Geoengineering is No Solution to Climate Change

By JIM VAN DER POL

The proposed solutions to climate change, including geoengineering, are totalitarian. They are one size fits all and imposed from above. It is thought that there is not sufficient time to achieve buy in by the population through argumentation. We have gotten ourselves into a corner where the change will need to be forced from above. Likely much force will be needed. Imagine if you will the imposition of a meatless diet, a car less life and no plane travel and no air conditioning on the population by fiat, especially if that population is awash in guns and ammo.

Geoengineering, or climate engineering, itself feels like something of the hair of the dog that bit us. Like all big technological solutions it involves a goodly dollop of panic and far too little independent analysis. We have become so accustomed to relying upon the technology itself to serve as moral arbiter (if it is possible, it is good) that we are simply no longer able to think through the morality of a course of action involving any kind of technological solution. Consequently we dismiss any drawbacks to adoption with the excuse that a technological solution to the problems caused by adoption of the technology will be found in time, or at all. But that habit of thought is exactly what got us to this point. This is faith to the point of superstition.

Geoengineering is based, like modern agriculture itself, upon a willingness to go forward on the basis of incomplete understanding of the system we want to impact. As modern agriculture has destroyed soil health by not bothering to understand it, so geoengineering proposes to fix an atmospheric imbalance with neither an understanding of, or focus upon, causes. It is a patch that could go badly wrong-continuous winter, for instance-to a problem that has been built on a generations long lack of any responsible economic and social structure.

It has been pointed out by a few of the very few serious thinkers we have among us that the problem of climate change becomes intractable because of its evident size. It suggests no program of work that can be assumed by individuals, families, or community groups. When we hear that large change must happen within a decade or so, and especially when we then look at the convocation of greedy violent fools our masters have placed in the government who are supposedly in charge of the problem, despair is the inevitable result.

Nevertheless, we must reject despair. Is there time for the population of earth to progress toward its own solution to the climate predicament? Possibly not. But is there a useful alternative to trying for it? There is not. So that brings us to thinking about what we can do. We need a democracy again. Just as obviously we all need to find our way away from fossil fuels. But as a farmer, I can also let soil organic matter levels weigh on my mind, forcing me to some kind of action. And I am blessed with the circumstance that I have a little land on which to bring my thinking to bear.

We know that tillage agriculture has burned off our organic matter in the midwestern grassland soils, taking it down from around ten percent when our great grandparents first turned the prairie sod to the current three or four percent level. We know that soil organic matter is about 58% carbon. We now understand that it is tillage of the soil that releases its carbon to the atmosphere. We know that restoring the carbon required to raise the organic matter in the top 12 inches of the soil, which is most of the root zone for annual crop plants, by one percentage point would have a very significant impact upon the level of carbon in our atmosphere where it is the major greenhouse gas. We are beginning to see ways of sequestering carbon in the soil while we farm it.

This then, is a program of work for us involved in farming. (All eaters are involved in farming) It is in two aspects that will proceed simultaneously. We stop burning carbon off. And we work at putting it back.

No till farming is a first step. This system plants the crop without very much disturbing the soil, thus tending to leave the organic matter intact. The difficulty is that no-till often is related to a decrease in bio diversity because it tends to focus upon just two annual crops, corn and soybeans, meaning that it is its own environmental (and economic) problem. And it relies heavily upon crop chemicals, another and related environmental problem. It stops tillage, so it is a start. But it will not, by itself, rebuild carbon into the soil.

There are five general principles guiding us to soil health, that is, toward the support of soil life and the rebalancing of carbon between the soil and the atmosphere. They are:

• Keep the soil covered (armor on the soil).

• Minimize soil disturbance.

• Increase crop diversity.

• Keep living roots in the soil.

• Integrate livestock.

Notice how a no-till practice responds pretty well to the first two on the list, but not at all to the next three. It is largely these last three that will do the lion’s share of re installing carbon in the soil. And they do so by feeding the soil life, the “livestock beneath the surface” that official and academic agriculture has spent the last seventy five years, all of my adult life, ignoring completely. And it is the last three that are the most difficult. Would perennial crop plants be a step in the right direction?

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, Conversations with the Land, was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2019

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