..A must read for for every US voter and concerned citizen.. challenges the reader to explore new possibilities and new mindsets that will ultimately be required if the world is truly ready to make a change.. amazon.com US onlyApart from the comment by Ron Larson, we have received others, also
from people apparently associated with the International Biochar
Initiative. We will issue a detailed response to the criticisms next
week, and we will post a public link to that response on
http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/docs/cnbe/cnbe.html . We strive to
ensure that anything we publish is factually accurate and are very
open to making changes where necessary – and yes we'll add a few more
explanatory statements and footnotes to the report, as well as
responding to the different technical issues next week.
However, we wish raise some very important points here:
The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) and their associates are
right now heavily lobbying UNFCCC to include industrial biochar into
the Clean Development Mechanism. There has been intensive lobbying of
other UN organisations, including the UNCCD and the Food and
Agriculture Organisations, various governments and the European
Commission for public sector support. Key policy makers are being
urged to implement policies which, if successful, would have the most
major impact on wider climate policies, on agriculture and forestry,
on farmers, indigenous peoples, forest communities and many other
people, particularly in the global South.
Ours might indeed be the first critical analysis of the industrial
biochar proposals (though critical questions have been raised in
scientific journals). This is hardly surprising, since, as Ron admits
in his post, there has been virtually no public awareness and
absolutely no public debate on the matter. Our impression is that
people, including those who would be the first to be directly affected
by any large-scale industrial biochar policies, have been kept
completely in the dark about what IBI lobbyists are trying to achieve
at a very high policy level – and that includes nearly all
environmental and development NGOs as well as communities and social
movements.
Ron refers to Tim Flannery and we would like to quote from the key
speech that Flannery gave at this year's IBI conference: "Biochar
represents a cornerstone of our future global sustainability. With
the appropriate political and technological recognition, promotion and
adoption, it will change our world forever, and very much for the
better".
We would like to know whether the IBI members and supporters really
believe that it is acceptable to promote policies to "change our world
forever" without even finding out what people might think about this?
Without finding out whether farmers and other communities and the
rest of us would want our world to be changed in the way Flannery and
the IBI think is for the best?
Yesterday, Peter Read, a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee
to the IBI, spoke at a UNFCCC side event Poznan and called for a major
biochar programme to be implemented, saying, "we cannot afford to wait
for scientific certainty". Not only has the public been kept in the
dark, but there is no credible scientific evidence for many of the
claims biochar lobbyists are making. Yet the IBI is calling for CDM
credits which, after all are supposed to "offset" carbon emissions
from fossil fuel burning. Whilst we have no 'scientific certainty'
that such a presumed 'offset' would sequester any carbon whatsoever,
it's absolutely certain that the extra fossil fuel burning legitimised
by such CDM payments will add more carbon into the atmosphere, heating
the planet even more.
As we show in our report, even the Chairman of the IBI Board,
Professor Lehmann acknowledges in peer-reviewed studies that there are
major uncertainties, that there is a great need for further research,
and he told us directly that there are no long-term studies to show
whether biochar sequesters carbon in soil. This scientific caution,
however, stands in stark contrast to virtually all the claims made by
the IBI and the rest of the biochar lobby. Nobody says `no' to
biochar research – but let's all be honest, the IBI, including its
science advisors has moved biochar beyond the realms of the academic
debate and into the high-level policy debate.
We hope that our report will help to raise awareness of what is
currently being promoted and planned very much 'behind closed doors'.
We need a much wider critical debate now, and we need it in the
public domain, not confined to scientific journals. Otherwise we
could soon be 'revisiting' the recent history of agrofuels, where
communities had no warning as to how their lives and their environment
would be changed, much for the worse – due to policies which
governments implemented after lobbyists told them that they would be
an answer to climate change and poverty.
Deepak and Almuth
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Biofuels are a wide range of fuels which are in some way derived from biomass.
Your idea?