To me, the first phrase that pops into my mind is “Beware the law of unintended consequences.” I believe Gaia theorist James Lovelock expressed the risks best in a commentary last September in The Guardian U.K.:

Geoengineering implies that we have an ailing planet that needs a cure. But our ignorance of the Earth system is great; we know little more than an early 19th-century physician knew about the body. Geoengineering is like trying to cure pneumonia by immersing the patient in a bath of icy water; the fever would be cured but not the disease.

Many of us feel a sense of unease about using geoengineering to escape global heating. Most of the planetary therapies have side effects, potentially as severe as the disease itself. We know that the cooling by Pinatubo was accompanied by droughts; cooling alone does nothing to prevent the ocean growing ever more acid as the carbon dioxide dissolves in the water.

Before long, global heating could reach a level that makes geoengineering an enticing option. Indeed, cautiously applied it may help by buying us time either to adapt to climate change or to develop a practical scientific cure. We have, as yet, no comprehensive Earth system science; in such ignorance I cannot help feeling that attempts by us to regulate the Earth’s climate and chemistry would condemn humanity to a Kafkaesque fate from which there may be no escape. Better, perhaps, to learn from the wiser physicians of the early 19th century; they knew no cure for common diseases but also knew that by letting nature take its course, the patient often recovered. Perhaps we, too, had better use our energies to adapt and leave recovery to Gaia; after all, she has survived more than three billion years and has kept life going all that time.

Bill Gates should stick with funding cures for disease. By venturing into the realm of geoengineering, he’s demonstrating the kind of arrogance that got us in trouble in the first place. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable if Microsoft Windows didn’t crash so much.

In the end, it’s the rough equivalent of making coal, but doing it in a few hours instead of a million or so years. It’s considered better — and likely cheaper — than the capture and sequestering of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions because it doesn’t just avoid the release of emissions; so-called charcoal sequestration can lead to the extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere. This makes it carbon negative. Turning some of the biomass into charcoal prevents new emissions, but the new generation of biomass that grows also absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. Over time, the cycle of charring biomass and growing new biomass can act like a big global carbon vacuum.

The trick is doing it on a large enough scale to matter. EnCana researcher Subodh Gupta, a big believer in charcoal sequestration, recently argued at the Canadian International Petroleum Conference in Calgary that the best way to demonstrate that the approach works is to start with the organics and even some plastics collected from municipal solid waste. It solves many problems. For one, you can leverage an existing municipal MSW collection network, so no extra costs there. Second, pyrolysis systems can be economically set up at central MSW collection points. Third, a municipality can better manage its waste by reducing how much of it goes to landfill. The charcoal produced is essentially crushed and stored in existing landfills, where it will sit inert for centuries. (A good way for municipalities to earn carbon credits, too).

Gupta argues that if it works well with MSW, and at scale, then it can expand to other areas over time. He even did a comparison to using MSW for other purposes — such as electricity-from-waste and ethanol-from-waste — and concluded that sequestration of MSW-based charcoal is cheaper to implement and, with the benefit of carbon credits, more economical overall. That said, we’re already seeing huge competition for biomass resources driven by the quest for carbon-neutral fuels and power.

Gupta’s enthusiasm for charcoal sequestration is shared by more than just James Lovelock, who says that if he was a betting man he’d put all his money on biochar. The Weather Makers author Tim Flannery supports it, as does NASA scientist James Hansen. Sure, you’ve got skeptics like Heat author George Monbiot, who recently slammed the approach in a column for the U.K. Guardian. But nobody is calling charcoal sequestration a silver bullet, as Monbiot suggests. It’s one promising option in the climate mitigation toolbox. Nobody is suggesting that we use prime agricultural lands to grow crops that we would then turn into charcoal. By making that connection Monbiot is doing his readers a disservice.

Would Monbiot be against turning all the dead and decaying pine trees in B.C. — victims of pine beatle infestation — into charcoal? Municipal solid waste? Would he be against farmers choosing to turn their own crop residue into charcoal, which can be used as a soil enhancer for their own land?

UPDATE: As promised, here’s the Lovelock Q&A from Saturday’s Toronto Star.

If you’d like to hear from the man who developed the Gaia theory, James Lovelock will be speaking in Toronto on the morning of May 26 at the Glenn Gould Studio, CBC headquarters building, 250 Front St. West. The event is organized by Corporate Knights magazine, and you can click here for details. Lovelock recently released his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, and his outlook on the world isn’t pretty. I had a chance to interview Lovelock last week and the Q&A will be appearing in this Saturday’s Toronto Star. He’s a delightful man, turning 90 in July, but his message regarding the impact of climate change on humanity is quite alarming, and depressing. I’ll link to the Q&A when it appears on Saturday. If you’re interested in checking out his talk, word is there are still a few tickets available.