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Record fires are blazing in the west coast, huge even compared to California's notorious summers.

Dead plants and debris are crucial to get a fire started. This debris could be collected, carbonized, and buried, say as terra preta. Biochar burial has been considered as a way to mitigate climate change.

Cleaning up thousands of square miles of brush would be a massive undertaking. But we would avoid the pervasive and persistent loss of air quality on top of an already high health cost as well as tens to hundreds of billions of dollars from property damage, economic disruption i.e. evacuations, and other costs such as fighting fires. Would the combined benefit to cost ratio be competitive compared to the "typical" climate, health, or economic program?

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    $\begingroup$ why collect it,most is probably on the ground where it will be covered over time and the ash contains minerals that will be nutrients for the next generation of trees.and as @RodrigodeAzevedo say why not use grazing animals to keep the undergrowth down. $\endgroup$
    – trond hansen
    Commented Sep 11, 2020 at 14:05
  • $\begingroup$ @Trond hansen: Carbon burial. Grazing it away may be even worse for CO2 than burning it because of animals belching methane. Although anything to stop this incessant smoke would be nice. $\endgroup$
    – Kevin Kostlan
    Commented Sep 12, 2020 at 5:33
  • $\begingroup$ @RodrigodeAzevedo A reasonable goat generation time is only ~1.5 years. This means shepherds breed or slaughter to follow changes in demand on a time-scale much faster than climate change. $\endgroup$
    – Kevin Kostlan
    Commented Sep 12, 2020 at 18:09
  • $\begingroup$ @Rodrigo de Azevedo: Hydrothermal vents is tiny compared to other sources both natural and artificial. About 20% of all emissions combined is from farm animals. About population size, is our current goat population enough to graze the vast forests of debris or would we need to breed even more? That being said, I think goats aren't that bad methane-wise per kilocalorie of cellulose. If they could replace cow meat... $\endgroup$
    – Kevin Kostlan
    Commented Sep 12, 2020 at 21:54
  • $\begingroup$ @KevinKostlan I also though about this, and it seems that it may indeed be. But, the catch is that it's best to have a lot of people actually living in the forest. I've created a chat room chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/133811/forest-litter-management join me there if you'd like to discuss this. $\endgroup$
    – Hennadii Madan
    Commented Feb 3, 2022 at 17:52

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The effects of biochar burial in California would be so minuscule they might be a net negative once you include the CO2 production of the labor involved. Biochar is a very labor intensive process. Consider carbon in fossil fuels was accumulated of millions of years of what is essentially the same process, even industrializing the process will still take comparable amounts of time to resequester that carbon using what is basically the same method. keep in mind fire is a normal part of many of these environmental cycles they are bad because humans kept preventing the normal fire cycles allowing fuels to build up for decades. Normally that fuel would be cleared by the natural fire cycles. Drought is a trigger not the cause.

Large impact estimates assume we would have to be converting land to biochar production, which has many many downsides and still would not be very effective.

It can be particularly confusing since "Bio-char" can mean two different things, the most touted use of biochar (fertilizer) will have no real carbon sequestration effect but can be a way to offset industrial fertilizers. Burial would sequester some carbon, but would also deplete soils and biodiversity. You have to check and see which use of biochar a source is referring to.

A better idea would be to burn the material as fuel, instead of fossil fuels, which would at least be carbon neutral.

source

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  • $\begingroup$ Too many "save the world" low carbon or otherwise green ideas are too much labor. Our time is a non-rewnewable resource. $\endgroup$
    – Kevin Kostlan
    Commented Oct 11, 2020 at 7:40
  • $\begingroup$ @KevinKostlan time is not the issue, the labor of modern humans is mechanized with hydrocarbon burning vehicles and tools. $\endgroup$
    – John
    Commented Oct 11, 2020 at 13:20
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There's No real evidence Biochar helps to sequester co2. Turning bioenergy crops into buried charcoal to sequester carbon does not work. The biofuels ‘scam’ has already proven to be a dud. From corn to ethanol, algae experiments, etc and tropical crop related fuels. All they do is speed up deforestation and peatland destruction, deplete water and soil for agricultural sustained fuel production, and increased the use of farm-chemicals to meet quotas. Above all, it has generated land grab, land conflicts, human rights abuses, labour abuses, starvation and food insecurity. Worse Biochar according to research is a notorious oxygen sink. https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/11/18/beware-the-biochar-initiative/

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  • $\begingroup$ can you provide some more information about charcoal being an oxygen sink,i have no problem seeing that burning coal uses a lot of oxygen but mixing biochar with soil should not make the coal combine with oxygen. $\endgroup$
    – trond hansen
    Commented Oct 8, 2020 at 6:47
  • $\begingroup$ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar as you can see in the first few lines of text biochar is made by removing the oxygen and heating the plant material.your source does not know the basics of charcoal/biochar production. $\endgroup$
    – trond hansen
    Commented Oct 8, 2020 at 13:07
  • $\begingroup$ Evaluation of biochar powder on oxygen supply efficiency and global warming potential during mainstream large-scale aerobic composting pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28898825 $\endgroup$
    – LazyReader
    Commented Oct 8, 2020 at 16:09

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