By John Sutter
Some Oklahoma farmers are getting paid to fight global warming by sinking carbon into their fields. It’s a concept that’s based on simple science: plants are made of carbon, and they pull some of it out of the air and store it underground. If, instead of plowing up the land or using it for crops, farmers plant native grasses or trees, they’re essentially cleaning up some greenhouse gases that are emitted by power plants and cars.
In this week’s environment podcast, I talk with two conservationists who are interested in hooking Oklahoma farmers up with people or groups who will pay them for these efforts. Some countries — like Canada and the European Union — regulate carbon dioxide emissions in a way that allows polluters to pay other people (maybe farmers in Oklahoma) to remove carbon dioxide from the air.
The market here is small. But a group called the Oklahoma Carbon Initiative is going to put a Web site (address is yet to be decided) up next month to help educate Oklahomans about so-called “carbon credit” payments. The group will even buy carbon from individual farmers and then sell it in packages to markets.
Here’s some background from the EPA.
And a diagram of the carbon cycle. Basically, people are looking for ways to put carbon back in the ground, since we’ve burned so many carbon-based fossil fuels, thus putting an excess of carbon in the atmosphere.
