The Science Is Wrong: It's Soil, Not Oil (Climate) | Hacker News Reader

The Science Is Wrong: It's Soil, Not Oil (Climate)

ddebernardy.substack.com

3 pointsddebernardy5 comments

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Author here.

TL;DR for those who don't click links:

- Corporate green solutions are shams

- Promote gardening if you care about fossil fuels

- An accounting chicanery keeps natural emissions out of view

- The hockey stick is actually about canopy loss

- Switching to alley cropping would reverse it

Happy to answer questions.

I really like your point about working with nature leading to more abundance. I think that a broad approach is still necessary to make any sort of real impact to curb climate change. Sure focusing only on curbing fossil fuels won't work, but I also think that only focusing on the agriculture industry similarly won't work. Sweeping change can't happen all at once, so changing many industries little by little I think will have the largest impact.

For the longest of times I thought the same way. Realizing that the actual issue was almost entirely tied to topsoil loss is what made me change my mind.

If you look into the atmospheric carbon dioxide data, you'll observe seasonal up and downs with the low point that takes us back to around where the high point from about a decade earlier. This means that we could resolve the issue very quickly in a scenario where farms keep enough plants around to soak up the soil emissions during tilling and harvesting operations.

Alley cropping is just one option to do so, btw. As I explain in a separate article [1], any well designed intercropping scenario should do the trick. The point is to not have a wide open field with no plants that could keep the fungi alive, block the wind to keep the carbon dioxide around, and soak up the carbon dioxide.

It can't be perfect because of night emissions and because trees eventually lose their leaves in the fall, but we can do far better than what we're currently doing.

[1]: http://ddebernardy.substack.com/p/stop-climate-agenda-soil-n...

I completely agree that this is a necessary strategy to fight climate change. I still fail to see, however, that this alone will be able to undo/counteract the effects that giant corporations that extract fossil fuels and pollute our atmosphere have on the environment.

I feel like this goes for so many issues as well. Sure, we can fight cholera in developing countries by providing clean water sources and administering vaccines, but we can also do so by providing universal education and economic opportunity. There is no one solution to these large problems.

Per the linked article, the problem is misdiagnosed. Forestry research shows that a) patches of tree stumps emit on the order of 10 tons of CO2 per acre, and b) these emissions go away when loggers thin forests instead of clearing them. Why are we not hearing about such huge yet trivially avoidable emissions? They are an order of magnitude larger than fossil fuels.

There are plenty of good reasons to not like fossil fuels, mind you. But the carbon hockey stick is not one of them.

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