Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future by Tim Flannery

Author:Tim Flannery
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2009-12-03T05:09:00+00:00

As of early 2008, humanity had just thirty-seven days' worth of grain supply in reserve. It's been said that the ancient Romans had a more generous buffer against famine. As a result of rising food prices, India, the Philippines, and some other nations have now banned the export of certain types of rice. The Haitian government, which acted too late, fell in early 2008 as a result of food riots. Unless a solution is found, the situation is likely to become worse as the century progresses, because it is projected that by 2050 there will be 9 billion mouths to feed, as opposed to today's 6.6 billion. Much of the remainder of this essay will be devoted to the nexus between carbon sequestration and food production, for it's here that we interact powerfully with the carbon cycle in ways that make it possible to achieve climate security and food security simultaneously. I will argue that it's possible to increase the yield of agricultural and pastoral land while at the same time sequestering carbon. In effect, we can create an ecological "magic pudding" which, while not infinitely elastic in its capacity to feed us, can stretch much farther than we commonly suppose.

An impressive amount of environmental experimentation is currently going on in agriculture, including a zero-based approach to crops and the establishment of permaculture. Most of these innovations produce incremental gains in productivity, as well as some carbon sequestration. One class of technology, however, promises a solution different in both quantity and quality from all the others. Known as pyrolysis, it generates energy, improves soil, and permanently withdraws carbon from the atmosphere, all at the same time. Pyrolysis is an everyday phenomenon that involves the heating of biological matter in the absence of oxygen. It occurs when the outer layer of the biomass oxidizes (burns), but the inside does not, as in fiying, roasting, and toasting. For instance, because oxygen can't reach inside the steak you cook on the BBQ, it cooks by pyrolysis. Charcoal-composed chiefly of carbon-is a product of pyrolysis; making charcoal by such means is a practice that goes back thousands of years. It's also what kept cars on the road in places like Australia during the World War II: they ran on charcoal burners. Modern pyrolysis is simply a very sophisticated means of making charcoal, but in its end result it is far different from any pyrolysis known previously. Any biological materialcrop waste, animal manure, forestry offcuts, and even human sewage-can be used as a feedstock.

Why is charcoal important? When we grow trees to offset the carbon emissions created by the burning of fossil fuel, we are really trading a very secure form of carbon sequestration (that oil or coal would have stayed buried for millions of years if we hadn't dug it up) for a less secure form of storage. After all, the carbon in a tree is "volatile" in the sense that if the tree rots or burns, the carbon will quickly be released back

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