[ExI] Carbon

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 10:40:15AM -0800, spike wrote:

> Well, how ungreen of those other locations.  By building American homes of
> carbon, we prevent that carbon from going into the atmosphere in the form of
> CO2.  

Not sustainably. A much better approach to immobilize carbon in the soil
long-term is biochar, which is easy enough to do even on small scale with improvised 
retorts and dry destillation. It also improves the soil, and you can combine
it with outdoor cooking (barbecue) without creating too much pollution.

http://www.holon.se/folke/carbon/simplechar/simplechar.shtml

Notice this also helps against soil demineralization and denitrification.
 
> For a single digit BOTEC, I would estimate the amount of CO2 we exhale and
> defecate every day on the order of about a kilo, then estimate the size of
> the woodpile needed to build an American prole's home, oh about 10 or more
> cubic meters, close enough to 10,000 kg of wood, so the typical American
> prole ties up 30 years worth of her exhalations and defecations merely by
> virtue of living in an American house.

Given that the average USian carbon footprint is some 20 t/year (against
global average of 4 t/year) it's a drop in the bucket.
 
> By building American homes of carbon, we also create and nurture a market
> for wood products, encouraging the diversion of water out of rivers to

Using irrigation to grow biomass in dry climates does not strike me
as particularly sustainable, and fraught with lots of nasty
side effects (see Oz and Taxifornia).

> otherwise dry and fallow ground, to grow commercial forests, further
> greenifying the planet. 
>  
> > > better-organized carbon, it would take far less than we 
> > currently use. Eugen* Leitl ...
> 
> But we want to *use* more carbon, if we use it in that form.

Once we start fixating atmospheric carbon dioxide on a large scale
using renewable energy sources for more than synfuels which are 
immediately returning it we *will* start running into atmospheric
depletion, which could result in a runaway glaciation event and/or
have negative impact on plant bioproductivity and hence the ecosystem.
You can bake out the carbonates, though, and and bury them. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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