A message came in on one of the lists from Bakary Jatta, who has a .gm email addy, noting some of the complexities of biochar subsidy schemes and emissions trading scams.

There would be a rapid response by the establishment if the UNFCCC process was introduced to them. Money is of great interest.

The amount of money would have to be compared to the value of the charcoal as a fuel sold in the urban area. It is illegal to produce charcoal in the Gambia, so it is 'supposed' to come from Casamance province, in fact from disputed territory. Legal or not, law enforcement staff buy and use it, and levy an informal tax on it and other substances at a large number of check points along the main highway. There would be great difficulty to monitor production and use of biochar, so in my opinion carbon credits would be additional income for those involved in the charcoal trade.

One must be realistic. The various kleptocracies would sensibly see such flows of wealth as a honey pot to be skimmed and diverted. It is a safe bet that most of the char would be burned as fuel, no matter what the official accounts claim, unless there were cheaper sorts of energy available. Even then there would be a lag in conversion due to the time required for new technology to be rolled out, and the inertia of preferences. People like char cooked foods and will prepare foods that way even when it is more expensive if they have the spare coin.

Consider:

Sub-Saharan Africa has huge untapped reserves of natural gas. It also has a huge potential market, given that charcoal in African cities — the fuel of choice for hundreds of millions of people there — is often more expensive than gas. But the production of charcoal is destroying forests, and its use for cooking can destroy lungs in households choking on smoke. For the time being, promoting ways to use charcoal more cleanly and efficiently is a goal of many development specialists in Africa. But when will the jump to gas take place?

Q. Why isn’t development of this African gas resource, for both local and global markets, a priority for rich countries that claim they are committed to helping Africa break the bonds of persistent poverty? (Dysfunctional governments are surely an issue in some places, but not all.)

Q. Should projects that develop natural gas and related propane supplies in regions with few fuel choices get credit under proposed climate-treaty provisions?

On the climate front, discussions of ways to limit global warming seem more focused on capturing stray emissions of methane (more on that anon) than on pressing for ways to promote it as an alternative to coal, at least as a bridge to even less-polluting energy sources. For several decades, a cluster of scientists — in particular Jesse H. Ausubel, Arnulf Grübler, and Nebojsa “Naki” Nakicenovic — have pressed the case that methane is a vital ingredient for navigating toward a prosperous planet with a stable climate. It releases half the carbon dioxide per unit of energy that coal does. And if burned in certain ways, the resulting stream of CO2 is pure and easily captured for storage, Dr. Ausubel says.

It is also becoming ever clearer that the world has vast untapped stores of natural gas, everywhere from the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico to a wide swath of the Arctic.

I've linked this article before and concluded that post observing that:

With an open mind and good information about the agro-enviro-energy system one can see some useful policy directions that advance the interests of all segments and the system as a whole. Methane, for example, is a feedstock in one type of nitrogen fertilizer synthesis. African methane could be used to make it, and so increase their agricultural productivity, while reducing pressure on forests for expanded low production agriculture, while also using methane for energy instead of biomass, and have progress on several fronts while reducing net emissions. Add in biochar production and use in some types of CHP systems and they could end up being net carbon negative due to increased use of fossil methane!

You have to consider the whole agro-enviro-energy system in order to prescribe useful policies.