Today, Albert Bates joins Christophe and Alexsandra to share his unique path from the courtroom to the ecovillage, describing how he came to study terra preta soils and get involved in the biochar movement. Listen in for Albert’s insight around the waste streams that could serve as biochar source material and learn about the ecovillages and cities that serve as proof of concept for using biochar to draw carbon out of our atmosphere and oceans!
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hi, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. My name is Alexsandra Guerra.
Christophe Jospe: And I’m Christophe Jospeit. And we miss you, Ross Kenyon. He is usually co-hosting, but we are still in Toronto. We’re on the 25th floor of a quite nice Airbnb. There’s really good feng shui in this room looking out over downtown Toronto. I said it right.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, you did. Good job.
Christophe Jospe: We’re really glad to do this podcast with Albert Bates. He is an author, former lawyer, farmer. I feel like he comes from the Lorax tribe. Been wanting to say that for a while. Waiting for someone who really could sort of represent and embody like, well, let’s stop doing destructive things to the planet. And you, the listener, will probably figure out why I gave him that title. Albert, we met last year, actually, at the same conference when it was in New Orleans. And I remember hanging out with you a number of times.
And the last time we hung out, you took out this little shot glass, which was a It was made out of biochar. And I was like, wow, that’s cool. This guy is onto something. And he’s also on the cutting edge of something that I think has been dismissed by a lot of the environmental community as maybe it’s hard to scale or too complicated and to even figure it out how it works. And you recently published a book with Kathleen Draper, who’s not here, but this was called Fire. Originally, it was called Carbon Cascades.
I’m sure we’ll get into it. Yeah, it’s called Burn.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, man.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, listener. It’s called burn. But let’s get into how do we like to start these?
Albert Bates: Well, let me just jump off on that shot glass idea. And I’m sorry. It is early. I don’t have espresso to fill these shot glasses with. But that’s actually cement that was made of cement. But it was a cement that was doped with biochar. And we can talk about what biochar is, but the idea is that it was lighter, it was stronger, it had greater tensile strength, it had greater compressive strength. And if you were to replace all of the concrete in the world that’s being poured every day, every year you could sequester gigatons and gigatons of carbon in the built environment in the same way we made that shot glass.
Christophe Jospe: And gigatons, that’s a billion tonnes. Well, sorry, I was kind of going slow. But Albert, I want to start off with you. Who are you? How did you get to where you are today? You’re a former lawyer. So at some point, you got out of that racket.
Albert Bates: Yeah, actually, the lawyer thing was sort of what got me into the present racket. I was taking a case in environmental justice that involved a small community in Tennessee that was being dumped upon. It had a chemical company that was making herbicides and pesticides, and they injected their waste stream. Imagine if you can, how toxic a bad batch of herbicides is. And it went down into a well that fracked the earth a mile down and created its own repository. And they had put something like a billion gallons down there. And it was the most toxic stuff ever tested in a state laboratory.
One drop killed all the fish in the tank in 24 hours. And so their argument was, Tennessee has plenty of water. You don’t need this. You know, it’s a mile down there. You never have to go that deep for water. We’re okay. And my argument was twofold. One, population is increasing. And two, climate is changing. We’re going to need water, more fresh water. And so don’t go destroying the aquifers we have. And at that time, we’re talking 1980, I had to go into court and prove that climate change was real.
So I was drawing upon experts. I went to my congressman to help do some research. His name was Al Gore.
Christophe Jospe: Part of him.
Albert Bates: Yeah. And he was just a freshman congressman at the time, but he held hearings and dredged the agencies for reports. And with that, we actually won that case. But it scared the bejesus out of me. I was never the same afterwards. I had seen what a one degree change, which is what had been predicted at that time, might mean for civilization. And I couldn’t keep going. I had to stop being a lawyer. I stopped and I became a mushroom farmer for a dozen years or so and grew organic forest mushrooms, gourmet forest mushrooms and had a small business still there called Mushroom People.
Eventually, I kept looking around for solutions, and I got involved with the Global Ecovillage Network, which was sort of my next platform, because I had been living in an ecovillage there in Tennessee called The Farm, which is something that was started in the early 1970s, still going, I still live there. And the eco-village movement was nascent. It was just starting. Maybe we knew of 12 or 15 in the world. I got involved with the organization of the Global Eco-Village Network, which expanded the horizons. And today there’s probably 20,000 of them.
I could talk much more. I could talk at length about global eco-village movement and where we’re going with that. But as it applies to carbon... I began to see the potential there for demonstrating ecological living as a way to transition out of the fossil fuel paradigm into the post-carbon world. And then as I was attending a meeting in Brazil, it was... Early 90s, I was made aware of the Terra Preta soils, the dark earths of the Amazon Indians, the Terra Preta dos Indios. And I went back to Brazil a couple more times.
I went to archaeological digs. I went to scientific conferences on Terra Preta. And I began to understand what that’s about. And it was about building carbon over the course of millennia. By indigenous practices of soil management. And the principal ingredient was discovered by a Dutch researcher in the 70s. His name was Wim Sombruk. And it was charcoal. He found that there were charcoal fragments embedded in these soils. In some cases, they were several meters deep. They could go back and they could carbon date them to 8,000 years before the present.
And so the Indians have been doing this a very long time. So you actually had two styles of agriculture being practiced in the world since the last ice age. And on one side of the planet, we had irrigation and the plow. It’s the story we’re told of Western civilization, the Fertile Crescent, Northern China, Northern Africa. Well, everywhere that style was practiced, the carbon was removed from the soil, mostly by tilling and also by irrigation. And what you were left with was deserts. It was a desertification process in slow motion, although it’s speeding up.
And then on the other side of the world, unbeknownst to anyone in Europe or Africa or Asia, there was a second style of agriculture that was going on for thousands of years. And it was putting carbon in the soil and building deep black profiles to meters of depth. And that process, we now can look at it scientifically and break it apart and say, what was it that did it? How did you hold that profile in tropics in the equator where traditionally you don’t keep good soil because of the rainfall patterns and so forth?
It’s almost impossible. And yet here you have it. You have soil that’s now in Brazil being bagged up and sold in Walmarts. It’s that fertile and they’re mining it. So it’s why would you want to have an agriculture that destroys soil when you can as easily have an agriculture that builds soil. And so that got me into biochar and then I became part of that and then sort of integrated that into the eco village world. And I created a book in 2009 called The Biochar Solution that described the whole history of the Amazon.
And then I continued research and going to conferences and going to the climate meetings in Paris and so forth. And I wrote another book called The Paris Agreement that described how that process played out. And then I finally wrote this newest book, which is called Burn, Using Fire to Cool the Planet, Cool the Earth, with my co-author Kathleen Draper.
Christophe Jospe: There’s so many mic drop moments and everything you just said. There’s a lot I want to unpack. I guess to start, you know, we’re talking about biochar. So how do you make biochar and what was happening in sort of the Amazon where Terra Preto is being formed? Were they doing the same things that are being rediscovered and done again today?
Albert Bates: There’s a lot of work being done there. And in fact, the anthropological, archaeological work was some of the most interesting. And you have the Brazilian scientists there who are some of the leaders in the world in this, but you have people being drawn from universities in Germany and Holland. And I think the field is expanding incredibly rapidly. I did an engram search on the scholarly journals, and they’ve gone from something like 300 articles in the 1980s to... 10,000 a year now, something like that, where every university is starting to look into what is the process by which biochar changed these soils?
How long does it last? What’s the mechanism? Is it chemistry? Is it physics? Is it biology? Well, the answer is it’s all of those. Then actually, the biology is fairly straightforward. If you look at charcoal under a microscope, What you will see is a pore structure that resembles to some extent the tissue of the plant. You can see the cellular structure of the plant and the vascular structure. And then if you look a little closer on the walls of those pores, there are pits or pores, and that’s possibly caused by the expansion of gases as the material heats in a kiln, and there’s an explosion of the volatiles and that craters the walls.
And then if you look down a little closer into another level of microscope, you find that it’s pores on the walls of the pores on the walls. So it’s fractal, turtles all the way down. You’ve got this amazing pattern there of surface area. An area of one gram about the size of a pencil eraser has greater surface area than a football field. Greater than a large building. And that’s because of all of those intricate pores on the walls of the pores. Well, if you’re a soil bacterium or you’re a fungi, and you’re just, you know, you are a fungi, Chris.
You are traveling through the soil and you encounter this structure and it’s like a condo. It’s like, wow, I can move in here and bring the whole family. And these cupboards, I’m going to fill up these cupboards with the various elements and things that I need. So you begin to populate that. And it’s often analogized to a coral reef because it does much the same thing in the soil as a coral reef does in the ocean. It’s a habitat. It’s not fertilizer. It’s a habitat. And it draws in fungi immediately.
It draws in nematodes. It draws in amoebae and bacterium. And pretty soon you’ve got this wild population. They do these tree diagrams of DNA profiles of soil. And immediately after adding biochar, the diversity goes off the chart. And that’s because it’s this coral reef effect. It’s also... You’re changing the structure so that it’s not disappearing very rapidly. And it’s a space for air and it’s a space for water. So it’s a sponge when it’s rainy and a source of water when it’s dry. And it’s a source of air. So you get aerobic microbes, which are better for plant growth than anaerobes.
And it has these other beneficial biological effects. That’s the biology side of it.
Christophe Jospe: Listener, we’re just getting going. If you thought you’ve heard all the good things about biochar, we barely scratched the surface, actually. It’s kind of interesting. Lots of surfaces. Lots of surfaces. So many surfaces, so many fractals of just turtles all the way down.
Alexsandra Guerra: Wait, but I just wanted to comment and bring to our awareness. It’s incredible how you cited this number from 300 papers to 10,000 researching this. And you started the conversation with way back when, 8,000 years ago, we found Our people were using biochar to amend their soils. So it’s like, are we overthinking this a little bit? It’s good to understand, but it’s incredible that we have more knowledge or understanding of why it’s better for the soil and why it’s giving us these benefits, and yet less people are doing it.
Albert Bates: I wouldn’t say less are doing it, but it’s very slow to get traction.
Alexsandra Guerra: Okay. Okay.
Albert Bates: And there’s reasons for that. And one reason is the price component, that it takes some time. You know, you have to go through a process of making the charcoal, making the biochar. And let me distinguish right now between charcoal and biochar, okay? Because similarly, They’re very similar physically. But if you go to the hardware store or the grocery store and you buy a sack of charcoal for your barbecue, it might have some petroleum products to help it as an accelerant or to get it started. It might have some hickory smoke flavoring or something, which could be compounds that would be great for flavoring your food, but you wouldn’t want to eat.
And biochar is, I could say, an edible form of charcoal. It’s pure. It’s just carbon.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. So let’s stay focused on biochar in the soil, because I think that’s a very tangible thing. And for longtime listeners, obviously, soil carbon is a recurring theme. But we’re talking about something which is much more stable. Because it’s been there for thousands of years. So can you spell out a little bit kind of some of the interactions that happen in the soil when you add biochar?
Albert Bates: Yeah, and it’s good that you mentioned this because there’s humic acid that actually is favored by biochar. It gets formed more quickly. In a compost pile, the composting process happens about 30% faster if you add the biochar to the compost. And that’s really microbial action. The microbial action is sped up. The reason that it sticks around, that it’s still there after 8,000 years, in fact, that’s a minor estimate. You can find biochar that was created 250 million years ago. If you go to the fossil record of the ancient forests that were here 250 million years ago, there was biochar from forest fires that was created.
So why doesn’t it break down? Why does it not like organic matter in the soil break? Why does it go back into the carbon cycle and get eaten and digested by organisms and then sent off as carbon dioxide or methane to the atmosphere and rain back down and create the cellular structure of next year’s plants? Why doesn’t that happen? Carbon is a miraculous element. It can bond to so many different other elements. It can take forms that were bonding to itself like ring structures. And what happens when you raise it to those temperatures is you chase off all the other gases that boil off at lower temperatures that suddenly become gases from minerals at lower temperatures.
And all you’re left with is the carbon. If you were to keep burning, if you were to expose it to oxygen, it would just turn to ash. But if you deprive it of oxygen, it cannot ash. And so it just is left with that carbon structure, which then hardens into itself like buckyballs. It’s almost indestructible. Well, a microbe encountering that in the soil says... Boy, that’s hard to digest. I’m going to break a tooth. And they don’t try because there’s other food available that’s easier to break down than that. That’s so hard to break down.
It’s just too much effort. And if it were all by itself and there’s no other food sources in it where they There for thousands of years, yeah, there’d be some degradation. And if you look at the scientific literature, it says you’re going to lose 5% to 10% in the first decade or so. Why is that? And that’s because there are parts of it that aren’t hardened off into those chains. Parts that are just partially torrified, partially burnt, it’s not really that crystallized yet. And then that’s what’s going in that first 10 years.
But after that 90%, the hard stuff is still going to be there a thousand years later. This is actually very important because... It’s moved from a labile form of carbon to what’s now in the scientific literature called recalcitrant carbon. Recalcitrant carbon is verifiable in any kind of carbon analysis regime. You can actually go back after 10 years, 20 years, do a soil analysis and do a real count and see what’s there. And you know that it’s probably not gonna change. It’s probably not gonna change in that time. It’s not gonna change in 20 years.
It’s not gonna change in 50 years at that point. It’s still gonna be there.
Alexsandra Guerra: So this is great and I love it because I’ve got this vision in my mind of, okay, we can just start growing ecologically the trees to burn and make biochar. We amend them in our soils and we keep this cycle and there is theoretically a cycle that we can have. But how much of biochar created today is actually done in a sustainable way where we could close that cycle and it’s still, we’re growing trees, not tearing down trees and leaving barren land.
Albert Bates: Very important point. And I don’t want us to start getting into genetically modified forests of eucalypt. This is not the direction we want to go. We need those forests. They need to be mixed age, mixed species. They need to perform all the services that normal natural forests perform. And also they need to be inhabited. By two-leggeds as well as all the other kinds of animals and creatures. And so how you create a forest culture is another story. And that’s kind of where my eco-village component comes in because I live in a forest eco-village.
The part about sources for biochar, well, if you’re coppicing, if you’re going in and harvesting some fruits or things from the forest and you’re taking off the dead limbs, then maybe you’ve got a source there. If you’re working with a mill that makes furniture, then you’ve got the furniture scraps. If you’re working with a mill that makes pallets, you’ve got old pallets. You’ve got these different stores. Sources of waste is kind of like crop waste. That’s another source is agricultural crop waste. If you start inventorying all of that, there’s way more than you need to keep us going with making biochar off into the indefinite future.
They looked at the maximum ramp up in the continent of Australia for biochars because they’re a little ahead of most others. And they said, well, you know, just two sources here could probably supply all the biochar we would ever need.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, but where are those sources coming from?
Albert Bates: The first source was paper mill wastes and the second was municipal sewage.
Alexsandra Guerra: Right. So let me clarify my question. It’s not so much, okay, yeah, that’s great reusing waste, but I think we can do better than that and look to the source because if it’s just the waste from a paper mill that’s completely destroying the land and is not regenerating and it’s not done responsibly, then what is it really that we’re supporting? We’re still relying on the root source, which is land degradation.
Albert Bates: But this is actually one of the things that I did in Bern or Kathleen and I did, which is we went and looked at what are those waste streams that are the most problematic to us. And I’ll give you another example, seaweed. Okay. So you’ve got seaweed that’s now... Now contaminating the coasts of many Caribbean countries because it’s growing so fast in the warming ocean. Why not turn that into a resource by transforming into biochar and actually put an economic incentive on going out and gathering it or raking it off the beach for the tourists?
The other one is municipal sewage. I mentioned Australia and actually it was chicken litter in Australia that was the second most thing that they could use for biochar. But municipal sewage is another problem because you’ve got eutrophication of the rivers and lakes and the ocean. You’ve got these big deserts. Dead zones forming from municipal waste that are just the biosolids that are just sent out into the sea or down the river. And why not take all of those? You can dewater them with the heat of the process, and then you can carbonize them.
And now you’ve got... A fertilizer that’s actually pretty good. Or if it’s contaminated, you can do the analysis. If it’s got pharmaceuticals or heavy metals or other things that sometimes get into municipal waste streams, then you can actually use it for things like that charcrete I talked about, the key. Hila Cup example would be the things that you could put into. You could put it into highways. You could put it into the bitumen and roads. How many millions of miles of roads are there and how much is poured every year, especially now in China and India where they’re going into cars in a bigger way?
Why not just use that as a giant sink and use these sources, these underutilized, you know, they’re orphaned sources of waste and recover all that carbon and put it into the ground?
Christophe Jospe: I’m just like so happy with everything that you’re saying right now because it’s just scratching the surface of carbon cascade, the potential of once you start finding this thing which has been thought of as a waste and finding value to it. Yeah. I want to keep on riffing on Alexsandra’s question because not all biochar is created equal. I mean, obviously we’re talking about carbon removal here. And so the carbon needs to come out of the atmosphere somehow, whether that’s through algae or biomass, which is growing. And then ultimately you’re taking that biomass in some form and you are starving it of oxygen, which also that produces energy too.
So when you’re burning it and starving it of oxygen, you’re getting an extra value and then you’re left with this char, but the char isn’t always the same. So Can you talk a little bit about some of the variations and then just keep going? Like you already started talking about purification using biochar to deal with other forms of waste, other forms of remediation of toxic chemicals. But I have a vision in my head of what that looks like, but I’m not entirely clear of what that looks like.
Albert Bates: We’ve had this issue discussed in the scientific meetings on biochar for a number of years now, and it’s kind of a conundrum because not all biochar is the same. You can get a different biochar from a Conifer tree than you can from a different hardwood. You can get something from a waste source that’s going to contain certain elements or compounds that are going to be different and it’s going to give it different characteristics. It may not be suitable for soils, for instance, or for coming in contact. So we’re talking not biochar, but biochars.
And we’re talking designer chars, different pHs or different qualities to it. And so what we’re really saying is what’s the fitness for purpose? And So, you would get a particular char that’s fit for a particular purpose. And in the case of the carbon cascade, the cascade is actually not that you have lots of different potential products, but that you can make a sequence of products. I’ll give you the example of a tofu factory where it’s used as a filter to filter the whey water that’s thrown away. Now you’ve got the char that’s been enriched and it’s enriched with particular nutrients.
And so if you add If you add that to a composting project or you add that to soils in some fashion, now you’re able to confer nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, all the things that came out of the soybean are now being able to be recovered and used as a better fertilizer. In fact, Kathleen suggested that maybe you could rent the biochar to the tofu factory first and then send it to the farmer, sell it to the farmer. Interesting.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, it brings to mind, you know, you are a big proponent of eco villages, which are sort of very much in the permaculture mindset and the holistic mindset. And if you look at the sort of continuum of how humans interact with our environment, we’ve got... We’ve got one end of being really attuned with nature, which is where I think you seem to sit, to the other end of the spectrum, which is the mechanistic mindset, where we like things that are factory produced, they look the same. If you buy something in one part of the world, you can get that same thing in the other part of the world and the factory produces it.
But that’s not the case with biochar, because as you say, they’re not all created equal. Yet, we need to see a world of unequal biochars scaling really quickly. And it seems like the ecovillage model potentially is well suited to do this. I kind of have this vision of like, you’re creating a biochar cartel of sorts. And these are like your production facilities to ship it all around. Yeah. Let me wave a magic wand. Your ecovillages are scaling up exponentially, not yours, but ecovillages as a concept are scaling up exponentially. What does that mean for biochar production and other holistic ways of healing the land?
And yeah, I guess just spell it out for us, like how the knowledge sharing and forms of interacting with local communities and environments might play out.
Albert Bates: Yeah, I’m actually calling them equal villages lately, because they could be a proof of concept, which would then be adopted more widely. The core of the Carbon Cascades process is our smallholder, bioregional, biocarbon. Biorefinery, Permaculture, Microenterprise, Hub, Making Biochar, Bio Oil, Wood Gas, Wood Vinegar, Leaf Protein, Pyropolymers, Nanocarbon, Aerogels, Fish Food, Fertilizer, Kitty Litter, Toothpaste, Charcrete, Chardboard, Ghillie Suits, Rhodes, Bridges, and Teslas that run on banana peels, Employing Crowdsource, Drawdown, Blockchain Credit, or something I call the Cool Lab. And the idea is that you would have a microenterprise hub in any ecovillage or, you know, we can talk urban ecovillages too.
It’s neighborhoods. That you create this at a bioregional scale where you have these microenterprise hubs that can produce all of this range of carbon drawdown products off of the same basic process. And it’s all accruing to end up as carbon that’s taken out of the atmosphere and out of the oceans.
Christophe Jospe: What do you think, Alexsandra? Do you buy it?
Alexsandra Guerra: I do. I’m just sitting here. I’m looking at the Toronto skyline, listening to you, Albert, and I’m thinking, like, how do we use this? And what are the roadblocks that we have currently today that are stopping us from utilizing this to its maximum capacity? Or are we? Like, other than we harness all these waste streams, we have all this biochar produced. We could use it for creating these products, for purifying water, for amending soils. The sky’s the limit. Where is the sky? Where’s the limit? Yeah.
Albert Bates: For 10 years or more as people started to think and what we can do about it. And when I wrote the first book I did, which was the Biochar Solution, we were looking at maybe 1. 7 gigatons from all agricultural uses. If we’ve scaled up completely 1. 7 gigatons a year, a billion tonnes a year, 2 billion almost of carbon could be drawn out of the atmosphere from the use of crop residues into agriculture.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, when we start now- Well, it’s not drawing it out, right?
Albert Bates: It’s just reusing it- It’s taking it from the photosynthetic cycle where it keeps going around. And removing that input into the photosynthetic cycle into a mineral form that’s not going back.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, I see what you’re saying because this is the crop residue and the crops keep growing.
Albert Bates: You’re cutting off a natural source. So you’re reducing the natural source that replenishes the photosynthetic cycle. It doesn’t go back to the atmosphere.
Christophe Jospe: Which would have otherwise just biodegraded and respired the CO2.
Albert Bates: CO2 or methane, it would go back. Either it’s going to be burned as a crop residue or something, or it’s going to go back as a decomposed product is like methane. And that carbon is going to then form next year’s plants. Well, we’re cutting it off at the source and we’re turning it into a mineral form. So essentially we’re mining the sky and burning what we find in making coal and putting the coal in the ground. We’re running the process in reverse.
Alexsandra Guerra: I like that. So to give us some perspective, our total global emissions is around 35, 37 tonnes a year. And you’re saying one to two of these could be notched off.
Albert Bates: If you’re just talking agriculture.
Alexsandra Guerra: If we’re just talking agricultural waste, let’s take all the agricultural waste that we’ve got globally and turn it into biochar. Now, is that the difference between what was in the char and The amount of carbon that was in the waste minus the amount of carbon that’s in the char or minus the amount that was emitted is the storage, right?
Albert Bates: You start with a plant. You start with a tree, say. And we actually still need those plants and we still need those trees. We just need that biological source, the photosynthetic source that’s going to give you the biological source carbon. It’s not fossil fuel. It’s carbon from a biological source. And now you’re going to transform that into essentially a fossil. You’re going to turn it into something that’s going to be around and not go back into that cycle.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yes, but when you heat it up in the process of heating it up, you also lose some of that carbon.
Albert Bates: That’s true. You’re going to lose some along the way, which is why you want to substitute for other things that are already producing that sort of heat. And you’re also wanting to capture that heat as much as possible. You want to use it to put into a heat process like making electricity. Yeah, why not? It’s a pyrolytic stove, but it also has a thermocouple in the heat chamber and it’s making electricity and it’s charging a little unit there that allows you to pop down a USB port. And so you can charge your phone or your watch or your iPad while you’re there on the mountaintop and you can watch Netflix on the side of Everest.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, then why go to Everest? Right, I know.
Christophe Jospe: I hope not. I mean, I’m all for charging devices, but like...
Alexsandra Guerra: Maybe send an SOS signal down.
Albert Bates: But what I’m saying is don’t waste that heat. That heat is actually part of the process and it’s useful and we can do the work that we’re already doing. But we can also change it so that we’re making this hard form of carbon with everything. And we can use it for all these different things. So I want to stop for just a second and go back to that one or two gigatons per year. That’s the agricultural component. In our book, we got to almost discuss. 60 gigatons per year from all these other things.
So if we start to pour our roads with this and we start to turn in seaweed and municipal waste and these other big sources into biochar, now we can look at 50, 60 gigatons. Gosh, you’re talking 37 to 40 gigatons, which currently anthropogenic emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide. Well, now we can start talking about taking out 60, 50, 60. That’s a net gain. We could be at 350, 300, 260, and we could do it in timescales of decades.
Alexsandra Guerra: Beautiful. But now I just need to clarify then, is that 60 gigatons a year, is that the weight of biochar? Is that just measured off of the biochar and not necessarily the sequestration? Like, is it the actual storage of carbon?
Albert Bates: Yes.
Alexsandra Guerra: Okay.
Albert Bates: And actually, one of the recent studies that came out was that if we were to bring the atmosphere back to 350 at this point, the ice would start to reform more permanently at the poles.
Christophe Jospe: I am pro-ice reforming at the poles again. And you should be too, because the albedo effect is very important to regulating the Earth’s surface temperature. But I want to go back to what Alessandro was asking about about what’s stopping the scaling of this beautiful vision. I mean, on the one hand, Nori... Here we are, like we want to help ecovillages that can sequester carbon, generate carbon removal certificates as an added revenue stream. I would imagine that in order to even create an ecovillage, you need a community and a sort of willpower or will to want to do this and willpower to potentially fight against existing forces that might seem a little bit easier or a bit more mechanistic.
And I’d imagine there are certain political or... Corporate forces that might not want to see this vision realize itself, but what’s stopping the massive dramatic scale that we have the potential to do?
Albert Bates: I don’t think there’s anything in the way. It’s a matter of proof of concept that you actually have to show people, right? And that was kind of the concept when we started EcoVillages in the mid-90s. We really wanted to have some visible, tangible evidence that this could actually work. One of the ways that we describe it is luxurious simplicity. Okay. So we’re actually living much more simply and basic in many ways. And yet our lives are richer that we’re finding in community opportunities to have deeper relationships and better lives than chasing consumer goods in other kinds of settings.
So we have an intentional or traditional community that’s transformed itself now to be Much more eco-minded that it’s sort of thinking of ways that it can improve its footprint, but at the same time support itself. And everything sort of has to pass through the filter of right livelihood. Is your livelihood actually harming things? Are things are making it better? Is it better for you? And you want to be regenerative. So ecovillage organizations now are teaming up with things like the ecosystem restoration camps and adopting forests and adopting degraded landscapes and going out and working to improve To what extent is this a savior complex coming to the rest of the world and saying, I’ve got the answers for you, just adopt this ecovillage?
Well, I wouldn’t just limit it to the ecovillages. I’m saying that was a proof of concept. And, you know, we’re relatively humble in terms of what we aspire to, although we want a seat at the table. So that’s why we come to conferences like the UN conferences and so forth. A better example, I think, might be a city like Stockholm, which had a problem with trees dying in the urban landscape and various forms of air pollution and things. And they started using biochar there in the... The gravel areas around the roots of the trees, they tore up sidewalks.
And suddenly trees that had looked like three-year-old trees after 30 years suddenly looked like 30-year-old trees after three years because of the biochar in the soil. And so then they started tearing up the roads and putting in the biochar as a filtration media. And the rainwater that came through the city during storms went to the bays and into the rivers clean. And that actually helped the trees too. And so suddenly you had the trees stop dying. They grew 10 times faster. You reduce the flooding. You clean the street water. You save nitrogen and phosphorus.
You reduce the CO2. The N2O, the SOX, the NOX. You reduce the urban heat island, cleaning the air of the city, and you’re locking up carbon and meeting your Paris goals. So immediately other cities in Sweden started adopting. Now you’re seeing it in Finland, in Helena. It’s been now being built out in Taiwan. Other cities are starting to catch on to this whole idea.
Christophe Jospe: And you didn’t even mention a major issue which cities have to deal with when it rains heavily is the combined sewage overflow that I’d imagine you have better water retention so you get less of that too.
Albert Bates: Well, why not just make the biochar from the sewage and then you won’t have that problem either. You won’t have the overflow because you’ll be using it so much.
Unknown speaker: Man, you’ve got a lot of work ahead.
Albert Bates: Well, the world subsidizes fossil fuels now at the rate of about $7 trillion a year. And if you were to look at how much carbon dioxide we put up, that’s about $150 a ton that we’re paying people to put into the atmosphere. $150 a ton. So if we currently were to spend that instead planting 10 billion trees, we’re currently losing 10 billion trees a year. We could be planting trillions of trees really with that. And in fact, we should because originally the planet had about 6 trillion trees. Now it’s got about 3 trillion trees.
We had a single day in India where they planted 50 million trees. Yeah. So we could actually do that kind of scale of tree planting. And if you could pay the same amount of money that you’re currently paying to put carbon dioxide up, you could be taking it back down.
Alexsandra Guerra: So I like the idea of agency. You’ve laid down the framework, the context for biochar and the uses. So what can our listeners do? Like what’s next?
Albert Bates: You might experiment with making some yourself. And in my book, I’ve got a few different ways of doing it. Anybody, if they have a furnace at home, if they’re heating that way, you can make an insert that you take some waste material like cardboard or bamboo or any kind of scrap material and just put it in this container. Put the container in your fire kind of like an oven. And it has little holes on the container so that the gas can escape and the gas ignites and then it provides heat for your home.
But then it’s also making biochar. And so you harvest that and you refill and repeat. You’ve got all of this beautiful new biochar that you can then add to your compost. It speeds up the compost process and then it can go into the garden and you get much better plants with much greater nutrient density. They have much more flavor, all of these different things because the soil biology is so much better. Well, actually that whole process can work even at an urban scale. If you have a kitchen in an apartment and you’re composting, you know, you can start composting.
It removes the smell. That’s another benefit of biochar is it takes away the smell. And now it also speeds up the compost process. And so you can make some for your balcony garden or your window box.
Christophe Jospe: So I’m excited to experiment a little bit. Where can I go? To sort of get some of the best knowledge on how to experiment. Is there a website? Are there good YouTube videos you recommend?
Albert Bates: Absolutely. The International Biochar Initiative has a wonderful website. The U. S. Biochar Initiative has a wonderful website. We do monthly webinars for the International Biochar Initiative. So different experts from around the world come together. And I’ll use this opportunity to plug my webinar, which is coming up there. And you don’t have to listen in real time. You can come and it’s going to be there permanently. You can just come and download it anytime. And the resources of every journal, scientific journal that’s published in this field is cataloged there. In some cases, they’re reviewed there.
There’s a monthly newsletter. So the International Biochar Initiative, highly recommended. The US Biochar Initiative, if you want to come to our conferences, we do a conference every year. We’re going to do one in Fort Collins, Colorado later this year. You’re welcome to come to that.
Christophe Jospe: I think you might have talked me into it here on this podcast. And the final questions I have for you, Albert, is I’m sure not everyone who’s listening to this right now is still convinced that biochar is the best thing since sliced bread. So what do you say to the skeptics? What do you challenge them to think about?
Albert Bates: It is the best thing since sliced bread. You know, there’s an anime that was made in Japan not too long ago. It was about a small family home bakery that was trying to compete with the big guys. And they had a competition where, you know, the best bakers would come together and produce the best breads. And the winner was the one that included the biochar in the recipe. Wow. So it is the best thing since sliced bread. Literally. I’m going to skip the giant robot battles and stuff that were in that anime.
But you have the potential there. Actually, it reduces methane in cattle flatulence by 30%. And so it’s very big now in Switzerland, Austria, Germany. Large dairy countries for it improves weight gain. It improves feed efficiency. So you actually get more out of the food that you’re feeding the cattle because you’ve added biochar only 2% to their diet. And that has all those effects.
Alexsandra Guerra: Okay. Okay, so don’t eat the biochar if you don’t want to gain weight.
Albert Bates: I don’t know. I actually use the biochar in pickles because it’s a fermentation process. So I add a little bit of powdered biochar into the pickles when I’m pickling. It’s probably good for you. It’s not as good for you as it would be for a cow because the cow has enteric fermentation. So it’s fermenting in its stomach, whereas you, it’s a different story. It’s more like activated carbon. So it’s going to scavenge the toxins in your body.
Alexsandra Guerra: It’s not going to I was totally kidding, guys. Biochar is good for your system.
Christophe Jospe: Also, you mentioned that you could make charquila.
Albert Bates: Yeah, that’s the idea of taking agave plants and harvesting the waste from that business to make biochar and then adding it back to the field so that the plants are more drought resistant, produce nutrient density, which means more sugars. And so they have more sugar You could have charquilla. You could have charcoal it so that your cacao orchard has the cacao pods digested into or changed into biochar and then added back into the tree. And then the tree produces fruit in three years instead of 12 years. And the fruit is bigger and better.
So you get charcoal it that’s made from cacao. I’m holding a ball here of Cobb. Those of you who are familiar with this method of making mud houses, most of the world still houses itself in mud brick, most of the world. And so, So what we’ve got here is a mud that’s been mixed with straw and biochar. And what’s the benefit? Well, besides this carbon sequestration, it actually reduces the... It’s more insulative. It’s stronger, more tensile strength, more compressive strength.
Unknown speaker: It’s heavy.
Albert Bates: Yeah, it’s heavy. It gets very strong very fast. So it’s almost like a metal when it sets up. It really is like a brick. Wow.
Alexsandra Guerra: It looks like soft mud and then it’s quite hard. It wouldn’t want to... Have that fall on my foot.
Albert Bates: So that’s a cob ball and it sets up very quickly and forms solid hard walls. It will block Wi-Fi. So if you’re trying to get Wi-Fi from an external source, it will block that. You better have your Wi-Fi modem inside the house. But it also blocks infrared and UV and things like that. So that’s why they use it in ghillie suits for snipers or for hunting because it blocks your heat signature.
Alexsandra Guerra: Wow.
Christophe Jospe: Well, this has been an amazing podcast. Listener, I hope you are inspired to go out and buy Albert and Kathleen’s book, Burn, Not Fire, and also the Biochar Solution, which I very much enjoyed and felt like gave me the crash course that I never had before on this solution. Albert, thank you so much. It is always a pleasure to see you. I look forward to finding ways where we can collaborate more closely. I look forward to trying to get over to Fort Collins for this conference. And certainly, as Nori scales up, we’re very eager to collaborate in finding ways to help generate carbon removal certificates that can further drive this whole field.
Thanks again.
Albert Bates: Thank you, guys. And when they finally do make Charkila, the drinks are on me.
