doesn’t necessarily have to be youthful types, although that’d probably provide the most return on investment. I would also love to lend my labor to a good cause like that.
Be the change you want in your community. Start attending city council (or wherever you might have by you) meetings and getting involved. It’s hard for one person to charge the world but, making small changes locally can encourage others. When you inspire people, they might make changes in their own communities and it can grow. That’s how you actually change the world. Start small, build community, share ideas.
If you’re looking for small ways to improve things locally, you might enjoy !NoLawns@slrpnk.net which focuses on native plants in yards instead of all mono culture grass. I did port the reddit wiki over so, the wiki in the sidebar has some good info.
