Countering climate change by increasing soil carbon

Allan J. Yeomans describes how in his book Priority One

According to Yeomans, it is perfectly possible today, without any additional technological research required, to take all of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that has been released by fossil fuel consumption over the last 50 years. The solution is a special agricultural management that increases the amount of carbon that is fixed into the top layer of the soil.

One example is to sow perennial grasses, which concentrate a huge underground crop of soil carbon since the grass periodically sheds its roots. These perennial grasses can also be harvested as biofuels. In this way they simultaneously provide both carbon storage and an alternative to fossil fuel.

The Two Nines Table, one of the major tables in the book, is freely available on the Internet. It shows the increase in soil organic matter, country by country, that would be required to bring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels down from the current 380 parts per million (ppm) to 299 ppm. The table also shows how much each country in the world contributed to global warming through fossil fuel consumption between 1950 and 2000.