The future was mortgaged . . . some time ago. Payment is due.

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.

It takes years and years to make a mess as terrible as the California debacle, but the recipe is simple. All that you need is two political parties that are always willing to offer easy government solutions for every need of the voters, but never willing to make the tough decisions necessary to finance the government largess that results. Voters will occasionally change their allegiance from one party to the other, but the bacchanal will continue regardless of the names on the office doors.

California has engaged in an orgy of spending, but, compared with our federal government, its legislators should feel chaste. The California deficit this year is now north of $26 billion. The U.S. federal deficit will be, according to the latest numbers, almost 70 times larger.

One of the reasons that subsidies for char are so foolish (discussed from another perspective in Char Wonks) is that the economy is in tatters and will remain that way for a good long time. The idea of paying huge sums to promote biochar is a non-starter. It was a dumb idea before the economy tanked, but now it's entirely nonsensical. As a climate hack it would have trivial effects - most of the emissions come from elsewhere - and with current technology production costs are so high that it doesn't pencil as a soil amendment except in some uncommon situations.

That's why systems such as one mentioned previously that pay the bills by producing a valuable commodity such as ammonia, but also have a biochar residual, make so much sense. It is the products made from the gases given off during pyrolysis that will pay for char. You might understand it better by comparison to spent brewer's grains. It's the beer that pays the bills, though the spent grain still has some value as forage in a mixed and balanced ration. It's the same for ethanol production, though it makes no sense without subsidy and harms the environment to boot.

It's not clear how much that investors will be willing to sink into such systems. If, when, the price of fertilizers made from fossil feedstocks get high enough then the value proposition will be clear, but at present it's betting on the come.