I’d like to post the entire back and forth. This discussion is getting to the core of the kinds of questions and commitments we are struggling with. We began sourcing palm wax as an alternative to paraffin and soy from Indonesia. We ended up building a fair-trade factory there. Even working with small farms there became difficult. This last year we switched over to using organic palm wax from Brazil. We are working with Ciranda and Agropalma. Oregon Tilth is helping us to get our products USDA certified.

Overtime, we hope to educate candle buyers about the difference between using palm, soy, and paraffin not just in terms of indoor air pollution and clean burning but the effects on our planet.

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I have no problem with capturing methane from landfills and using it to generate electricity. That is being done all around California these days, and it is a good thing.

However, I don’t see that as proving the points you’ve made before. When scientists go out into the field to carefully collect data (e.g. measuring carbon in soil), I think it does a disservice to just dismiss that hard work with a wave of the hand and in effect say “my story is more powerful than their data”.

Also, please know that plants are lousy at turning sunlight into chemical energy. A textbook of mine estimates that sugar cane (considered one of the best energy crops) is 0.38% efficient. For satisfying our energy needs, a 30% efficient Stirling dish in the desert is a much more modest use of land. It leaves far more land for wildlife habitat.

The rubbish dump in Valdemingómez has been put underground, and only organic rubbish is taken there. Natural processes of decomposition of that rubbish produces methane, which is stored and used in new power plants to produce energy in a more efficient way that it was done before, because producing electric energy from CH4 is quite efficient. There’s no air pollution, as the only results from that reaction are H2O, CO2 and heat, which is used for the electricity generation. The burning is very clean.

The underground facility for the rubbish storage is huge, as you can guess. But the previous area was too, before it was put underground. Now, appart from the ecological benefit of more efficient energy production, which means less CO2 being put into the atmosphere for every kWH of energy, we have a park on the surface, with plants sequestering CO2 at the same time and a leisure area for enjoying natural life and playing sports.

What’s the point I am trying to make? Well, what if, instead of making biofuel with the cultivated vegetables, you put them underground to slowly become methane, and use the methane to produce the energy? First, because of the return of the vegetables to methane is a slow process, you are effectively sequestering a lot of carbon in the short term, underground. Second, the costs to produce the fuel decrease: natural processes do it for you. Third, the electricity production is more efficient with methane than with biofuel.

And I will go further: why don’t we EAT the part of the cultivated plants that we would normally eat, instead of creating that stupid biofuel which is making our food more expensive, and let the remaining parts be the ones becoming methane? Microorganisms won’t really care what you feed them with. Organic is organic.

There are many interesting ways of sequestering CO2 while not affecting or maybe even improving our quality of life, that are worth trying. We only neec to be creative about it, instead of all that scaring and cutting of heads. Technology is our friend, not the enemy.

Rainforests and jungles, although no longer draining points, are massive storage points of carbon. Just burning them means liberating a huge ammount of it to the atmosphere as CO2. Although the later continuous growing and recollection of vegetables succcesfully drains CO2, it would take decades for as much biomass as previously existed to be created.

So what I say is that the new land-use is better for sequestering CO2, but you have to be careful as to the way you make the previous jungle or forest disappear. Just letting it burn in situ is strongly negative. I didn’t dispute that. Finding a good use for all that biomass, either by manufacturing items or paper with the wood or by generating electrical energy in the burning process are better solutions. But in the longer term, no matter how you got rid of the wild vegetation, the CO2 you liberated will come back with the agriculture, and from that point on you only have a benefitial increased CO2 draining capability.

Earlier you said, “killing of forests and jungle … in order to cultivate the same land is definitely not a bad thing.” I cited a peer-reviewed paper that suggests that it is very definitely a bad thing as far as CO2 is concerned, and you have no response other than to redefine the problem to your liking?

In your second part you are only offering conjecture. Where is your data? Have you done any calculations based on data in the literature?

The scientists that study these things go out into the rainforest and take samples to produce their estimates, or they cite papers that have done so. The Fargione paper cited numerous such papers, and averaged results, for example. In the same issue of Science, there was also the Searchinger paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/ cgi/ content/ abstract/ 319/ 5867/ 1238
In it, in Table D-7 you will find their estimate of the losses: 126.7 tonnes C/ha in vegetation, and 47.5 tonnes C/ha in soils for tropical rainforest. Their estimate of the gross uptake from regrowth is 0.9 tonnes C/ha/yr. This directly contradicts your assertions.

There are ways to counter a bit the instant CO2 increase effect of destroying the jungle for cultivating fields. Instead of just burning it all in situ, you can use the wood, for furnitures or paper, and the carbon will stay trapped for decades more, and you can burn the parts that you cannot use in an incinerating electrical plant, which will add CO2 in the same way as burning the forest in situ, but producing electricity at the same time, so that on the other hand you don’t need to burn some ammount of other fosil fuels for that energy and you save those emissions.