Capturing carbon - the second best solution

Two comments from Tom Ashbaucher:

“With small bottles of hand sanitizer selling for such high prices, why aren't those idle ethanol plants cranking out product? Have you seen the book COWS SAVE THE PLANET by Judith D. Schwartz, a serious look at how an organically maintained soil will in fact sequester a huge amount of the carbon and CO2 that lots of people are worried about re: global warming. There is a lot here to make us rethink how our dirt (soil) is being handled, or actually, sub-optimally dealt with by the very people with a vested interest in farming.  Maybe our farms could end up having much higher yields per acre.”

Tom: Thanks for writing. I did look at the sanitizer market some months ago, and the bottom line was the market was tiny compared to fuel volumes, and the equipment needed to switch from industrial to pharmaceutical grade ethanol as well as changing loading railcars to formulating and filling small bottles was prohibitively expensive. Even if plants did switch products much of the lucrative markup would go to other manufacturers and the distribution system, not ethanol plants.

As far as the book, I have not read it, but carbon capture or sequestration is very much in the news, both ag and general media. The role livestock plays in the carbon problem will continue to be debated, but there is an intrinsic structural problem. All the solutions I have read seem to focus on pasture feeding, and widely distributed livestock populations. This is exactly the opposite of what we have now and continue to intensify. The plans proposed by many agricultural reformers generally have as a goal an agrarian ideal of small, diversified farms, preferably with several crops in rotation and livestock (mostly cattle) to replace much of the synthetic fertilizer. That nostalgic picture cannot return for many reasons – lack of infrastructure like fences, adverse economics, and powerful entrenched interests with sophisticated production and exclusive marketing power. Above all the math of carbon capture is not at all clear is hard to prove conclusively. The most effective way to mitigate global warming is to stop releasing carbon. It looks to me like we’re looking for any answer other than that obvious one. Current emissions levels simply overwhelm all the techniques I have seen to sequester the carbon.