Heating Soil
Sometimes worry can lead to thoughtful action to avoid hazard. Sometimes it can lead to self-destructive activity, especially when it leads to mindless panic.
The activists who have dominated the discussion about the global environment for decades have fostered a sense of urgent worry about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is based on the theory that carbon dioxide levels will cause dangerous climate change, and therefore our civilization must stop releasing excess carbon dioxide to generate energy.
Here in the United States we are set to follow the path previously pioneered by the Germans over the past couple of decades with regard to environmental energy policy. This was the conclusion of Mark Mills in a recent video presentation. The effort will spend a lot of tax money subsidizing windmills, solar panels, and probably biomass, in spite of all the drawbacks inherent in these technologies. Let’s take a look at biomass.
We are familiar enough with wind and solar energy as promised renewables. Less has been said about burning biomass for energy under a similar premise. The basic idea is simple enough: there’s lots of plant matter on the earth’s surface that contains carbon recently pulled from the atmosphere. Why not burn that rather than extracting fossil fuels from the deep ground? The biomass is living now, after all, and being regenerated all around us.
As it turns out, nature has no free lunch to offer here either. We need the living biomass to pull excess carbon dioxide from the air. And at the same time, we need to burn the biomass for energy, which will release its stored carbon dioxide. But after we burn the biomass for energy, how can we rely on it to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—or to provide a healthy topsoil in which to grow our food? Umm…
Mining blogger, lawyer, and nuclear energy proponent B. F. Randall described the overlooked complications in his newsletter this past January:
By definition, removal of biomass from the biosphere for burning (resulting in ash, CO2, and water), converts all of the biomass immediately into CO2. If the biomass had not been removed from the biosphere, the biomass would have become Organic Soil Carbon.
This organic soil carbon turns out to be something we need to grow things like vegetable food crops, grazing pastures for our livestock, and fertile ground for trees that will constitute the forests of tomorrow.
The biomass is harvested from forests cut down to make wood pellet fuel.
A biomass operation is very similar to a coal mine, except that instead of mining fossil carbon, a biomass “mine” removes biomass directly from the living biosphere that sustains all life.
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Pretending that Biomass is "renewable" is absurd. The ability of the earth to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is highly dependent on Organic Soil Carbon.
It would be foolish to burn this for energy today, since it takes decades and centuries to build it up—and in the panic over climate change, the foolishness is what we are apparently pursuing.
European policymakers in particular have been relentless in their attempts to mitigate carbon dioxide production as they generate energy. Nevertheless, they see nuclear energy as something of a fearsome technology, and eliminated it from consideration because it might produce radioactive disaster.
It has been frustrating to watch as functional energy-generating technology is abandoned in favor of more expensive, unproven technologies—all without anyone ever having bothered to inform the public or invite debate on the matter. Yet this appears to be precisely the course we have embarked on, it having been selected for us.
Hi all
Been crazy the past few mornings, so i haven't really logged on before evening. I have a 12:30 meeting, and wanted to share a remembrance of Tim Keller that I found very moving and loving. Tomorrow I'll follow up with a tearjerker story of my best friend, Christy.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/august-web-only/tim-keller-francis-collins-walking-through-valley-of-shadow.html
I once knew a guy that worked in this industry, capturing methane from landfills to create energy. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1012218119/epa-struggles-to-track-methane-from-landfills-heres-why-it-matters-for-the-clima