Introduction to The Burning Question
Hello, and welcome to The Burning Question!
What is The Burning Question (TBQ)?
You’ve guessed it, this is a newsletter.
Another newsletter?! Yes, but also, no. This isn’t going to be just an outbound stream of biochar-related information. Our hope is to build a place for the whole biochar community to work together toward biochar as a scalable method of carbon sequestration.
Our current situation:
There is too much carbon in the air.
We’re going to need to take a lot of carbon out of the air to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis.
While it’s not the only way to get carbon out of the air, plants are really good at getting carbon out of the air.
People are good at growing plants, and we already have the equipment and know how to grow and manage them well distributed across our country.
Turning plants into char sequesters the carbon inside them for a long time — something > 1000 years.
So, the question becomes, how do we do this? A question worth answering! You might even say…The Burning Question. Welcome 👋.
A few thoughts as we get started, and some info on the language you’ll find on our website:
Our goal
The Burning Question promotes biochar production, processing, and application for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation.
You can see that, for example, “improving soil” isn’t among our goals. While biochar can do so many things—filter water, decrease nutrient run off, improve soil, etc.—we’re focused on its impact on carbon sequestration and climate mitigation. That doesn’t mean we don’t see the value in applying biochar to solve other problems, it means that the outcome we’re looking at is climate oriented.
We recognize that without sustainable business models for biochar production and usage, any progress is academic. With that in mind, we will be interviewing farmers more interested in soil quality than climate change and forestry workers more interested in forest-fire prevention than carbon sequestration. We will be writing about and talking to people involved in various stages of the process: those that focus on feedstock (what gets turned into biochar), those that make biochar from feedstock, and those that use biochar.
How are we going to accomplish our goal? We’re thinking about it like this:
Community
We highlight and detail opportunities in the biochar sector to help attract investment, support progress by community members, and facilitate adoption.
As part of this newsletter, we’ll be interviewing members of the wider biochar community (maybe you!) We’re going to be conducting a lot of quick, informal video interviews with people working on a variety of problems, from academics and hobbyists to industrial producers and farmers. That includes people who are not yet using biochar, and people that have left the field. We hope that these videos allow you to connect with each other and find out about all the new projects in the sector.
Collaboration
We promote best practices and innovation in the community by open-sourcing content, working to increase understanding of shared challenges, and providing a place for collaboration and information sharing.
I wrote at length here about why showing one’s work is especially important when doing something as new as climate change mitigation. If we’re going to build up the sector, we’re going to have to make sure everyone trusts what we’re saying and doing. We’ll encourage the people we talk with to share what they thought, what they think now, what they did right and wrong, and what they’ve learned.
In the coming months, I’ll be doing a few things to increase collaboration in the community (and I’m open to other ideas):
Every few weeks, I’ll be dedicating a post to an opportunity in the sector, drawn from interviews. I’ll try to interview people already doing a version of the work and write up a breakdown of the opportunity itself so that people interested in the space can better understand it.
I’ll be asking each of the people we talk to say what they’re willing to be contacted about, so we can start weaving together opportunities and expertise. (We want to make it easier for people get up to speed!)
I’ll be launching a portion of the TBQ website that breaks down the biochar sector and provides information about different types of potential feedstocks, biochar-making processes, and potential applications. In time, we’ll be connecting these profiles with our interviews.
Communication
We increase interest in biochar as a climate change mitigation sequestration strategy by developing relationships and meaningful communication with policy-makers, regulatory bodies, and community members like farmers, foresters, climate activists, and soil experts.
There is a huge distance from research and pilot projects to sustainable businesses and meaningful and appropriate policy. While y’all are doing the important work, we want to make sure people hear about it. That starts with this newsletter and accompanying information. We hope it will grow into outreach to policy makers and figuring out how expand the network.