The Biochar Debate: Charcoal's potential to reverse climate change and build soil fertility (Schumacher Briefings #16)
Description
Charcoal-making is one of the oldest industrial technologies, and there has been a growing wave of excitement about its potential for combating climate change. Burying biochar (fine-grained charcoal) is a highly effective way to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; and in addition it can increase the yield of food crops and moisture retention of soil. The Biochar Debate sets out experimental and scientific aspects of biochar in the context of global warming, the global economy and negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol. It concludes by encouraging all gardeners and farmers to use biochar to help prevent climate change.
Praise for The Biochar Debate: Charcoal's potential to reverse climate change and build soil fertility (Schumacher Briefings #16)
"There is one way we could save ourselves [from global heating] and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contrains carbon that plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal and burying it in the soil . . . This scheme would need no subsidy: the famer would make a profit." —James Lovelock, scientist and author, A Rough Ride to the Future
