Monbiot: Even greater than all the Biofools are the misguided advocates of Biochar

No matter how many times they lead to disappointment or disaster, the newspapers never tire of promoting miracle cures, miracle crops, miracle fuels and miracle financial instruments. We have a bottomless ability to disregard the laws of economics, biology and thermodynamics when we encounter a simple solution to complex problems. So welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the new miracle. It’s a low-carbon regime for the planet which makes the Atkins Diet look healthy: woodchips with everything.

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Biomass is suddenly the universal answer to our climate and energy
problems. Its advocates claim that it will become the primary source
of the world’s heating fuel, electricity, road transport fuel
(cellulosic ethanol) and aviation fuel (bio-kerosene). Few people stop
to wonder how the planet can accommodate these demands and still
produce food and preserve wild places. Now an even crazier use of
woodchips is being promoted everywhere. The great green miracle works
like this: we turn the planet’s surface into charcoal. Sorry, not
charcoal. We don’t call it that any more. Now we say biochar. The idea
is that wood and crop wastes are cooked to release the volatile
components (which can be used as fuel), then the residue – the
charcoal – is buried in the soil.

According to the magical thinkers
who promote it, the new miracle stops climate breakdown, replaces gas
and petroleum, improves the fertility of the soil, reduces
deforestation, cuts labour, creates employment, prevents respiratory
disease and ensures that when you drop your toast it always lands
butter side up. (I invented the last one, but give them time). They
point out that the indigenous people of the Amazon created terras
pretas (black soils) by burying charcoal over hundreds of years. These
are more fertile than the surrounding soils, and the carbon has stayed
where they put it. This miracle solution has suckered people who ought
to know better, including the earth systems scientist James
Lovelock(3), the eminent climate scientist Jim Hansen(4), the author
Chris Goodall and the climate campaigner Tim Flannery(5). At the UN
climate negotiations beginning in Bonn on Sunday, several national
governments will demand that biochar is eligible for carbon credits,
providing the financial stimulus required to turn this into a global
industry(6).

Their proposal boils down to this: we must destroy the
biosphere in order to save it. In his otherwise excellent book, Ten
Technologies to Save the Planet, Chris Goodall abandons his usual
scepticism and proposes that we turn 200 million hectares of “forests,
savannah and croplands” into biochar plantations. Thus we would
increase carbon uptake, by grubbing up “wooded areas containing
slow-growing trees” (that is, natural forest) and planting
“faster-growing species”(7). This is environmentalism? But that’s just
the start of it. Carbonscape, a company which hopes to be among the
first to commercialise the technique, talks of planting 930 million
hectares(8). The energy lecturer Peter Read proposes new biomass
plantations of trees and sugar covering 1.4 billion ha(9).

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