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Surprise: less oxygen could be just the trick
Richard Macey, Sydney Morning Herald
It was used by the people of the Amazon for thousands of years. Now Australian researchers say biochar could reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide – while providing a new source of energy, and boosting farm productivity.
For almost 7000 years Amazonian farmers kept their soils fertile by setting organic waste alight and letting it smoulder under mud or earth, reducing it to a black carbon-rich material.
” Biochar is not unlike charcoal,” says Lukas Van Zwieten, a senior research scientist with NSW’s Department of Primary Industries.
When organic material is burnt with air it is often reduced to white ash. Trapped carbon goes up into the air as carbon dioxide, hence the greenhouse emission problem at coal-fired power stations.
But if heated while starved of oxygen “it just goes black, like a pizza left too long in the oven”, says Van Zwieten. Called pyrolysis, the process leaves up to half the carbon trapped in the char.
…During processing gases are released from the material which are cleaned and burned to produce energy. This gaseous biofuel is called syngas. “Syngas can be used as a replacement for natural gas or LPG in gas-fired boilers or dryers, or to produce electricity,” says Downie.
The remaining black carbon-rich biochar can be used on farms.
…Overall, says Downie, “there is more carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere than is returned, even after the syngas has been utilised as a biofuel”.
If biochar is so efficient, why has it taken 7000 years to be appreciated? The problem, says Downie, is that coal-fired electricity and oil have been so cheap. However, as energy costs soar, and greenhouse emissions are factored into prices, biochar may again become as important as it was to the ancient Amazonians.
This month the technology won the United Nations Association of Australia’s World Environment Day award for “meeting the greenhouse challenge”.
(12 June 2007)
Could Vermont feed itself?
Tim Johnson, Burlington Free Press
Yet another dietary mantra is gaining traction across Vermont — “eat local” — as more and more people are expanding their vegetable gardens, buying directly from farmers, and trying to relearn food preservation techniques that most Vermonters have long since forgotten.
All of which raises obvious questions:
— Could Vermont really feed itself?
— In a state where the ground is frozen four months a year, how realistic is it to try to “eat local” once the summer growing season is over?
— What about all those staples — wheat and other grains, for example — that are barely grown in Vermont at all?
The answers are nuanced and speculative, depending on who’s talking, but no less surprising for that.
One recent boost to the national “eat local” movement, whose proponents have dubbed themselves “localvores,” comes in a book by novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family. “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” details their experiences after they resolved to “eat local” for a year. They did this in Virginia, however, where the climate is less intimidating. Comparable “eat local” challenges posed by enthusiasts in Vermont tend to be for just a few weeks at a time, and seldom in February.
(11 June 2007)
Bills rise as China gets a taste for milk and honey
Valerie Elliott, Times (UK)
The cost of the weekly food shop is being forced upward by global demand for cereals and dairy products.
Higher standards of living in China and India are driving inflation in food prices as a move to a more Western diet has led to a greater demand for meat and milk.
Warnings over continued higher food prices are now being given by industry leaders. Even though consumer price inflation fell to 2.5 per cent last month, from 2.8 per cent in April, the price of food is racing ahead and at 5 per cent is now twice the rate of inflation.
World prices for whole-milk powder, skimmed-milk powder and butter are at record levels. Skimmed milk powder now costs £2,433 a tonne compared with £1,013 a tonne last year. Butter is £1,292 a tonne compared with £912.
Lord Haskins, the former chairman of Northern Foods and a former rural adviser to Tony Blair, said: “Prices are going crazy and the money brokers are moving worldwide investing in arable land. China is the key driver to this, I believe. Exports of milk powder from New Zealand to China have gone up 60 per cent in a year and prices have been pushed up by 30 per cent.”
The problem has been exacerbated by severe drought in Aus-tralia and the United States and a growing trend for farmers to grow crops for fuel instead of food, which has caused a worldwide shortage of cereals and milk. Kevin Hawkins, director-general of the British Retail Consortium, said that consumers in Britain would have to brace themselves for higher food bills as demand worldwide was certain to outstrip supply and prices would have to rise.
(13 June 2007)
Stashing seeds in ‘Noah’s fridge’
Moises Velasquez-Manoff, The Christian Science Monitor
Researchers worldwide are collecting seeds from wild plants to guard against the ravages of climate change.
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Escondido, Calif. – In a modest building with stuccoed walls made from bales of hay, scientists are working on an ambitious conservation project. They seek to create a “backup” of this area’s – and the world’s – wild plants.
Handful by sweaty handful, they collect seeds from plants in the hills around this city in southern California. Once cleaned and dried, the seeds are put into silver-colored, insulated envelopes. Half of the envelopes remain here at San Diego Zoo’s Conservation and Research for Endangered Species (CRES); the other half crosses the Atlantic to the Millennium Seed Bank Project (MSBP) in Britain, the acting repository for all the world’s wild plant seeds.
Unlike animals, which can theoretically move to more suitable climes, plants can only move as fast as their seeds disperse. But in today’s human-dominated landscape, such obstacles as cities, agricultural fields, and highways could stop plant migration. Scientists worry that many plant species won’t be able to adjust and will simply disappear. One-quarter of Earth’s species, plants included, may vanish by century’s end, says the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
So as US lawmakers haggle over how to handle human carbon emissions and avoid what’s widely considered a climate catastrophe in the making, seed-banking projects like the MSBP have moved ahead with a “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” approach.
The worry – and the hurry – is that species may disappear tomorrow.
“We don’t know what benefits these plants will provide – sources of medicine, important food crops,” says Kayri Havens, director of the Institute for Plant Biology and Conservation at the Chicago Botanic Garden, a contributor to MSBP. “If we lose them, we lose all of those options.”
On the other hand, scientists hope that once the proverbial dust settles, reintroducing species to the wild will be possible.
(13 June 2007)
