15
Nov
Business As Usual “Carbon Capture” Undermines Organic Land Management as a Climate Solution
(Beyond Pesticides, November 15, 2024) There are many pie-in-the-sky ideas to address the climate crisis while allowing business as usual in the extractive and industrial systems that are causing the crisis. Prominent among them are geoengineering to block sunlight and building industrial plants to prevent carbon dioxide (CO2) from reaching the atmosphere, known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).
Like geoengineering, CCS is a “solution for the future that always will be.” It has garnered decades of hype, research, and government funding of prototype projects without doing much of anything to remove carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere.
The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) contains numerous revenue streams aimed at coping with the climate crisis, including CCS. But it is a mixed bag of good and bad ideas. Beyond Pesticides analyzed the IRA in 2022, lauding the act’s “provision of unprecedented sums to address the existential threats we face related to climate, biodiversity, and health.” These include about $21 billion for “climate smart” agriculture and programs to reduce petrochemically dependent farming. But the analysis also details the many provisions for infeasible and counterproductive projects.
Rather than complex and expensive technological projects, the best practitioners of CCS are plants and soil. In fact, soils hold more than three times the carbon in the atmosphere. This is why agriculture—organic agriculture—can provide the simplest and most direct counter to the catastrophic load of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Industrial methods have made agriculture a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions by virtue of deforestation, soil erosion, nutrient depletion, and general degradation of landscapes. More than half the entire soil carbon loss since agriculture began has occurred in the last 150 years, according to Farming Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis, a report from Project Drawdown. But organic methods offer a route to re-capture much of that carbon and prevent further emissions. Another report from American Farmland Trust, Combatting Climate Change on US Cropland, notes that the U.S. has almost 400 million acres of cropland, offering an enormous opportunity to rebuild soil organic carbon, capture atmospheric carbon, and reduce emissions. Just adopting cover crops and no-till practices could reduce emissions “equal to 40% of 2018 U.S. agricultural emissions,” the report states, and if proper practices are applied, “soil carbon emissions could be halved from 2010 levels by 2050.”
Thus, decoupling agriculture from fossil fuels should be a primary goal of any climate mitigation plan, yet it takes second place to more technological proposals in federal initiatives and is being actively obscured by fossil fuel companies. Many of the touted elements of industrially-based carbon reduction programs include materials that are of doubtful utility at best, such as biofuels including biochar and ethanol. Further, pesticides, which are mostly derived from fossil fuels, add directly to carbon emissions. At least one pesticide is actually a greenhouse gas itself, . sulfuryl fluoride, which is used to kill termites, moths, bedbugs and beetles.
The policymakers, corporate interests, and researchers focusing on climate solutions tend to concentrate on the energy balance of technologies in the hope that a carbon capture or prevention method will also produce more energy than it consumes. This strong emphasis on combining carbon control with energy production can compromise the former and often results in more energy being expended than is produced. The approach also omits consideration of unintended consequences and harms to public and worker health that may be present in any climate solution application. In other words, technological and economic benefits take precedence over human and ecological protections without actually mitigating climate change.
The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) has just issued a report with a number of recommendations for how we may manage carbon without harming communities already vulnerable to multiple environmental stressors. The first recommendation is that all types of carbon capture should undergo analysis of their “environmental impacts (including Soil), human and public health risks and impacts, cumulative impacts, explosion and seismic risks, full life cycle assessments of greenhouse gas emissions outcomes, and co-pollutant emissions related to these projects.” The report addresses how climate policy decisions may themselves contribute to the injustices faced by groups already bearing the brunt of industrial practices and their effects on climate: communities of color, Native American tribes, farmworkers, and poor people.
The WHEJAC report takes aim at the CCS variant Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). This involves burning biomass to produce energy and capturing the resulting carbon emissions. BECCS is widely considered a crucial element in an overall climate-saving strategy, and is supported by the IRA.
But the WHEJAC report details a number of substantial concerns with BECCS methods, which “contribute to soil erosion, nutrient depletion, and degradation of soil quality, and … are painted as carbon negative [climate-protective] despite the fact that BECCS ‘leads to significantly more carbon emissions in the grid than the current average.’” Moreover, BECCS projects compete with actual crop production and require major inputs of land and water. Some proposals even suggest burning existing forests to provide energy, the logic of which is incomprehensible. And according to a Natural Resources Defense Council analysis, in at least one typical BECCS scenario, the CO2 emissions occurring along the biomass supply chain would offset 60 percent of the captured emissions at the biomass power station.
Another as-yet-unworkable idea, carbon markets, has also been promoted as a way to reduce emissions since the Kyoto Protocol enabled them in the 1990s. The idea is that carbon emitters can buy credits from others who did not use their allotted carbon emissions, and producers can “offset” carbon emissions in other ways, such as paying for tree planting elsewhere. But last year the Guardian reported that 90 percent of the offsets traded in the world’s largest offset program were “phantom” credits and resulted in zero carbon reductions.
Further, as Beyond Pesticides covered in the August 27 Daily News, carbon markets have also had another serious negative consequence. Carbon offset and reduction concepts inspired pesticide companies to set up purported “sustainable” programs based on the continued use of agrochemicals including pesticides and pesticide-treated seeds, greenwashing them by claiming they are useful in reduced or no-till agriculture and cover cropping and can conserve soil carbon.
Pesticides, treated seeds and biochar contamination are serious issues both for organic practitioners generally and for vulnerable populations. The WHEJAC report warns that any climate mitigation programs based on carbon capture, biomass burning, and biochar must be thoroughly vetted and required to specify the types of feedstocks used and ensure that public health risks are taken into account.
Beyond Pesticides covered a particularly egregious version of converting biomass to energy in 2021. According to a Guardian investigation, a company called AltEn in Mead, Nebraska produced ethanol from unused seeds. Unfortunately, the seeds were coated with toxic pesticides, including bee-killing neonicotinoids. Ethanol plants typically sell their leftover fermented seeds to livestock farmers as “spent grains.” But the company recognized that its spent grains were too poisonous for livestock, so they sold them to farmers as a soil amendment. This merely spread the toxicity around more, and farmers and the community objected. Finally the state banned the sale of the spent grains, so the company piled them up around the ethanol plant, where the level of the neonicotinoid cloathianidin reached 427,000 parts per billion. Another neonicotinoid was measured in a wastewater storage pond at over 300 times its acceptable level in drinking water. Two days after the state shut the company down in 2021, a pipe burst and spilled millions of gallons of tainted wastewater. The state is now conducting a cleanup of the site at the scale of a Superfund site, although the plant is not so designated.
Biochar is a very popular component of many carbon reduction programs. It is basically biomass—either waste material or grown for the purpose—reduced to carbon in a low-oxygen environment so that CO2 does not form. The heat energy produced in that process can be tapped for human use. And the biochar, used as a soil amendment, sequesters carbon.
Biochar can have other virtuous applications, such as removing pollutants from water. But, as a 2024 study found, its virtue is also its Achilles heel; like charcoal, it can absorb and retain just about anything, including heavy metals and pesticides in soil. Further risks from biochar depend on the chemistry of the source material, which can include hemp, wood, wheat chaff, and many other plants. For example, depending on source and processing, levels of toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons such as naphthalene may vary in the end product. It is not a neutral and uniform material that will save the planet without careful management.
The WHEJAC report expresses concern for workers and others exposed to biochar. Particulates, high temperatures and contaminants can lead to respiratory, skin and eye injuries. There may be allergenic potential in some types of biochar, and contaminants in feedstocks may be transferred to soil and water. Currently, the report says, few of the downstream or unintended consequences like these are considered in climate projects.
Pesticides contribute directly to climate change in multiple ways. According to a 2022 Pesticide Action Network report, “99 percent of all synthetic chemicals—including pesticides—are derived from fossil fuels.” Production of one kilogram of pesticide takes about ten times more energy than one kilogram of fertilizer, resulting in proportionally more greenhouse gas emissions. And just as nitrogen fertilizers do, fumigant pesticides multiply formation of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide in soils, which then escapes to the atmosphere.
Wetlands, which are extremely important carbon sinks, can be turned into carbon emitters by pesticides, according to a July 2024 study. For example, the authors cite research indicating the fungicide tridemorph increases methane production in flooded rice fields; in the authors’ direct experiment, the herbicides glyphosate and 2,4-D combined increased CO2 production in wetland sediment.
As we showed in our Daily News last May, sulfuryl fluoride has been known to be a greenhouse gas since 2008 and was listed as such by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013. Sulfuryl fluoride use has increased since the 1987 Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer led to reduction in methyl bromide applications. In 2009, Beyond Pesticides reported on a study showing that sulfuryl fluoride absorbs infrared light at a high rate and lasts a long time in the atmosphere—at least 30 to 40 years, and possibly as long as 100 years. It is up to 4,000 times as effective at trapping heat as CO2. When used indoors, 90 percent of it escapes to outdoor air within two hours.
Nor is sulfuryl fluoride benign otherwise. Several cases of acute exposure resulting in death have been documented. The chemical can also result in cancer, endocrine disruption, neurotoxicity, and impacts on reproduction and development. EPA allows it to be used in the production of raw and processed foods. U.S. emissions of sulfuryl fluoride are highest in southern California, according to a study published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment last April. The study includes an analysis of imagery showing that after the chemical is applied inside tents, plumes of the gas drift over residential areas. This pesticide does double duty as a threat to the climate and directly to human and ecosystem health.
Taken together, the evidence shows that conventional agriculture using industrial chemicals does more harm than good with respect to climate change. Tying progressive agricultural CCS to energy production hamstrings the climate benefits. Endorsing BECCS, biochar, pesticide-treated seeds, and the like by commercial interests and policy experts without serious consideration of unintended consequences will likely fail to have the desired effect and produce numerous additional harms to humans and ecosystems.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
Sources:
Recommendation Report 2 White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council Recommendations: Carbon Management
White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC)
October 4, 2024
https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-10/whejac-carbon-management-recommendations-october-2024.pdf#page51
Unregulated Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Potent Pesticide Impact Climate Crisis and Public Health
Beyond Pesticides, May 2, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/05/unregulated-greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-potent-pesticide-impact-climate-crisis-and-public-health/
Harnessing soil carbon sequestration to address climate change challenges in agriculture
Project Drawdown
Soil and Tillage Research
Volume 237, March 2024
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167198723003264
Combatting Climate Change on US Cropland: Affirming the Technical Capacity of Cover Cropping and No-Till to Sequester Carbon and Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
American Farmland Trust
https://s30428.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/AFT_Carbon-WP-2020_FNL-web.pdf
The energy return on investment of BECCS: is BECCS a threat to energy security?
Mathilde Fajardyab and Niall Mac Dowell
Energy & Environmental Science 2018
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/ee/c7ee03610h
Pesticides and Climate Change: A Vicious Cycle
Pesticide Action Network 2022
https://www.panna.org/resources/pesticides-and-climate-change-a-vicious-cycle/
Historic Federal Support Could Effectively Take on Climate, Health, and Biodiversity Crises—with Grassroots Advocacy
Beyond Pesticides, August 19, 2022
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2022/08/historic-federal-support-could-effectively-take-on-climate-health-and-biodiversity-crises-with-grassroots-advocacy/
Carbon Markets Entrench Pesticide Use
Beyond Pesticides, August 27, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/08/carbon-markets-entrench-pesticide-use/
Termite Insecticide a More Potent Greenhouse Gas than Carbon Dioxide
Beyond Pesticides, January 26, 2009
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2009/01/termite-insecticide-a-more-potent-greenhouse-gas-than-carbon-dioxide/
Ethanol Plant Processing Pesticide Coated Seeds Contaminates Nebraska Town
Beyond Pesticides, January 13, 2021
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2021/01/ethanol-plant-processing-pesticide-coated-seeds-contaminates-nebraska-town/
Exploring negative emission potential of biochar to achieve carbon neutrality goal in China
Deng et al.
Nature Communications 2024
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45314-y
Common use herbicides increase wetland greenhouse gas emissions
Cornish et al.
Science of the Total Environment
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969724030286
