Bio-Fantasy

It is strange that we have so much concern about reducing the pollution created by the coal industry and capturing the carbon that they emit and proposing that we look at Biochar as part of the environmental solution.

Strangely enough coal is also a form of Biochar! It is the results of ancient forests being laid down over millions of years and slowly fossilising into what we now know as coal. With all the best intentions in the world, we cannot hope to capture enough of these daily emissions by creating Biochar and burying it to make any substantial dent in the atmospheric carbon. Not that it is not a good intention, but as a solution to the problem it is totally inadequate.

We use only the non-commercial part of trees that take up to 500 years to grow and return a small percentage of this carbon to the earth in the form of charcoal. Compared with the rate that the coal industry can mine and generate new carbon dioxide from antique deposits we are fighting a hopeless battle. Closing down one large productive coal mine would create the equivalent of many hundreds of years of Biochar burying. It is a very small bandaid on a potentially life threatening wound.

The best that Biochar can offer is to offset some of the emissions caused by forestry practices by turning a percentage of forestry waste into a useful product and also prevent the burning of this waste which then contributes to global warming.

However, the whole exercise may be self defeating, for as soon as we create a carbon saving, Forestry will add it to their carbon count to try to prove that they are carbon positive or carbon neutral, This will then give them even more incentive to strip our assets and pretend that they are doing us a favour by benefitting the atmosphere by this new miracle creation – Biochar!

If they can do a bit of Enron style accounting, they can even prove that they are now producing a carbon surplus, and with this, they can now join the emissions trading scheme and sell their surplus credits to the coal industry, thus allowing them to mine more coal and pollute even further.

I am unsure whether I am just a cynic or realist. I suspect the latter!