In Charily Charred I ridiculed a silly paper in Nature Communications by Woolf et. al. - Sustainable biochar to mitigate global climate change - and lamented the coming dung storm from their equal and opposite rent seekers. They're baaack.

Today twenty-one groups . . . expressed their dismay at an article by leading biochar advocates, published in the science magazine Nature Communications, which proposes that an area larger than the land mass of India could be turned into charcoal plantations in the name of climate change mitigation.[1] The paper’s own figures contradict the authors’ claims that biochar will not lead to large-scale land grabbing in the global South. . .

Although the authors claim that this could be done without the conversion of natural habitats and agricultural lands, the figures and forecasts used as a basis for their calculations tell a very different story, implying land-conversion on an unprecedented scale. . .

Co-authors Johannes Lehmann and Stephen Joseph are Chair and Vice-Chair of the International Biochar Initiative, which lobbies for carbon credits and subsidies for biochar. . .

This isn't about biochar, climate change, or any other environmental issue, it is about money. The biochar advocates want subsidies and a carbon market - which is in effect a derivatives market which could be very lucrative - and their opponents are a rag tag collection of rent seeker NGOs and others in the development exploitation business who wish to maintain their current rents and gain increases. Biochar rents are a threat to their existing business.

Move along, there's nothing to see here.