Warning: wikipedia - based discussion
I have been reading about carbon sequestration to try and understand what the heck "carbon-neutral" means, and I found an interesting article on wikipedia that says that the US sequestered about the same amount of CO2 in agricultural soils as was released by burning fossil fuels.
This is contrary to everything else we've learned about our use of fossil fuels and the effect on global warming, indeed it would refute Mr. Gore's Inconvenient Truth. So now I am very confused: are we (the US) producing greenhouse gases? Has anyone read a good book on this topic? I never took organic chemistry but none of this seems logical.
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Hmm... Interesting.
ReplyDeleteIt seems plausible that we sequester as much carbon each year in agriculture as we release in fossil fuels, but if that is so, then it is probably misleading.
Assuming that there is a relatively constant amount of agriculture on the planet, and assuming that each year we move more carbon that has been sequentered as fossil fuels into the atmosphere, I think that the burning of fossil fuels likely has a cumulative effect not compensated for by agriculture. If agricluture locks up 100 units of carbon say, and we burn up 90 units per year, then we sequester more than we release in a year, but next year, we'll have released 180 units over 2 years, and agriculture will only be accounting for 100 still, because most of what we grow gets turned over back into free carbon I would suspect? Maybe?
Al Gore, of course, is personally carbon neutral himself, because he purchases "carbon offsets" to balance the effect of his rather large carbon and energy footprint. He can therefore take credit for living a nice happy carbon neutral life thanks presumably to the efforts of someone else, who actually made an effort towards conservation.
And now for my Al Gore bashing. Al Gore (and his arrogance) annoys me. It's all green marketing BS with him.
"...it turns out he pays for his extra-large carbon footprint through Generation Investment Management, a London-based company with offices in Washington, D.C., for which he serves as chairman. The company was established to take financial advantage of new technologies and solutions related to combating global warming."
"Gore is chairman of the firm and, presumably, draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he "buys" his "carbon offsets" from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn't buy "carbon offsets" through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks."
"In a nutshell, Gore consumes large amounts of carbon-based electricity while he trumpets a growing "global warming" crisis that drives up the value of "green" companies like the ones in which he buys carbon offsets invests in their stocks."
quoted stuff from billhobbs.com
Don't even get me started about "carbon offsets" that seems like a scam hatched up oil execs to me. There is a lot of controversy over the methods used to sequester carbon for these so called "offsets". I would go so far to say that anyone who believes carbon offsets has any productive value in mitigating climate change is mislead (by the green marketing of Al Gore and others).
ReplyDeleteThe question of sequestering by agriculture is not in the biomass of the plants grown, but in the soils, which can accrue organic carbon and hold on to it much longer. So that article is saying that in the US (and in organic farming in particular) we are creating a carbon sink in the soil. As much as the amount of carbon released from fossil fuels. This does not seem possible.
Yeah - that sounds dubious. I don't remember enough of soils class.
ReplyDeleteWould like to know more, especially about how organic is better than "industrial", or whatever you call it, for carbon sequestration purposes.
Aight, I figured it out - we don't sequester as much CO2 as we produce in agricultural soils, we sequester as MUCH AS 1% of the CO2 we produce in those soils. Thats the bad news. The good news is that that percentage is on the rise.
ReplyDeleteAs a summary of my reading, it looks like Tropical reforestation, iron supplements in the antarctic seas, and agricultural soil amendments are our best hopes for long-term carbon sequestration. Exciting.
But a big surprise: eating beef contributes greatly to greenhouse gas from the methane cows burp (1 unit methane = 23 units CO2!), and you can bet we can put Michael Logan in that same category.