What do biochar advocates really think?

Mathews keeps a bag of biochar on his desk, because he sees it as key to the future of the earth. He applauds the initiatives by Sen. Salazar and New South Wales and contends that the time is right for individual countries to promote pyrolysis and biochar. Kyoto's cap-and-trade approach "can never get CO2 levels down fast enough or far enough. The biochar approach can solve global warming by biosequestration of carbon direct from the atmosphere using the power of photosynthesis," he says.

There's a compelling logic in this. The idea of avoiding a fall off a cliff by going more slowly is just silly. You have to stop, turn around and head a different direction.

Still, who cares what the carbon wankers think? Isn't biochar valuable even in a world that has no climate issues?

Brown and many other biochar advocates believe that the economic key to unlocking the potential of biochar lies in making it eligible for carbon credits or other incentives for greenhouse-gas mitigation. "That is not to say that other benefits of using biochar are less important," he says, "but in terms of driving implementation, it is greenhouse-gas policies."

Compared with planting trees, Earth's capacity to store biochar is almost endless—theoretically, arable lands could hold carbon equivalent to all the carbon in the 200 million t of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere today, according to eco-entrepreneur Mike Mason of U.K. biomass company BioJoule. Forest-stored CO2 can also go up in smoke with a fire, he adds, and geological storage can leak.

I doubt it. I doubt that "making it eligible for carbon credits or other incentives for greenhouse-gas mitigation" would result in much increase in the use of biochar. A few rent seekers would make a bundle, but the amounts directly attributable to those rents would be trivial. This is political madness, a disease that strikes so many and degrades their minds, often permanently. It's responsible for far more wasted lives than drugs or alcohol.

Biochar will see greater use when it is available at prices that make business sense. I think this is already true but the product is in short supply and hasn't had good marketing. There's an opportunity here.

If you have about US$3 million to invest, drop me a line and I'll explain.