{"id":8899,"date":"2015-06-07T07:51:22","date_gmt":"2015-06-07T12:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8899"},"modified":"2015-06-07T07:51:22","modified_gmt":"2015-06-07T12:51:22","slug":"the-carbon-ranch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8899","title":{"rendered":"The Carbon Ranch"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"https:\/\/carbonpilgrim.wordpress.com\/2015\/06\/01\/the-carbon-ranch\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Carbon Ranch<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Novelist and historian Wallace Stegner once said that every book should try to answer an anguished question. I believe the same is true for ideas, movements, and emergency efforts. In the case of climate change, an anguished question is this: what can we do right now to help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2<\/sub>) from its current (and future) dangerously high levels?<\/p>\n<p>In an editorial published in July of 2009, Dr. James Hansen of NASA proposed an answer: \u201ccut off the largest source of emissions\u2014coal\u2014and allow CO<sub>2<\/sub>\u00a0to drop back down . . . through agricultural and forestry practices that increase carbon storage in trees and soil.\u201d I consider these words to be a sort of \u2018Operating Instructions\u2019 for the twenty-first century. Personally, I\u2019m not sure how we accomplish the coal side of the equation, which requires governmental action, but I have an idea about how to increase carbon storage in soils.<\/p>\n<p>I call it a carbon ranch.<\/p>\n<p>The purpose of a carbon ranch is to mitigate climate change by sequestering CO<sub>2<\/sub>\u00a0in plants and soils, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and producing co-benefits that build ecological and economic resilience in local landscapes. \u201cSequester\u201d means to withdraw for safekeeping, to place in seclusion, into custody, or to hold in solution\u2014all of which are good definitions for the process of sequestering CO<sub>2<\/sub>\u00a0in plants and soils via photosynthesis and sound stewardship.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">The process by which atmospheric CO<sub>2<\/sub>\u00a0gets converted into soil carbon is neither new nor mysterious. It has been going on for millions and millions of years, and all it requires is sunlight, green plants, water, nutrients, and soil microbes. According to Dr. Christine Jones, a pioneering Australian soil scientist, there are four basic steps to the CO<sub>2<\/sub>\/soil carbon process:<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Carbon Ranch Novelist and historian Wallace Stegner once said that every book should try to answer an anguished question. I believe the same is true for ideas, movements, and emergency efforts. In the case of climate change, an anguished question is this: what can we do right now to help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[112,3193,113,6195,1408,141,1004,6196,6194],"class_list":["post-8899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-carbon","tag-carbon-dioxide","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-carbon-sequestration","tag-carbon-storage","tag-climate-change","tag-co2","tag-dr-james-hansen","tag-the-carbon-ranch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8900,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8899\/revisions\/8900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}