Al Gore Supports Soil Carbon Sequestration
The Times UK recently reported on our former Vice President’s remarks at an environmental conference in at the Smith School in Oxford. He made several key points with regards to soil carbon:
(1) “There is three times as much carbon [sic] in the first two meters of soil than there is in all of the world’s vegetation.”
(2) “Soil is the third-largest natural store of carbon in the world after the oceans and fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.”
(3) The misuse of land through over-farming, desertification, and “the burning of peatland…is responsible for as much as 30 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, more than either deforestation, power generation or transport.”
Gore recognizes that our approach to soil carbon will be integral in curbing – and even reversing – damage to our atmosphere caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Several members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change were present at the Oxford conference. Biochar is currently on the agenda for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. We hope that the further support from change agents and politicians such as Mr. Gore will further raise the profile of biochar as a verifiable carbon offset mechanism.
Roger
July 10th, 2009 at 10:20 am
The benefit of the char form of carbon storage is that it is a solid. Unlike the char, deep storage of liquefied CO2 gas is a recipe for disaster as this gas must eventually escape, leaving us open to the prospect of enormous Carbon "belches" caused be seismic activity. Better to put it in the ground as char.