[Terrapreta] Fwd: carbon sequestration but where is TP?

[mmbtupr at aol.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: mmbtupr at aol.com
To: terrapreta at bioenergylist.org
Sent: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 7:54 pm
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] carbon sequestration but where is TP?






                  to   Terrapreta List                     from   Lewis
L Smith 
 

As a semi-retired energy economist with considerable biomass
experience, I am somewhat mystified about the repeated calls for the
use of life-cycel analysis in the evaluation of the various possible
ways of creating and using terra preta which are currently "on the
table". 
 

We don't have a good handle on what the ancients used to make theirs or
on what they made it from. We don't have a good handle on how we ought
to make it and  use it, in a world soon to be overwhelmed by Global
Warming. 
 

And still we want to use LCA ?  I don't get it. The basic assumption of
LCA is that one has a pretty good idea as to how what one is analyzing
is going to behave over its lifecycle, so that we have numbers for all
the relevant boxes in our spreadsheet. That condition certainly doesn't
prevail yet, as far as terra preta is concerned. 
 

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't go ahead an use one of the methods,
soley on the basis of a few years of agro experimentation. Global
warming isn't going to wait for a "life long" experiments. We have to
do a lot NOW, often on the basis of sketchy data. Otherwise we will end
up like the polar bears, drowning at sea. 
 

Cordially.  ### 

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