“?We’ve been so focused on fossil fuels and the short-term methane from burping cows that we’ve missed the significant amount of carbon (and water) being lost from under our feet to the air and to the seas.” Nicole Masters, For the Love of Soil

Soil is the Elephant in the Climate Change Room

With 2800 billion tons of carbon, the world’s soils contain three and a half times more carbon than the 800 billion tons in the atmosphere. To return to 360 ppm carbon from the current 420 ppm, 100 billion tons of carbon must be removed (800 billion tons reduced to 700 billion tons). Nature has a global solution that we call photosynthesis.

The world’s biomass contains 564 billion tons of carbon. Photosynthesizing reduces the carbon in the air and increases the carbon in biomass. Plants push a fixed percentage of carbohydrates out of their roots to build soil whenever they photosynthesize. Unlike humans, plants always give the same percentage of carbon to feed the soil while producing biomass.

Soil, particularly humus, can store carbon for thousands of years, and wood stores carbon for hundreds of years. In soil, carbon storage is long-term, while carbon stored in wood is short-term.

At best, soil covers 25% of the world’s land surface, while approximately 40% is desert or degraded land. By converting desert and degraded land to healthy soil with plants, spreading green borders, and expanding oases, we can dramatically increase the amount of carbon drawn out of the atmosphere. If a quarter of degraded land could be regenerated, it would increase the atmospheric drawdown of carbon by hundreds of billions of tons.

Tell Beacon Hill that more green means less climate change.