Soil is the underappreciated solution for soaking up the carbon emissions causing global warming. If we were to practice regenerative agriculture across the world’s agricultural and ranch lands, so that we were restoring the soil year over year rather than depleting it the way do today with conventional agriculture, we could readily achieve net-zero emissions. Soil is a massive carbon sink, the numbers add up quite favorably when you look at the global potential. In this book chapter, I review the analysis first presented by the French government and the Rodale Institute in the USA.

Then I create a model using the funds collected from a carbon tax of $40 per ton of CO2 which equals $150 per ton of soil carbon. We use the funds from a carbon tax, I call it a deposit, to pay farmers and ranchers to bury carbon in the soil on a ton-for-ton basis. In organic agriculture, it is a rule of thumb that one ton of carbon per acre per year can be added to the soil on an ongoing basis.

A global carbon deposit would generate trillions of dollars that flow into rural economies to reward farmers to use healthy practices that restore Mother Earth. This would have many downstream benefits of attracting freshwater, fixing nitrogen in the soil, and reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers. This concept would transform farm economics the world over and could actually achieve the elusive goal of net zero emissions if the policy were pursued holistically and globally.

The link below is my chapter in a book where I explain the concept in detail. I use blockchain technology as a way to model the accounting of the complex system.  The soil concept stands on its own without using blockchain, but I was asked to write this chapter by the book editor as it was based on an article I wrote.

Carbon Deposits—Using Soil and Blockchains to Achieve Net-Zero Emissions

The Book:

Transforming Climate Finance and Green Investment with Blockchains