Amazon

We often think — wrongly — of ecological systems as linear. Adding a certain amount of CO2 to the atmosphere means a certain amount of warming. Twice that amount, twice the warming. Losing 10 percent of a forest means 10 percent less forest. Twice that amount of deforestation means twenty percent less forest. Stuff like that.

But that’s not how ecological systems operate. They’re integrated. Their components rely on one another to function properly.

Brazil is the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, responsible for about 5 percent of current global GHG emissions.

Maybe this isn’t shocking. It’s a huge country. Its south is speckled with major population centers, and it has a southern industrial belt. Yet most of its emissions don’t come from its cities or its factories. At least not directly. They come from its land.

The Amazon jungle is metaphorically referred to as the lungs of the world: CO2 in, O2 out, transformed through a dense emerald mass. It's an irreplaceable treasure, in many spots still unmapped, and a biological preserve filled with species that we likely haven’t even seen.

So it’s quite welcome that author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is paying attention to what happens to the Amazon.

What’s not welcome are the misdirections Friedman takes while discussing how to protect the remaining 80 percent of the Amazon that has not yet been clear-cut and transformed into cattle ranches and soy plantations.

Sugarcane is touted as the miracle biofuel even by biofuels' skeptics.

Former President Bill Clinton lauded it at the recent Brazilian ethanol summit, held in São Paulo (although he warned of the dangers of deforestation). Sweden views sugarcane ethanol as a relatively clean proxy for petroleum and has sought to lower EU import tariffs on it, the better to have a more “renewable” energy profile.

By some measures, sugarcane ethanol deserves the accolades.

The governing metric for determining the quality of a given biofuel is the EROEI, or the energy returned on energy invested. For Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, the number is frequently reported as eight or higher—that is, for every unit of fossil energy input, eight units of sugarcane ethanol energy are output. Pretty good.

Except for a niggling problem: The ecology is a bit more complicated than an EROEI calculation. For one thing, a recent study in the journal Science suggests that conversion from rainforests, peat-lands, savannas or grasslands to biofuel plantations can create huge carbon debts that will take decades to repay:

In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered a police crackdown on illegal logging after flash floods and landslides, made by worse by deforestation, killed more than 300 people, according to news reports.

Fifteen years earlier, in 1989, the government of Thailand announced a nationwide ban on tree cutting following severe flooding and the heavy loss of life in landslides. And in August 1998, following several weeks of record flooding in the Yangtze River basin and a staggering $30 billion worth of damage, the Chinese government banned all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the basin.

Each of these governments belatedly learned a costly lesson, namely that services provided by forests, such as flood control, may be far more valuable to society than the lumber in those forests.

Imagine if in a poverty-stricken sector of the equatorial band, littered with acidic soils barely fit for farming, there were jet-black patches of dirt, seeded with charcoal and so fertile that they could be planted continuously for over 40 years without applying fertilizer.

Then imagine that those patches were so loaded with carbon that they had six to seven times the amount of carbon per pound of the surrounding soils, that Western scientists could partially replicate the process through which the black earth was made, and that by burying carbon in earth they could augment soil fertility and, perhaps, leach carbon out of the atmosphere and reverse global warming.

Perhaps the jig is already up—too much detail. What we’re talking about is terra preta, or more colloquially, biochar, the Amazonian miracle soil.

NASA Climatologist James Hansen has endorsed terra preta—literally black earth—as a carbon “draw-down strategy.” British chemist James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, says it is the “one way we could save ourselves.”

So let’s check it out. But first, what is it?