Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at their highest in 3 million years. Oceans, the biggest carbon sinks of all, are acidifying because they hold too much of it. Plant life, which absorbs CO2 through photosynthesis, can sink carbon into the soil. Regenerative farming helps speed that along—with the added benefit of producing more nutrient-rich soil.
Rattan Lal, a professor of soil physics and director of Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, is the key scientist behind Gore’s thinking. Lal served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) when it shared a Nobel Prize with Gore in 2007, and was awarded the Japan Prize this year for his work on soil carbon sequestration.
The world’s population currently uses more than a third of the planet’s surface for agriculture, according to the United Nations. In the U.S., close to 40% of land is farmland. Soil used for agriculture has degraded and eroded over centuries of use, losing between 20% and 60% of its original carbon content, according to the IPCC. Lal’s research shows that soil can sequester carbon at rates as high as 2.6 gigatons each year. An aggressive, global combination of tree planting and increased vegetation along with soil carbon sequestration, he said, has the “technical potential” to absorb 157 parts per million of CO2.
With about 415 parts per million in the air today—a huge jump compared with a few decades ago—removing even a fraction of that could slow the advance of global warming.
“There is virtually no analysis that shows the feasibility of doing any of this at scale.”
Gore is realistic when it comes to the fraught politics of climate change and the policies that would need to align to make that potential possible. Moreover, carbon farming is a nascent concept in the U.S.: California has a growing program and Hawaii’s plan to become carbon neutral by 2045 includes a carbon farming framework. U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” supported in some form by several Democratic presidential candidates, simply encourages farmers to improve soil health.
But even without any legislation on the horizon, big agriculture is starting to pay attention.
Eco-conscious shoppers are beginning to look for food farmed with regenerative practices, just as they do for organic products and sustainable packaging. General Mills set a goal in August to have 1 million acres in its supply chain transitioned to regenerative agriculture by 2030, and a group of companies including Danone North America and Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s have been working on a certification for food farmed with regenerative practices.
Not everyone is convinced its time has come, though. Timothy Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University who has studied the issue, said scalable carbon farming is still very much a pipe dream.
“There is an unbelievable amount of scientific uncertainty,” Searchinger said. “There is virtually no analysis that shows the feasibility of doing any of this at scale.”