FAKE VERSUS REAL CLIMATE SOLUTIONS
Most environmentalists will fall for Exxon’s faux solution, because they don’t understand regenerative agriculture. The solution is private action and public policy that supports local farms.
The attached article about Exxon pitches a solution for carbon capture, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into the ground. But we have a much better and much cheaper solution that we could implement right away.
If we could find the political will, we could, within a few short years, be storing 17.5 gigatons (Gt) of carbon per year in our soils. That’s 3500 times as much per year as Exxon proposes.
The article states: “Exxon Mobil (XOM.N) on Monday floated a proposal for a public-private carbon storage project that would collect planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. petrochemical plants and bury them in deep under the Gulf of Mexico. The plan would require "$100 billion or more" from companies and government agencies to store 50 million metric tons of CO2 by 2030, with capacity potentially doubling by 2040, Joe Blommaert, president of Exxon's Low Carbon Solutions business, said in an interview.”
This proposal to capture carbon is an expensive and ineffective non-solution, compared with the capacity of regenerative agriculture to 1) store much more carbon, 2) store it safely, 3) store it inexpensively and 4) store it in the soils where it becomes a valuable asset, not just toxic waste.
Exxon promises to be able to store 50 million metric tons in ten years. But that’s only one-twentieth (1/20) of a gigaton (Gt) or 0.05 gigatons. Divide that by ten years, and you’ve got 1/200 of a gigaton or 0.005 gigatons (Gt) per year.
We have the capacity to store 17.5 Gt every single year via regenerative farming. Note well: Every ppm (parts per million) of atmospheric carbon corresponds to about 7.75 Gt (gigatons). So every time we add one ppm of carbon, we are adding 7.75 Gt. By the same token, if we could reduce atmospheric carbon by 17.5 Gt per year, we could reduce atmospheric carbon by over 2 parts per million. That would be good news, since we’ve been doing nothing but increasing atmospheric carbon for 150 years.
Someone might say that we will never get all farmers worldwide to do anything, and that’s true. But you only have to get a small fraction of farmers on board to store way more carbon than Exxon proposes.
And most of the most carbon intensive agriculture occurs in the first world, the wealthy nations. So US agricultural policy could have a big impact, even though we are only 5% of the world’s population.
Here’s a sample of the relevant science, from Vandana Shiva in her wonderfully well researched compilation of findings called “Biodiversity, Agroecology, Regenerative Organic Agriculture.”
Vandana Shiva is a delightful woman, whom you should find on YouTube.
According to Shiva, the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania (among others) has demonstrated in extensive controlled experiments that we can sequester 3,596.6 kilograms of CO2 per hectare per year via regenerative agriculture.
If we multiply the same results across all agricultural lands globally, we can draw down 17.5 Gt of CO2 per year.
Here’s the math:
3,3596.6 kg CO2 per hectare per year
times 4,883,697,000 hectares globally
equals 17.5 Gt (gigatons) per year.
Thus, regenerative agriculture can store 3,500 times more carbon per year (17.5 Gt as compared with 0.005 Gt) than Exxon’s little gadget.
And Exxon’s little gadget will cost $100 billion in public-private investment. Regenerative farming doesn’t cost anything, when you consider that farmers will save money on equipment and “inputs” fertilizers, pesticides and seeds.
And when Exxon stores carbon in the ground, how do we know it’s going to stay there? It might escape. Even if it doesn’t escape, expensive storage facilities entail environmental impacts and lots of carbon-intensive products like concrete, steel and electronic devices.
But when regenerative agriculture stores carbon in the ground , it’s fertilizer. Soil carbon hangs out in the form of plant matter, humus, fungi and bacteria. This is fertilizer. This makes crops grow. Plus, carbon-rich soil absorbs water and makes the land largely drought-proof.
Why haven’t we heard about this?
Why haven’t you heard about this? Because a few powerful agribusiness companies and oil companies effectively control the media conversation and the public policy. So we don’t get the truth.
As a result agribusiness releases gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere annually, mainly via tilling and via nitrogen fertilizers made from natural gas.
Farmers could profitably raise our food sustainably and regeneratively, starting now. Why don’t they? Part of the answer is public policy and its impacts on the economics of farming and the channels of communication, including schools and the media.
But still, profitable regenerative farms exist in every state.
The path to regenerative farming contains no insurmountable obstacles. We have plenty of land. We have plenty of people who want to do the work. And we have plenty of know how and expertise, in the form of farmers like Gabe Brown in North Dakota, Joel Salatin in Virginia, Will Harris in Georgia, Mark Shepard in Wisconsin, and Kentucky’s own Wendell Berry and the Berry Center.
The first step is for farmers, citizens, eaters and policy makers to get informed and know that much--if not most--of what we’re told about climate change is a lie, or at least a misleading half truth. And most of the misleading half truths come from climate activists themselves.
Narrowly defined problems, with narrow solutions.
The Sierra Club--an organization with good people at the local level and charlatans at the top--is usually on the wrong side of these issues, selling false solutions to the narrowly defined problem of “carbon” and “decarbonization.”
Carbon is only one factor in climate change. We need to also look at nitrous oxide and water. Nitrogen fertilizers put out deadly amounts of nitrous oxide. Water conservation is a whole big solution to climate change that nobody is talking about.
And climate change is only part of a family of issues that includes desertification and biodiversity loss. We search in vain for a solution to climate change apart from its siblings desertification and biodiversity loss.
Regenerative agriculture can solve all these problems at once.
We have a serious problem. And we need to solve it. But it’s not just about carbon. And it’s not just about decarbonization. If we define the problem narrowly as carbon, we will be used by Big Business as they sell us faux solutions.
The solution is for us to buy our food locally, from regenerative farms, and spread the word about what constitutes real solutions very false solutions.