[Terrapreta] Making charcoal in a barrel

[code suidae]

On 9/23/07, Sean K. Barry <sean.barry at juno.com> wrote:
> Any of these kinds of videos, where the person has a moniker (e.g. Greenjack?!) and
> no real name given seems somewhat suspect to me.

Certainly you can maintain this illusion if you wish, but be aware
that you will be dismissing the content of a great number of 'books'
because of your irrational aversion to the modern use of the /nom de
plume/ rather than the merit of the information contained therein.

To the original point:
> If you make biochar in a barrel you are contributing to global warming, not being part of the solution.

I'd really like to see more support for this position. Presuming that
the gases produced are at least partially flared off and that the char
is used as a soil amendment to increase the yield of the makers
garden, I wonder how long it takes to offset the effect of the gases
that were produced? One must take into account that the soil will last
for many years and that for at least some of this time it will be
yielding a quantity of food beyond what it would otherwise have
produced. Over the years this food represents some quantity of miles
not driven, plastic bags not consumed, produced not trucked, acres not
harvested, planted or tilled by diesel tractor and fertilized by
fossil fuel.

I don't even have an order-of-magnitude calculation for this, but it
seems to me that if a few barrel-fulls of char represent a quantity of
GHG's sufficient to outstrip the emissions avoided  by the garden
enhanced by the char, well, then we really are over a barrel.

<insert ID here>
-- 
"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know." -
M. King Hubbert