[Terrapreta] Fwd: Global Carbon Cycle

[code suidae]

Apologies in advance if two copies of this message show up. I'm still
constantly replying to the poster rather than the list.

On 6/4/07, rukurt at westnet.com.au <rukurt at westnet.com.au> wrote:
>
> Sean K. Barry wrote:
> It's really quite simple. It appears that the most effective form of
> charcoal comes from hardwoods. Todate, we have no conclusive evidence
> that other forms of charcoal will do the job.


When we are considering a process on a large industrial scale I don't think
that it is sufficient to only do what we discover works in trial and error
discovery. This is only the first step. We must understand exactly why that
particular process works best and consider alternatives that could, through
our advanced technology, do as well or better.

We have vastly greater technology than the original inventors of TP, it is
likely that we can determine (eventually) why it works so well and how we
can produce something similar, tailored for whatever environment is
necessary, without necessarily using only one sort of feedstock.

Additionally there is the argument that it is ridiculous to dig carbon
> out of the ground by the gigaton, just to try and re-extract it from the
> air, to bury it again. We should be
> using the charcoal we can produce to reduce the amount of mined carbon
> while also producing enough more charcoal to bury, to get rid of the
> excess carbon in the atmosphere.
>

I have an idea I like to call the "You can't get there from here" principle.
The idea is that for any given situation there are some intermediate steps
that are made necessary by a variety of things including, but not limited to
human psychology (market dynamics, getting people to do things, the time it
takes to 'think up' technology, the time it takes to creatively apply
technology, etc) and the restrictions of the natural world (energy
availability, physical limitations to the rate at which things can be done,
etc).

As an example, you can't go from a nice, non-polluting pre-industiral
society directly to a nice, non-polluting high-tech society. You have to
have a dirty, abusive, polluting industrial revolution first, because it is
this that lets people realize that they have the power to destroy the world
and spurs them to invent the stuff that can eventually lead to a clean,
sustainable high-tech civilization. This sustainable civilization can then
clean up the damage done getting to that point. While in principle, or
retrospect, it might be possible to skip the nasty middle parts, it is in
practice prohibitively difficult.

I recently read an article about China that suggests that someone in power
there understands this idea. Rather than attempting to stifle blazing
economic growth, something that is difficult to create on demand, and the
associated environmental damage that goes along with, they accept that
damage must be done, but that once the painful growth phase has finished,
the resources of the resulting more mature economy and civilization can be
directed to cleaning up the damage and to producing wonders of
sustainability that would not have otherwise been possible.

The idea that we can get from where we are, an almost completely fossil fuel
dependent civilization, to a civilization that depends primarily on solar
power (in first order, solar-thermal/solar-PV, or second order,
wind/tidal/hydro) in one step is an example, I think, of a very difficult
thing. It must be accomplished in steps that take into consideration the
limits imposed by the realities of this civilization, like the difficulties
inherent in the statement "If we'd all just stop using so much energy...".
It may be true, but it is also highly unlikely. If we'd all just use
biochar....

This is the principle that makes me skeptical of the concern individuals who
do biochar research have for flaring off the waste gases. The impact the
production of personal or research quantities of biochar, even if done in
stupidly inefficient ways is insignificant when considered next to the
production of GHG's from the rest of civilization. On a personal level it is
admirable to strive for low impact, but unless the attitude is widespread
(which is infinitely improbable when one considers the current culture
against the necessary timeframe) it is not a step toward a civilization-wide
solution. On a research level it is akin to Al Gore's air travel spewing
GHG's into the atmosphere in a seemingly paradoxical quest to preach
conservation and environmental sensitivity. If one wastes time and cognitive
resources trying to make zero-impact biochar in order to avoid the
relatively piffling quantities of GHG's produced, one is not progressing
toward the goal of learning how to make biochar solve the much larger
problems at hand. Or, to pull in some cross-disciplinary wisdom from my
field, computer science, I'll quote Donald Knuth's restatement of Tony
Hoare's insight, sometimes called "Hoare's Dictum": "We should forget about
small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the
root of all evil." This refers to the computer programmer's predilection to
spend lots of time tweaking areas of a system that, while in the development
stages of a system might appear to be a problem, really aren't.

Of course, that whole paragraph is completely beside the point, but since I
managed to work in the word 'piffling', I think I'll keep it :D

DOK
-- 
"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know." - M. King
Hubbert
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