The Greening Earth Society is an astroturf organization. That is, a
phony front group for fossil fuel industry points of view (it was
formed by the Western Fuels Association) that poses as a grassroots
environmental organization.
Greening Earth was exposed in John Stauber's and Sheldon Rampton's
/Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and
Gambles with your Future/ (Putnam/Tarcher, 2001). These are folks who
also publish /PR Watch/.
The problem with the carbon-in-soils equation from a human
perspective is that we didn't evolve on this planet in an ecosystem
where all that carbon was held in the soil. All that carbon was
locked up deep down in the rock. For tens to hundreds of millions of
years.
In the course of little more than 150 years, we have lifted it out of
the earth's crust and put it into the atmosphere.
Sure, it may be possible to get the soil to uptake some amount of
carbon...but don't expect the resulting chemistry to be amenable to
human evolution. And as ever, humans are in a big-ass hurry, and
expect the rest of creation to keep up with our clock-driven
rush-fetish.
The Duke press release gets it pretty much right. There are limits to
how much fossil matter living organisms can absorb, and at what pace.
The most sane policies would act immediately to stop excavating
below-ground carbon and seek alternatives--like the nearly limitless
flows of photon, kinetic (wind and surf), and other energies. And
would address from a cultural standpoint the hurry-sickness.
It ain't gonna happen. I came to that conclusion a couple years ago,
consulting with the folks at the NASA/Goddard Institute for Space
Studies at Columbia (while I was at Redefining Progress).
Anyone who argues at this point that there will be no or only minor
effects in excavating billions of tons of carbon out of the earth's
crust and putting it into the atmosphere, decisively changing the
composition of the atmosphere, has their head up their tailpipe,
huffing methane.
You're aware that many older folks are boasting these days, "I'm
spending my children's inheritance."
Home office: 360-459-5683
Home office fax: Same as above, phone first for enabling
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The First Rule of Holes is that when you are in one,
you should stop digging. --Molly Ivins