Al Gore Is Still Trying to Save the Earth, And He's Got Some Very Good Ideas
January 2nd 2020
Vice President Al Gore (Center for American Progress)
By Joan McCarter
The new president we have in January 2021 should do one key thing in her first 100 days: talk to former Vice President Al Gore. Maybe even make him her Climate Czar. Here's just one reason for doing so—he's looking for solutions.
In this case, carbon farming. Or, basically, farming like people farmed for thousands of years before the use of petrochemicals and monoculture. It's regenerative farming that makes the most of what healthy topsoil does: grow food while sucking up and storing carbon, more than three times as much as forests. Instead of being a carbon emitter (now it creates about 14% of the greenhouse gas emissions going into the atmosphere) to being a net absorber, actually capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere.
Gore has been working on this at his 400-acre farm in Carthage, Tennessee, where he also has a training program for climate activists and a carbon farming demonstration project.
If farming practices are changed through the use of cover crops, low-tilling and tree-planting, Gore said, agriculture conglomerates and family farmers alike could theoretically make their farms more productive while fighting global warming. Those changes can also replenish nutrients to the world's soil, of which 33% has already been depleted.
He's recruiting stakeholders—farmers, scientists, chefs, food experts, entrepreneurs, and investors—to his message of regenerative farming, having brought 450 of them to the farm this fall to strategize on scaling up his vision to the point that it could slow climate change. "We've waited so long to start to address the climate crisis," Gore told the group. "We will need to both reduce emissions drastically and take as much carbon out of the atmosphere as we possibly can."
There are, of course, skeptics. One of them is Timothy Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University, who says "There is an unbelievable amount of scientific uncertainty. [...] There is virtually no analysis that shows the feasibility of doing any of this at scale." Which is a piss poor argument for not trying it, for not changing agricultural policy to encourage ways of farming that at the very least would be more sustainable. It takes incentives for farmers—who have been badly hurt already economically by Trump policies—to upend their practices and return to the ways of their grandparents. But there's a reason that generations of farmers knew about crop rotation, using cover crops and tilling them back into the topsoil as green fertilizer, and letting fields lie fallow. It worked.
Agriculture is going to have to change. Growing seasons are changing. Water is less available. Markets will have to shrink because transporting food across the globe is already a luxury we can’t afford. Imagine a Farm Bill that actually encouraged farmers to restore the soil. And the environment.
Posted with permission