Kipling had it right.
I was at an event recently at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs (where I’m teaching) and Elisabeth Rosenthal, the “NY Times” environmental reporter based in Europe, was being interviewed. She touched on a number of important subjects including the talks in Poznań in December, some of the international politics of climate change, and an interesting approach to green building: “passive” houses. Passive houses employ fairly simple principles of ultraefficient insulation and heat exchange. In the same vein – simple and easy – she had an article recently on the burgeoning practice in Britain of converting used cooking oil to transportation fuel.
During the Q&A, I asked her about black carbon and why the development aid community isn’t doing much more to promote clean cooking, something that can be done low-tech and inexpensively. (See Black Carbon and Solar Cookers.) I wondered why we are promoting nuclear power technology for India, but not low-tech alternatives. She said it was a good question and that these sorts of solutions, in her opinion, needed more backing. Rosenthal is a good friend of a good friend and so we talked about this some more after the program.
There’s a terrific article from another terrific environmental reporter, Fiona Harvey, in today’s “FT” about biochar. This is a comprehensive look at a technology that has enormous potential to not only sequester billions of tons of carbon but also to reduce the need for nitrogen fertilizers that cost farmers all over the world boatloads of money and also cause massive environmental damage, including pouring nitrous oxide, a potent GHG, into the atmosphere.
I wrote about biochar in this post, The Earth, from last summer. It has some extraordinary properties. The idea is to infuse soil with biochar in order to enhance fertility and to capture and hold the carbon contained in the biomass that’s been used to produce the biochar. As Harvey puts it: “What is different about biochar is that the stability of the charcoal should make it possible to lock away the carbon it contains for hundreds of years. The carbon is mineralised, so it’s very resistant to breaking down. What’s more, the ancillary benefits – not just its soil-improving characteristics, but certain by-products of its manufacture – should be enough to make it economically attractive.”
Where do you get the biomass? Agricultural waste and certain components of municipal solid waste are two excellent sources. How do you make it? Pyrolysis – “a form of controlled thermal decomposition of organic material in the absence of oxygen.” (Long before I knew about biochar, I conceived of pyrolysis as an integral part of an urban solid waste management scheme that I’d noodled and promulgated to a great number of people in New York City. See the last paragraph of this post from a couple of years ago for more on my “Urban Gold” concept.)
You can get so much bang for the buck out of low-tech, quickly and easily deployable approaches to energy production and distribution (solar hot water heaters and ground source heat pumps), energy efficiency (insulation), agriculture (no-till and biochar), green building (passive houses and green roofs), not to mention solar cookers for the developing world. KISS – keep it simple, stupid – is the engineer’s way of saying what Kipling said in poetry.
