Biochar is very measurable and a physical product that farmers can sell as a soil additive in powder form so that it will not be burned on the BBQ.

Dwight, thanks for your detailed comment. The webinar panelists were pretty clear that more research is needed to get clear on precisely how much carbon this technique can sequester, and for how long.

But to your main point — I don’t think anyone is suggesting carbon farming as an alternative to phasing out fossil fuels, protecting species, or all the other things we need to get done by mid-century. It’s one more tool in the toolbox. By the same token, we have far too much evidence (with the last couple of decades of climate campaigning as Exhibit A) that constantly and exclusively hammering away at the scope and depth of the crisis is not a way to motivate people or build public support. It just paralyses anyone we talk to and convinces them that it doesn’t matter what they do, because nothing will work.

Enriching the soil by natural means or supplements to nature by inventing enzymes will make the soil more productive, but with such increases in productivity, more carbon is harvested in the crop’s sugars and released back into the environment. Therefor I question your reduction of soil based carbon in the soil–crop–harvest cycle.

Rather than sway the ignorant public with these heretical ideas that science is reducing the atmosphere carbon by humanist/environmentalist’ catch and release’ practises, why not continue with increasing public awareness that the way to reduce atmospheric carbon is primarily to stop all burning of fossil fuels, reducing natural biomass ground cover such as forests, reducing g industrial pollutants which inhibit the natural processes from absorbing carbon and most importantly by doing the reduction of human produced carbon gases and reducing global warming we will stop the melting of perma-frost which is currently ramping up the release of methane which increases global warming.

Presenting more facts about species loss, changes to the natural environment caused by human use of carbon based fuels, which will harm the planet and destroy human beings from surviving in our only limited parameter niche in the earth’s environment is the only way forward. Yes this is alarming, but humans are obtuse and take a long time to break their narrow view of exceptionalism, an extraordinary US based propaganda, so that your apologist approach diminishes the argument for universal action agains atmospheric carbon proliferation immediately which means today not just a little later because we are all running out of time.

When species die, they don’t come back, there is no heaven on earth for lost species. Lost species is the canary in the mine shaft telling all that doom is imminent. People who are wealthy, northern hemisphere inhabitants primarily, need to be made more aware that producing wealth for luxury life styles, having greater wealth and job security is not the way forward at the expense of their less fortunate global neighbours and the survival of our ecosystem. Wealth in the future when the world is dead to human inhabitation is not going to buy us a future when we fail to live in a cataclysm. Then we are the Dodo.

Please stop with the apologist nature of first world back patting, self deception that somehow we are healing the planet by tackling such a small improvement that does not stop mass degradation. The issue is stopping all use of fossil fuel producing atmospheric carbon. That is the root cause of environmental degradation and the greatest offence. We are already able to stop fossil fuel waste as fuel by going green but we need to demand its last gasp to maximize its use to create more money for its owners begin immediately and not fool the public that we can both continue carbon release, sequester a tiny portion of the proliferation and stop our permanent environmental destruction.