Re: [biochar] Re: Safety Risks of Chemicals
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Erich Knight
Aug 8, 2016, 3:23:11 AM8/8/16
to biochar, se-bi...@googlegroups.com, Soil Age
Dear Rick,
Thank you so much for this context & background of your thinking. Compared to Mike's 2 cents, yours is dollars in cautionary sense.
"Forks Over Knives"
http://www.forksoverknives.com/
Thank you so much for this context & background of your thinking. Compared to Mike's 2 cents, yours is dollars in cautionary sense.
Not finding a conclusive link and the overall work force health reminds me of individual chemical sensitivity, like is seen in psychopharmacology & how neurotransmitters vary in us all, and the new findings of individual epigenetic adaptations.
In more general dietary health issues,
I tend to look at large subject population, demographic studies.
My favorite, (maybe because it has always been my diet), is "Forks Over Knives" , (>20% or <5% Animal protein = cancer), ya just can't denie the 800 million Chinese, what happened in Norway during WWII and the Philippian Nouveau riche kids.
In more general dietary health issues,
I tend to look at large subject population, demographic studies.
My favorite, (maybe because it has always been my diet), is "Forks Over Knives" , (>20% or <5% Animal protein = cancer), ya just can't denie the 800 million Chinese, what happened in Norway during WWII and the Philippian Nouveau riche kids.
"Forks Over Knives"
http://www.forksoverknives.com/
Cheers,
ErichErich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
1047 Dave Berry Rd. McGaheysville, VA. 22840
540-289-9750
USBI 2016 Presentation; http://usbi2016.org/schedule/
"The Civilization of Soil",
Hall Marks of The Unintended & Intended Anthropocene
Policy & Community Chairman
2013 North American Biochar Symposium
Harvesting Hope: The Science & Synergies of Biochar
October 13-16, 2013 at UMASS Amherst
http://pvbiochar.org/2013-symposium/
On Mon, Aug 8, 2016 at 1:38 AM, Rick Wilson rww...@yahoo.com [biochar] <bio...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
I'm sure that some of the readers on this blog have been insulted by my suggestion of the possibility of (plant and human) toxicity with biochar and related chemicals such as wood vinegar.I want to share a life experience.After I received my Ph.D. I worked for Amoco, later acquired by British Petroleum, for 17 years. Half of my career was in R&D, working in building "700" in Naperville, outside of Chicago. The adjacent building 500 was a brain cancer cluster, and the reason for it was never fully understood. The building was later demolished out of frustration.Two of the victims were my coworkers. I went to their funerals, and I was in my 30's. Imagine that life experience.My take away, and my advise to this group, unless you know what's in a material, don't assume its safe.Rick Wilson
From: "David Yarrow dyar...@gmail.com [biochar]" <bio...@yahoogroups.com>
To: "bio...@yahoogroups.com" <bio...@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 7, 2016 7:49 PM
Subject: Re: [biochar] pyroligneous acid
hi mike,useful observations. certainly small batch, home-cooked wood vinegar has less chance of contamination with phenols & other biotoxic byproducts than biomass that's heated to high temperature (= 700+dC). my experiences suggest that the truly irritating, biotoxic substances were cooked out at higher temperatures at the end of a long, slow burn, but i'm not sure that low temperature is a complete free pass for toxicology testing. fire certainly changes these biofluids. consider the distinctions between raw and pasteurized milk.davidOn Sun, Aug 7, 2016 at 7:24 AM, mikethe...@aol.com [biochar] <bio...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:Part of the value proposition of biochar and related by-products is that it is made locally, by local folks, using local renewable materials, for local applications. It is a local, small batch, balanced, close-loop approach. This model works at a specific scale.Based on my readings, folks appear to have figured out, by human observation, the best methods to prepared pyroligneous acid so that it is not hazardous. The accepted approaches are more based on mortality significance than being statistically significant.my 2 centsMike__._,_.___
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Erich Knight
Aug 12, 2016, 1:11:52 PM8/12/16
to biochar, se-bi...@googlegroups.com, Soil Age, Nando Breiter, nikolaus foidl, Hans-Peter Schmidt
If the Soil-C friendly Government in France maybe our Whitehouse can give at least some attention.
Soil Action,...
A Call to Action to Save One of America’s Most Important Natural Resources
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/08/01/call-action-save-one-americas-most-important-natural-resources
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, (OSTP), is issuing a national Call to Action and forming an interagency group to protect America’s soil
OSTP seeks innovative actions from Federal agencies, academic scientists and engineers, farmers, entrepreneurs, businesses, advocates, and members of the public in a nationwide effort to impede soil loss, enhance soil genesis, and restore degraded soils.
OSTP welcomes efforts to develop or deploy solutions or incentives achieve the following:
(1) rapidly generating healthy soil or restoring degraded or contaminated soil;
(2) increasing soil carbon content and sequestration; and
(3) reducing pressure on agricultural soil that is particularly vulnerable to erosion.
Soil Action,...
A Call to Action to Save One of America’s Most Important Natural Resources
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/08/01/call-action-save-one-americas-most-important-natural-resources
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, (OSTP), is issuing a national Call to Action and forming an interagency group to protect America’s soil
OSTP seeks innovative actions from Federal agencies, academic scientists and engineers, farmers, entrepreneurs, businesses, advocates, and members of the public in a nationwide effort to impede soil loss, enhance soil genesis, and restore degraded soils.
OSTP welcomes efforts to develop or deploy solutions or incentives achieve the following:
(1) rapidly generating healthy soil or restoring degraded or contaminated soil;
(2) increasing soil carbon content and sequestration; and
(3) reducing pressure on agricultural soil that is particularly vulnerable to erosion.
Tell OSTP About Your Work;
What you or your organization will do to protect soil resources, please submit this web form by August 31, 2016.
Ask them for a plan, any plans, for incentives to build Soil Carbon too. Tell them to tell the USDA to go the French way but do it better, say 5/1000 Soil-C increase.Cheers,
ErichErich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
1047 Dave Berry Rd. McGaheysville, VA. 22840
540-289-9750
USBI 2016 Presentation; http://usbi2016.org/schedule/
"The Civilization of Soil",
Hall Marks of The Unintended & Intended Anthropocene
Policy & Community Chairman
2013 North American Biochar Symposium
Harvesting Hope: The Science & Synergies of Biochar
October 13-16, 2013 at UMASS Amherst
http://pvbiochar.org/2013-symposium/
On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 10:07 AM, 'Ronal W. Larson' rongre...@comcast.net [biochar] <bio...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
Nando and list and ccs
Several comments:1. Great that you are still involved with biochar - and better that you are getting regular inquiries.2. It is terrible that governmental funding isn’t available to get your first unit in place.3, Maybe this exchange can get some altruistic funding group to realize how important biochar is - to the poorest groups.4. I am still looking for outstanding country efforts - and Switzerland is in the running. What country is doing better?5. You say both that biochar is too expensive and that payback in at least one location can be less than a year. We need to find ways to get the latter started. I am betting that the locations where biochar can be cost effective are many - based on both increased outputs and reduced expenses in Agriculture. Especially the US government is negligent - and not only because of our Congress.Again, good to hear from you and thanks for hanging in there.RonOn Aug 12, 2016, at 6:15 AM, Nando Breiter <na...@carbonzero.ch> wrote:Hi Ron,[RWL8: I also found Nando Breiter’s name at http://innovabridge.org/ as one of your group members. We haven’t heard from Nando in some time, so I add him as a cc to hope he will tell us how things are going. He has some nice photos from the 2007 first IBI meeting (when we met) in Australia at this site: http://www.carbonzero.ch/ . I thought this is an excellent site for promoting biochar, if others haven’t gone there.[RWL9: Last point - I am amazed that Switzerland has so much going on in the world of biochar (I am thinking of the work of Hans-Peter Schmidt [cc’d] as well). I hope someone can tell this list if Switzerland is in fact a global biochar leader - and why. And what can the rest of us learn from Switzerland about accelerating biochar’s introduction?On a practical basis, I don't think there is actually more biochar activity happening in Switzerland than anywhere else in the world. All I'm doing is trying to promote Nikolaus' technical and economic solutions to produce biochar, hoping to secure a first major client. Many potential clients write me, at least several a week. Very few engage seriously, perhaps one or 2 a year. And until now, no one has invested is actually developing a plant. Core financial issues remain as impediments that idealism does not mitigate; biochar is an expensive intervention, soil fertility is not an attractive idea for risk-taking investors (the current group I'm taking to would rather invest in carbon nanofiber production), in general, farmers don't have the capital, the ability to raise the capital, or the appetite for risk to invest in biochar.I continue to believe that a business producing a biochar-based substrate (with possible co-products, condensates, energy, etc) can be financially successful - Nikolaus has some great ideas in this regard. But it's difficult to convince the first investor. I had a guy call me from Hawaii with feedstock coming out his ears. He told me he can get $0.45 a kilowatt hour selling electricity to the grid and he was very interested in starting a business producing biochar and electricity. When he found out we hadn't produced a first unit yet, he laughed me off, even tho' we would use a commercially available genset from GE and he would make his investment capital back in electricity sales in, what, 2 to 3 months max. These people flow like water through my fingers, even when I put my best effort to present the situation in a positive light - my failing, but it hasn't been good enough yet. There has been a Canadian group on the burner for some months now that is still cooking away.All told, I reserve the time and energy I have for biochar to corresponding and talking with potential clients. Hopefully this Canadian group will come through ...Kind regards,Nando__._,_.___
Messages in this topic (41)
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Ronal W. Larson
Aug 12, 2016, 2:32:24 PM8/12/16
to Soil Age, biochar, se-bi...@googlegroups.com, Biochar-Policy
Erich:
Thanks for this lead - which I think is very important.
I have just sent in a response (below). They ask only for something new. In Part A they ask who you are representing - I said “Biochar Policy” as Coordinator. The main part reads:
B. Announcement Summary
What new (i.e., not yet public) activities or actions is your organization undertaking to respond to the Call to Action to prevent soil loss, enhance soil genesis, or restore degraded soil? Provide quantifiable details to indicate the scope, impact, and timeline of the new activities and actions, e.g., value of resources committed, number of individuals reached, geographic extent, sectors impacted, etc. Responses should be limited to 4 sentences.
I wrote: “I and most members of the "Biochar-Policy" internet discussion list, are primarily working to make those active in CDR or NET (Carbon Dioxide Removal or Negative Emissions Technologies) aware that soil improvement is the key to the much needed climate action. Those involved in "Geoengineering" simply do not know how to analyze approaches that involve soil - and biochar seems to be the best approach in each category. There is of course a clean non-fossil energy advantage as well.”
The whole exercise took less than 10 minutes - and one only needs about a minute on parts A and C.
I think coupling CDR to soils will be new to OSTP, which I assume already knows about biochar. We should not simply dump a lot of old pro-biochar material on them. But we will be making a mistake if a lot of (US is best, but US is not mandatory) people on these 4 lists don’t take this opportunity to promote any new important soil aspect of biochar (or what ever soil oriented technology you are working on)
Erich’s site below ends up at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/webform/white-house-soil-workshop if you want to check the instructions more closely.
Again - Erich - thanks.
Ron
<snip - as being on a different topic>
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