The lunatic fringe has been aroused.

Adding charcoal (‘biochar’) to the soil has been proposed as a ‘climate change mitigation’ strategy and as a means of regenerating degraded land. Some even claim that this could sequester so much carbon that the Earth could return to pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels, i.e. that all the global warming caused by fossil fuel burning and ecosystem destruction could be reversed. Such large-scale production of charcoal would require many hundreds of millions of hectares of land for biomass production (primarily tree plantations). This is an attempt to manipulate the biosphere and land use on a vast scale in order to alter the global climate, which makes it a form of ‘geo-engineering’.

Well, some may have proposed growing and processing tree plantations for char, but that's a very small part of the whole story, no more realistic than the biofuel opportunists who dream of vast switchgrass acreage for use for the as yet mythical cellulosic ethanol. And, so what if the production and use of charcoal is a form of ‘geo-engineering’? Every land use qualifies for that label.

As the unfolding disaster of agrofuels clearly demonstrates, such major land-conversion poses a major threat to biodiversity and ecosystems that play an essential role in stabilising and regulating the climate and are necessary to ensure food and water security. It threatens the livelihoods of many communities, including indigenous peoples.

Right, it's the ill-informed emo activists again. In fact biochar would ease some of the pressure on land since it would make existing farm lands more productive, meaning less would have to be brought into production to provide food, fiber and fuel for our still growing population.

‘Biochar’ and agrofuels are closely linked: Charcoal is a byproduct from a type of bioenergy production which can also be used to make second-generation agrofuels, i.e. liquid agrofuels from wood, straw, bagasse, palm kernel residues and other types of solid biomass.

Some link. These folks can't distinguish their assholes from their esophagus. Gases are a byproduct of pyrolysis. All over the world they are wasted when charcoal, a major fuel for poor people, is produced for cooking and heating fuel. In a better designed charcoal production unit those gases can be used. They can simply be burned for more heat, or processed into a variety of products, everything from liquid fuel to fertilizer.

Eleven African governments have called for agricultural soils in general and ‘biochar’ in particular to be included into carbon trading. Their submission indicates that they seek to increase “private sector financing” (and by implication corporate control) over rural areas in the South, and to link this to proposals for including forests in carbon trading (i.e. the mechanisms for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation or REDD being negotiated at present). Those REDD proposals have met with opposition on the basis that they commodify forest ecosystems with dire implications for indigenous peoples and biodiversity. The inclusion of soils into those mechanisms would further extend such serious impacts.

All of these things that the African governments support are very good things. If there are to be subsidies payed for carbon management then no better uses exist than for forests and soil. Indigenous people and biodiversity would be less threatened than they are now since their homes would have greater value than now, but only when they are intact.

The referenced rant goes on, making preposterous claims, half truths, selective citation, FUD and all of their usual logic bending antics. I suspect that their real fear is that biochar would be a great help, and that this would ruin the revenue streams and rapturous dreams of the emo activist community. The last thing they want is for their crises to diminish. This is just silly. There will always be another crisis, something else that they can keen about. They face no real threat. They should just be ignored.

There are true concerns about the production and use of char. I've pointed out the erroneous applications as they made the news. For example, the fellow that uses chicken manure as the feedstock for char production is misusing the manure, which has a higher use as a soil amendment and fertilizer. And the wackos who proposed using giant microwave ovens to char the harvest from tree plantations miss the point.

Pro-biochar activists can be as silly as these anti-biochar activists. The battles they are fighting to control rents from political sources are irrelevant to the issues they claim to care about. It's all about the rents, the money they can glean from people. That's criminal, but the production and use of char for soil amendment will continue and grow unless it is criminalized. That's a bizarre prospect but would be consistent with the behavior of emo activists. In order to protect their criminal racket they criminalize anything that would make them redundant.