Should the carbon billions go to shell, or to farmers?
The UN climate change summit in Copenhagen didn t produce an agreement that will arrest man-made climate change. What it did accomplish was to define a fundamental criteria for success in any such future agreement. The world s political leaders declared the need to limit the rise in average global temperatures to not more than 2F above pre-industrial levels.
Assuming this declaration is sincere, it signals a need for urgent and large-scale action. Current CO2 levels are already 11 per cent beyond the 350 parts per million that climate scientists such as NASA s James Hansen associate with that 2 temperature increase over the long term. And greenhouse gases persist in the atmosphere for 100+ years.
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So, to hold to the 2 threshold, we need to begin reducing net annual greenhouse gas emissions immediately. We also need to sequester 40 PPM of the carbon currently in the atmosphere plus any new net additions that take place during this overshoot period. And we need to get this done before feedback loops, such as the release of permafrost methane, send our climate system spiralling into uncharted waters.
Here in Canada, members of carbon-intensive industries are promoting industrial-scale carbon dioxide geo-sequestration projects as a way to mitigate climate change. And they are getting support. Between the commitments of the federal government and the province of Alberta, $1.6 billion in taxpayer funds has been committed to two carbon capture and sequestration projects organized respectively by Shell and TransAlta. Yet these projects would be dwarfed by another under discussion that would liquify carbon dioxide produced during the processing of oilsands and pump it into depleted oilfields.
Though it may be enjoying the largesse of our government, geo-sequestration has its skeptics. Some come from sources inside the oil industry where, for the last 30 years, people have been experimenting with pumping CO2 into depleted oilfields hoping to squeeze out more oil. These pilot projects have encountered challenges (such as acidification of the deep aquifers in sedimentary rock beds) that raise concerns over the feasibility, permanence and environmental impacts of geo-sequestration.
And then there is the cost. The consulting firm McKinsey ranks geo-sequestration as expensive compared to other major forms of carbon abatement. The GLOBE AND MAIL s Geoffrey Simpson, after calculating the projected impact of our public sector geo-sequestration investments at about $761 per tonne of carbon dioxide captured, described the cost this way: staggeringly, wildly, mind blowingly higher than any other conceivable measure designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions. In a way though, both McKinsey and Simpson have missed the point. Because of the greenhouse gas overshoot, we need carbon sequestration in addition to cutting net new greenhouse gas emissions.
So, suppose we in Canada wanted to do our share on the greenhouse gas overshoot and suppose we wanted to design a carbon sequestration program that would be a better investment than geo-sequestration. What would it look like? Presumably, it would be cheaper on a cost-per-tonne basis. It would scale faster. It would have fewer environmental risks, and it would be less reliant on unproven technologies. So where could we find such a solution? How about right beneath our feet?
Farmers can influence how much carbon our particular patch of land can sequester. Proven practices that could help us deal en masse with the C02 overshoot include rotational pasturing, reduced or zero-till cropping, returning marginal cropland to grasslands and forest, and increasing the use of legume cover crops to reduce the need for nitrogen fertilizer (itself a source of a greenhouse gas more potent than C02).
How much impact could Canadian farmers make on this basis? This is a calculation that should be put urgently to an interdisciplinary team of economists, soil scientists, climatologists, and agronomy experts. But here s what we know already our country represents seven per cent of the world s land mass and 68 million hectares of it is in farmland. We also know that practices such as the ones named here can definitely increase the proportion of organic matter in the top foot of the soil.
Is this realistic? No less so than the billions of dollars being invested in geo-sequestration today. In fact, a publicly funded program compensating Canadian farmers with incentives to sequester carbon through modified farming practices could serve multiple policy goals at the same time.
Such a program could help Canada make a distinctive contribution addressing our international obligations on climate change. It could help stabilize our farm income. It could boost the productivity of our soils serving the interest of longer-term food security. And, if administered correctly, with an eye to the value and interests of small and mid-size farms, it might even halt depopulation trends in farming communities across Canada. CG
This is the second in a set of four columns by contributing writers Kimberley Love and Glen Drummond that examine Canadian agriculture in the context of current trends.
