Towards a Sustainable Economy

feebates are the most effective way to facilitate the shift towards a more sustainable economy

Feebates are proposed to facilitate a shift away from fossil fuel towards clean energy; furthermore, feebates are proposed to assist biochar.

Cycle A:  Inorganic Waste

We're all familiar with the idea that we're running out of scarce resources. We just cannot continue to keep drilling and mining for more fossil fuel, metals and other resources. One way to deal with scarcity is to recycle resources, i.e. separating waste to extract metals, glass, plastic, concrete, bricks, etc. This type of recycling is possible for much of our inorganic waste. In the light of global warming and health concerns, however, a shift to organic resources and renewable energy seems a better approach, such as described in the Next Industrial Revolution.

Cycles B and E:  Biomass and organic Waste

Recycling organic waste constitutes another cycle in a sustainable economy. Many people now compost kitchen and garden waste, thus returning many nutrients to the soil. Composting, however, releases greenhouse gases. A cleaner alternative is to pyrolyze organic household waste, farm waste and forest waste. Pyrolysis is an oxygen-starved method of heating waste at relatively low temperatures that will result in the release of little or no greenhouse gases. With pyrolysis, organic waste can be turned into hydrogen and agrichar, or biochar, which can store carbon into the soil and make the soil more fertile.

Estimates are that some 363 tonnes of CO2 per hectare can be locked up in the soil in the form of biochar. The U.S. has some 475 million hectares of agricultural land. Australia has almost 762 million hectares of land, mostly desert. Desert soils can contain between 14 and 100 tonnes of carbon per ha, while dry shrublands can contain up to 270 tonnes of carbon per ha. The carbon stored in the vegetation is considerably lower, with typical quantities being around 2–30 tonnes of carbon per ha in total. Eucalypt trees grow rapidly and eucalypt forest can store over 2800 tonnes of carbon per hectare. The FAO-OECD Agricultural Outlook 2009-2018 says (on page 11) that over 0.8 billion ha of additional land is available for rain-fed crop production in Africa and Latin America. The need to feed a growing world population makes it imperative to look at ways to increase soil fertility.

Biochar will result in better retention of nutrients and water. Once applied, biochar can remain useful for hundreds of years. Increased vegetation in many ways feeds itself. It results in additional input for pyrolysis and thus additional biochar. There are also studies indicating that an increase of vegetation goes hand in hand with an increase in rain. Healthy soil will contain numerous bacteria that increase rain, both when they are in the soil where they break down the surface tension of water better than any other substance in nature, and when they become airborne.

Furthermore, there are indications that forests generate winds that help pump water around the planet, resulting in increased rainfall for forests. This would explain how the deep interiors of forested continents can get as much rain as the coast.

In the 1990s, U.S. farmers needed to implement a soil conservation plan on erodible cropland to be eligible for commodity price supports, and the no-till farmland increased from 7 million hectares in 1990 to 25 million hectares in 2004. Similar policies could be implemented to add biochar, such as making local rates dependent on carbon content.

NASA-scientist Jim Hansen calculates that reforestation of degraded land and improved agricultural practices that retain soil carbon could draw down atmospheric CO2 by as much as 50 ppm.

Cycle C:  Clean & safe energy

In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we should shift away from burning fuel to generation of clean and safe energy. Obvious ways to do this are to install more solar and wind facilities. Pyrolysis can also help produce fertilizers and fuel, to power transport. Hansen calculates that this and using carbon-negative biofuels could bring carbon dioxide back to 350 ppm well before the end of the century.

Surplus Energy

As the number of wind turbines grows, there will increasingly be periods of time when turbines produce more energy than the grid needs. Especially at night, when demand on the grid is at its lowest, there can be a lot of wind. Unless this energy can somehow be stored or used otherwise, it will go to waste.

Similarly, surplus energy can be produced by solar power facilities. Especially in the early hours of the morning, just after sunrise, the sun can shine brightly, yet there's little or no need for electricity on the grid. It makes sense to store such surplus energy at solar farms in molten salt facilities.

Surplus energy from wind turbines can be used for purposes such as:
  • storage (for later use)
    - car batteries
    - pumped-up water
    - flywheels
    - compressed air
    - hydrogen

Surplus energy can close this cycle, leading to a range of new and clean industries, such as water desalination which could in turn result in the production of lithium for car batteries and magnesium for clean concrete.

Electrolyzers can now be made without a need for platinum and there's also interesting research into using electricity to turn seawater into hydrogen. When vehicles run on hydrogen, their output is clean water, rather than emissions.

Cycle D:  Air Capture

Surplus energy can also power devices that capture CO2 from ambient air, which can in turn be used to power aviation, to feed to greenhouses, to produce urea and to supply carbon to industry, e.g. for manufacture of building material, plastic, carbon fiber and other products.


Towards a more sustainable economy

Instead of burning fuel and throwing things away, there are more sustainable ways to do things. Not only are they environmentally more sustainable, they also provide good job opportunities and investment potential. While some of these technologies are controversial, in that they aren't natural and their consequences aren't fully known, the need to act on global warming makes that they should be further explored.

Such technologies include:

- clean and safe electricity generation with solar, wind, tide, wave and geothermal power

- using electricity and hydrogen to power transport

- carbon dioxide captured from ambient air

- spraying seawater into the sky, to change albedo above oceans

- pyrolysis to produce biochar, hydrogen and synthetic fuel

- fertilizing soil to produce extra biomass for pyrolysis and to stimulate young growth, which has a lighter color, thus reflecting more sunlight back into space

- producing rain by means of cloud seeding, using dry ice and urea, produced by means of pyrolysis and from carbon dioxide captured from ambient air

- water desalination for irrigation and industrial purposes

- algae bags

Because many such technologies complement each other, their combination can make them more commercially viable than when looked at in isolation. Furthermore, a framework of feebates can most effectively facilitate the shift to technologies that reduce greenhouse gases. Feebates only need to insist that the alternatives are safe and clean; market mechanisms can further sort out what works best where. The following five feebates (the yellow arrows in above diagram) are particularly recommended:

1. fees on fertilizers and on livestock products, funding local rebates on biochar

2. fees on fuel, funding local rebates on clean and safe electricity

3. fees on engines, funding local rebates on electric motors

4. fees on aviation, funding CO2 capture from ambient air

5. fees on combustion ovens, funding rebates on building insulation, solar cookers and electric appliances for cooking and heating

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