kenneal wrote:small scale charring of organic waste and its incoporation into soil to provide a lesser furtilizer would be benefitial and sequester the carbon that would otherwise return to the atmosphere as CO2 and methane through rotting
Globally we're emitting about 7 billion tonnes of carbon -- not carbon dioxide, that's the value of the elemental carbon (see
http://intranet/arch_library/energy/cli ... m_cont.htm). Any idea what that looks like? Britain emits 158 million tonnes of carbon.
The other problem is that to ge tthe carbon char out you have to pyrolise the waste, which if it is contaminated (e.g., plastics) can give rise to the production of pollutants like dioxin, and the products of incomplete combustion like benzo-a-pyrene.
By incorporating the carbon in the soil it becomes bio-available. The purpose of the Branson Project is to take the carbon
out of the biosphere so that it can no longer affect the climate cycle. Eventually that buried carbon will be cycled back into biomass again.
What really annoys me, particularly with regards to the media, is that no one challenges these ideas with very simple though experiments to test the validity of what proposed (e.g., the energy consumption of immobilising carbon from the atmosphere). E.g. I recently had a really good argument with someone proposing to grow willow in upland Wales to produce "carbon neutral" power from biomass... but it doesn't!! Most of upland Wales is peat -- peat is stored atmospheric carbon. If you grow willow on the peat the peak loses moisture, and the peat breaks down releasing its carbon. This process is already happening with some wind farms, e.g. Cefn Croes, where the trenching to bury cables has drained the peat (Cefn Croes wind farm is actually emitting more carbon than it saves).
There's such a simple solution, and it really pisses me off that people like Greenpeace are afraid to say it --
let's just turn a lot of things off! No carbon trading. No personal carbon allowances, we just stop them. The driver for carbon emissions is economic growth -- as Lord Lawson quite clearly outlined on the R4's The Week in Westminster on Saturday, and it was for this reason he opposed do anything to significantly reduce carbon emissions .
If you want to cut carbon emissions, cut the material excess from our lives. The best way I've seen of doing this is living in a small space -- if you don't have a big house, you can consume to fill it, and a smaller space takes less energy to build and run (see
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/wolfe92.html).
