The Key to Solving the Climate Crisis Is Beneath Our Feet
Carbon capture could help limit the effects of climate change.
Carbon capture could help limit the effects of climate change. (Brian
Boucheron / Flickr)
The Green New Deal resolution that was introduced into the U.S. House of
Representatives in February hit a wall in the Senate, where it was called
unrealistic and unaffordable. In a Washington Post article titled "The Green
New Deal Sets Us Up for Failure. We Need a Better Approach," former Colorado
governor and Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper framed the
problem like this:
"
The resolution sets unachievable goals. We do not yet have the technology
needed to reach "net-zero greenhouse gas emissions" in 10 years. That's why
many wind and solar companies don't support it. There is no clean substitute
for jet fuel. Electric vehicles are growing quickly, yet are still in their
infancy. Manufacturing industries such as steel and chemicals, which account
for almost as much carbon emissions as transportation, are even harder to
decarbonize.
Amid this technological innovation, we need to ensure that energy is not
only clean but also affordable. Millions of Americans struggle with "energy
poverty." Too often, low-income Americans must choose between paying for
medicine and having their heat shut off. .
If climate change policy becomes synonymous in the U.S. psyche with higher
utility bills, rising taxes and lost jobs, we will have missed our shot. .
The problem may be that a transition to 100% renewables is the wrong target.
Reversing climate change need not mean emptying our pockets and tightening
our belts. It is possible to sequester carbon and restore our collapsing
ecosystem using the financial resources we already have, and it can be done
while at the same time improving the quality of our food, water, air and
general health.
The Larger Problem - and the Solution - Is in the Soil
Contrary to popular belief, the biggest environmental polluters are not big
fossil fuel companies. They are big agribusiness and factory farming, with
six powerful food industry giants - Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Dean
Foods, Dow AgroSciences, Tyson and Monsanto (now merged with Bayer) -
playing a major role. Oil-dependent farming, industrial livestock
operations, the clearing of carbon-storing fields and forests, the use of
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the combustion of fuel to process
and distribute food are estimated to be responsible for as much as one-half
of human-caused pollution. Climate change, while partly a consequence of the
excessive relocation of carbon and other elements from the earth into the
atmosphere, is more fundamentally just one symptom of overall ecosystem
distress from centuries of over-tilling, over-grazing, over-burning,
over-hunting, over-fishing and deforestation.
Big Ag's toxin-laden, nutrient-poor food is also a major contributor to the
U.S. obesity epidemic and many other diseases. Yet these are the industries
getting the largest subsidies from U.S. taxpayers, to the tune of more than
$20 billion annually. We don't hear about this for the same reason that they
get the subsidies - they have massively funded lobbies capable of bribing
their way into special treatment.
The story we do hear, as Judith Schwartz observes in The Guardian, is,
"Climate change is global warming caused by too much CO2 in the atmosphere
due to the burning of fossil fuels. We stop climate change by making the
transition to renewable energy." Schwartz does not discount this part of the
story but points to several problems with it:
"
One is the uncomfortable fact that even if, by some miracle, we could
immediately cut emissions to zero, due to inertia in the system it would
take more than a century for CO2 levels to drop to 350 parts per million,
which is considered the safe threshold. Plus, here's what we don't talk
about when we talk about climate: we can all go solar and drive electric
cars and still have the problems - the unprecedented heat waves, the wacky
weather - that we now associate with CO2-driven climate change.
But that hasn't stopped investors, who see the climate crisis as simply
another profit opportunity. According to a study by Morgan Stanley analysts
reported in Forbes in October, halting global warming and reducing net
carbon emissions to zero would take an investment of $50 trillion over the
next three decades, including $14 trillion for renewables; $11 trillion to
build the factories, batteries and infrastructure necessary for a widespread
switch to electric vehicles; $2.5 trillion for carbon capture and storage;
$20 trillion to provide clean hydrogen fuel for power, cars and other
industries, and $2.7 trillion for biofuels. The article goes on to highlight
the investment opportunities presented by these challenges by recommending
various big companies expected to lead the transition, including Exxon,
Chevron, BP, General Electric, Shell and similar corporate giants - many of
them the very companies blamed by Green New Deal advocates for the crisis.
A Truly Green New Deal
There is a much cheaper and faster way to sequester carbon from the
atmosphere that doesn't rely on these corporate giants to transition us to
100% renewables. Additionally, it can be done while at the same time
reducing the chronic diseases that impose an even heavier cost on citizens
and governments. Our most powerful partner is nature itself, which over
hundreds of millions of years has evolved the most efficient carbon
sequestration system on the planet. As David Perry writes on the World
Economic Forum website:
"
This solution leverages a natural process that every plant undergoes,
powered by a source that is always available, costs little to nothing to run
and does not cause further pollution. This power source is the sun, and the
process is photosynthesis.
A plant takes carbon dioxide out of the air and, with the help of sunlight
and water, converts it to sugars. Every bit of that plant - stems, leaves,
roots - is made from carbon that was once in our atmosphere. Some of this
carbon goes into the soil as roots. The roots, then, release sugars to feed
soil microbes. These microbes perform their own chemical processes to
convert carbon into even more stable forms.
Perry observes that before farmland was cultivated, it had soil carbon
levels of from 3% to 7%. Today, those levels are roughly 1% carbon. If every
acre of farmland globally were returned to a soil carbon level of just 3%, 1
trillion tons of carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere and
stored in the soil - equal to the amount of carbon that has been drawn into
the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago.
The size of the potential solution matches the size of the problem.
So how can we increase the carbon content of soil? Through "regenerative"
farming practices, says Perry, including planting cover crops, no-till
farming, rotating crops, reducing chemicals and fertilizers, and managed
grazing (combining trees, forage plants and livestock together as an
integrated system, a technique called "silvopasture"). These practices have
been demonstrated to drive carbon into the soil and keep it there, resulting
in carbon-enriched soils that are healthier and more resilient to extreme
weather conditions and show improved water permeability, preventing the
rainwater runoff that contributes to rising sea levels and rising
temperatures. Evaporation from degraded, exposed soil has been shown to
cause 1,600% more heat annually than all the world's powerhouses combined.
Regenerative farming methods also produce increased microbial diversity,
higher yields, reduced input requirements, more nutritious harvests and
increased farm profits.
These highly favorable results were confirmed by Paul Hawken and his team in
the project that was the subject of his best-selling 2016 book, "Drawdown:
The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming." The
project involved evaluating the 100 most promising solutions to the
environmental crisis for cost and effectiveness. The results surprised the
researchers themselves. The best-performing sector was not "Transport" or
"Materials" or "Buildings and Cities" or even "Electricity Generation." It
was the sector called "Food," including how we grow our food, market it and
use it. Of the top 30 solutions, 12 were various forms of regenerative
agriculture, including silvopasture, tropical staple trees, conservation
agriculture, tree intercropping, managed grazing, farmland restoration and
multistrata agroforestry.
How to Fund It All
If regenerative farming increases farmers' bottom lines, why aren't they
already doing it? For one thing, the benefits of the approach are not well
known. But even if they were, farmers would have a hard time making the
switch. As noted in a Rolling Stone article titled "How Big Agriculture Is
Preventing Farmers From Combating the Climate Crisis":
"
[I]implementing these practices requires an economic flexibility most
farmers don't have, and which is almost impossible to achieve within a
government-backed system designed to preserve a large-scale,
corporate-farming monoculture based around commodity crops like corn and
soybeans, which often cost smaller farmers more money to grow than they can
make selling.
Farmers are locked into a system that is destroying their farmlands and the
planet, because a handful of giant agribusinesses have captured Congress and
the regulators. One proposed solution is to transfer the $20 billion in
subsidies that now go mainly to Big Ag into a fund to compensate small
farmers who transition to regenerative practices. We also need to enforce
the antitrust laws and break up the biggest agribusinesses, something for
which legislation is now pending in Congress.
At the grassroots level, we can vote with our pocketbooks by demanding truly
nutritious foods. New technology is in development that can help with this
grassroots approach by validating how nutrient-dense our foods really are.
One such device, developed by Dan Kittredge and team, is a hand-held
consumer spectrometer called a Bionutrient Meter, which tests nutrient
density at point of purchase. The goal is to bring transparency to the
marketplace, empowering consumers to choose their foods based on
demonstrated nutrient quality, providing economic incentives to growers and
grocers to drive regenerative practices across the system. Other new
technology measures nutrient density in the soil, allowing farmers to be
compensated in proportion to their verified success in carbon sequestration
and soil regeneration.
Granted, $20 billion is unlikely to be enough to finance the critically
needed transition from destructive to regenerative agriculture, but Congress
can supplement this fund by tapping the deep pocket of the central bank. In
the last decade, the Fed has demonstrated that its pool of financial
liquidity is potentially limitless, but the chief beneficiaries of its
largess have been big banks and their wealthy clients. We need a form of
quantitative easing that actually serves the local productive economy. That
might require modifying the Federal Reserve Act, but Congress has modified
it before. The only real limit on new money creation is consumer price
inflation, and there is room for a great deal more money to be pumped into
the productive local economy before that ceiling is hit than is circulating
in it now. For a detailed analysis of this issue, see my earlier articles
here and here and latest book, "Banking on the People."
The bottom line is that saving the planet from environmental destruction is
not only achievable, but that by focusing on regenerative agriculture and
tapping up the central bank for funding, the climate crisis can be addressed
without raising taxes and while restoring our collective health.
Ellen Brown
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute, and
author of thirteen books including her latest, "Banking on the People:
Democratizing Money in the Digital Age."
Ellen Brown
