CP - Warming Adv CPs - Michigan 7 2023 BEJJP

Neg
General
1NC – Solvency
NETs solve climate change---collective deployment solve 5 gigatons of CO2. Best studies.
Divya Pant 23, Penn state doctoral candidate, director of the Department of Agriculture and Biological Engineering in Penn, Soil and Ocean Carbon Sequestration, Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage as Negative Emission Strategies for Global Climate Change, SpringerLink, 3-30-2023, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42729-023-01215-5/, yao
Carbon is stored in vegetation, soils, woody products, and aquatic habitats through biological carbon sequestration. Biological carbon sequestration requires the implementation of advanced management strategies that enhance the quantity of carbon stored by vegetation (cropland, grassland, forest), soil, ocean, and microorganisms. However, biological carbon sequestration alone cannot achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Carbon capture and storage (CCS), bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture (DAC), and carbon capture and utilization (CCU) hold the potential for decreasing emissions of greenhouse gasses by lowering the use of fossil fuels and advancing the adoption of clean and sustainable energy sources. CCS, CCU, and DAC approaches can deliver the steep CO2 emissions reductions necessary with the promise of large-scale deployment given strong structural and policy support, research and development, and reduction in cost. Along with human intervention, the definite variation in carbon sequestration capacity of each technology, our best estimations for global negative emission technologies (NETs) potentials based on extensive literature study in 2050 for BECCS, ocean carbon sequestration, biochar, DAC, and soil carbon sequestration is 0.5–5 gigaton of carbon dioxide (GtCO2 yr−1), 2.2 ± 0.4 GtCO2 yr−1, 1–1.8 GtCO2 yr−1, 0.5–5 GtCO2 yr−1, 5.5–6.0 GtCO2 yr−1, respectively. However, to solve climate change, no one single technology can acquire it and the review concluded that a collective deployment of feasible and scalable NETs could help to reduce CO2 emissions and combat climate change.
2NC – Solvency
BECCS is key to warming mitigation---scientific consensus.
Carbon Brief 16, specializes in clear, data-driven articles and graphics, both in terms of the science and the policy response, includes explainers, interviews, analysis and factchecks, as well as a range of popular email newsletters, Explainer: 10 ways 'negative emissions' could slow climate change, 04-16-2016, https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-10-ways-negative-emissions-could-slow-climate-change/, yao
BECCS
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage – more commonly known by the acronym BECCS – is widely viewed as the negative emissions technology offering the most promise of drawing significant quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere at the lowest cost.
Put simply, BECCS achieves net negative emissions through sequestering underground the emissions resulting from the burning of biomass for power. Negative emissions are achieved because of a “double gain” with the biomass, as it grows, having already drawn CO2 out of the atmosphere before the CCS process begins at the power plant.
Over the past decade, as climate scientists has attempted to present scenarios whereby the world manages to limit warming to below 2C, they have tended to include BECCS within their modelling assumptions. For example, in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report published in 2014, 101 of the 116 scenarios that achieved a “likely” chance of staying below 2C relied on BECCS. And 67% of these scenarios said BECCS would represent at least 20% of the world’s primary energy by 2100.
A recent study suggests BECCS could be used to sequester around 12bn tonnes of CO2e per year globally.
Biomass Repurpose
1NC – Solvency
Biomass for landfills and agro-sequestration solves all carbon emissions. It’s easily adoptable.
UC Berkeley 23, A Cost-Effective Solution to Climate Change: Burying Biomass in Dry Landfills, SciTechDaily, 7-9-2023, https://scitechdaily.com/a-cost-effective-solution-to-climate-change-burying-biomass-in-dry-landfills/?expand_article=1/, yao
Storing biomass in dry landfills by salting and burying it can economically preserve greenhouse gases for thousands of years.
Lowering the worldwide greenhouse gas emissions is crucial to avoiding a climate disaster, but existing carbon removal techniques are proving to be inefficient and expensive. A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, has come up with a scalable answer that utilizes basic, low-cost technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere and safely store it for thousands of years.
In a report recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers propose a new unique approach to capturing carbon from the air, called agro-sequestration. This method involves growing biomass crops and then burying the harvested vegetation in specially designed dry biolandfills. The buried biomass is kept dry through the use of salt to inhibit microbial activity and prevent decomposition, allowing for the stable sequestration of all the carbon in the biomass.
The result is carbon-negative, making this approach a potential game changer, according to Eli Yablonovitch, lead author and Professor in the Graduate School in UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
“We’re claiming that proper engineering can solve 100% of the climate crisis, at a manageable cost,” said Yablonovitch. “If implemented on a global scale, this carbon-negative sequestration method has the potential to remove current annual carbon dioxide emissions as well as prior years’ emissions from the atmosphere.”
Unlike prior efforts toward carbon neutrality, agro-sequestration seeks not net carbon neutrality, but net carbon negativity. According to the paper, for every metric ton (tonne) of dry biomass, it would be possible to sequester approximately 2 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Agro-sequestration: A way to stably sequester carbon in buried biomass
The idea of burying biomass in order to sequester carbon has been gaining popularity, with startup organizations burying everything from plants to wood. But ensuring the stability of the buried biomass is a challenge. While these storage environments are devoid of oxygen, anaerobic microorganisms can still survive and cause the biomass to decompose into carbon dioxide and methane, rendering these sequestration approaches carbon-neutral, at best.
But there is one thing that all life forms require — moisture, rather than oxygen. This is measured by “water activity,” a quantity similar to relative humidity. If internal water activity falls below 60%, all life comes to a halt — a concept underpinning the UC Berkeley researchers’ new agro-sequestration solution.
“There are significant questions concerning long-term sequestration for many of these recently popularized nature- and agriculturally-based technologies,” said Harry Deckman, co-author of the study and a researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. “The agro-sequestration approach we’re proposing can stably sequester the carbon in dried salted biomass for thousands of years, with less cost and higher carbon efficiency than these other air capture technologies.”
Hugh Helferty, co-founder and president of Producer Accountability for Carbon Emissions (PACE), a nonprofit committed to attaining global net zero emissions by 2050, sees great promise in this solution. “Agro-sequestration has the potential to transform temporary nature-based solutions into permanent CO2 storage,” said Helferty, who is not involved with the study. “By developing their approach, Deckman and Yablonovitch have created an invaluable new option for tackling climate change.”
Achieving the right level of dryness to prevent decomposition
Living cells must be able to transfer water-solubilized nutrients and water-solubilized waste across their cell walls to survive. According to Deckman, decreasing the water activity below 60% has been shown to stop these metabolic processes.
To achieve the necessary level of dryness, Yablonovitch and Deckman took inspiration from a long-term food preservation technique dating back to Babylonian times: salt.
“Dryness, sometimes assisted by salt, effectively reduces the internal relative humidity of the sequestered biomass,” said Yablonovitch. “And that has been proven to prevent decomposition for thousands of years.”
Researchers point to a date palm named Methuselah as proof that biomass, if kept sufficiently dry, can be preserved well beyond the next millennium.
In the 1960s, Israeli archaeologist Yigal Yadin discovered date palm seeds among ancient ruins atop Masada, a mesa overlooking the Dead Sea — one of the most arid places in the world. The seeds remained in a drawer for more than 40 years, until Sarah Sallon, a doctor researching natural medicines, requested them in 2005. After having the seeds carbon-dated, she learned that they were 2,000 years old and then asked horticulturist Elaine Solowey to plant them. They germinated, and Methuselah, one of those date palms, continues to thrive today.
“This is proof that if you keep biomass dry, it will last for hundreds to thousands of years,” said Yablonovitch. “In other words, it is a natural experiment that proves you can preserve biomass for 2,000 years.”
A cost-effective, scalable approach
In addition to offering long-term stability, Yablonovitch, and Deckman’s agro-sequestration approach is extremely cost-effective. Together, the agriculture and biolandfill cost a total of US$60 per tonne of captured and sequestered carbon dioxide. (By comparison, some direct air capture and carbon dioxide gas sequestration strategies cost US$600 per tonne.)
“Sixty dollars per tonne of captured and sequestered carbon dioxide corresponds to an added cost of $0.53 per gallon of gasoline,” said Yablonovitch. “At this price, offsetting the world’s carbon dioxide emissions would set back the world economy by 2.4%.”
The researchers have compiled a list of more than 50 high-productivity plants capable of being grown in diverse climates worldwide and with dry biomass yields in a range from 4 to more than 45 dry tonnes per hectare. All have been selected for their carbon-capturing abilities.
This solution also can scale without encroaching upon or competing with farmland used to grow food. Many of these biomass crops can be grown on marginal pasture and forest lands, or even on farmland that has remained fallow.
“To remove all the carbon that’s produced would require a lot of farmland, but it’s an amount of farmland that is actually available,” said Yablonovitch. “This would be a great boon to farmers, as there is farmland that is currently underutilized.”
Farmers harvesting these biomass crops would dry the plants, then entomb them in a dry engineered biolandfill located within the agricultural regions, tens of meters underground and safe from human activity and natural disasters.
The researchers based their design of these dry tomb structures on current municipal landfill best practices, but added enhancements to ensure dryness, such as two 2-millimeter-thick nested layers of polyethylene encasing the biomass, a practice already used in modern landfills.
The landfill area would cover only a tiny portion — 0.0001% — of the agricultural area. In other words, 10,000 hectares of biomass production could be buried in a 1-hectare biolandfill. In addition, the top surface of the landfill could be restored to agricultural production afterward.
A fast path to adoption
The timeline for the adoption of this carbon capture and sequestration method could be short, according to Deckman. “Agro-sequestration is technologically ready, and construction of the engineered biolandfills could begin after one growing season,” he said.
Yablonovitch and Deckman’s analysis shows that farmers could make the transition to biomass agriculture rather quickly. They estimate that it would take about one year to convert existing farmland to biomass agriculture, but longer for virgin land that lacks the infrastructure needed to support agriculture. The biomass crops would be ready for harvest and sequestration within a growing season.
2NC – Solvency
Biomass building is a tangible alternative for carbon-intensive industries. Investment key.
Carbon Brief 16, specializes in clear, data-driven articles and graphics, both in terms of the science and the policy response, includes explainers, interviews, analysis and factchecks, as well as a range of popular email newsletters, Explainer: 10 ways 'negative emissions' could slow climate change, 04-16-2016, https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-10-ways-negative-emissions-could-slow-climate-change/, yao
Building with biomass
Plant-based materials can be used in construction, storing carbon and preserving it for as long as the building remains standing. For example, timber and bamboo can be used for structural elements, hemp and wool for insulation, and hemp-lime for walling.
These materials provide an alternative to standard construction materials, including steel and concrete, which are typically carbon-intensive to produce. Natural materials have additional benefits, such as the ability to regulate moisture and absorb pollution.
Architects are starting to incorporate natural construction materials into their designs. In 2015, seven townhouses made of straw went on the market in Bristol, for instance. However, lack of investment, certification and expertise in the UK are currently obstacles to large-scale deployment.
Biochar improves sustainable agriculture and solves at least 4.8 billion tonnes of CO2 per year.
Carbon Brief 16, specializes in clear, data-driven articles and graphics, both in terms of the science and the policy response, includes explainers, interviews, analysis and factchecks, as well as a range of popular email newsletters, Explainer: 10 ways 'negative emissions' could slow climate change, 04-16-2016, https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-10-ways-negative-emissions-could-slow-climate-change/, yao
Biochar
Biochar is the name given to charcoal that is added to soils rather than burned as a fuel. The charcoal is produced by burning biomass, such as wood, crop wastes and manure, while cutting off the supply of oxygen. This process is known as pyrolysis.
The carbon in the resulting biochar is very slow to break down. This means the carbon it absorbed from the atmosphere while it was mere biomass is locked up for – potentially – hundreds or even thousands of years.
Making and using biochar can serve several purposes in addition to sequestering carbon. Adding it to soils can improve its fertility – acting as a slow-release sponge for water and nutrients – and boost crop yields The most famous example of this is the Terra Preta (“black earth”) soils in Brazil, which get their name from the charcoal that Native Indians added to the otherwise poor quality soil over 2,500 years ago.
Other benefits include biochar being a convenient way of disposing of agricultural wastes, and producing heat and biofuels as by-products during pyrolysis. Biochar has also recently been mooted as a way of helping trees resist ash dieback.
A recent study found that biochar has the potential to sequester up to 4.8bn tonnes of CO2e per year. It has “fewer disadvantages than many negative emissions technologies,” the paper says, with limited need for additional land and water. However, as adding biochar makes soil darker, it reduces its albedo, meaning the land will absorb more of the sun’s energy and warm more rapidly. In addition, one study found that charcoal might not stay in soils as long as scientists think, and instead much of it dissolves and is washed into rivers, wetlands, and eventually the oceans.
Biochar need to be economically viable---counterplan solves.
---AT: Biochar now
Diane Nazaroff 21, University of South Wales, Biochar: The waste product that could help mitigate climate change, Phys.org, 8-4-2021, https://phys.org/news/2021-08-biochar-product-mitigate-climate.html/, yao
Needs to be economically viable
Prof. Joseph, who has received an Order of Australia for his work in renewable energy and biochar, says to enable widespread adoption of biochar, it needs to be readily integrated with farming operations and be demonstrated to be economically viable.
"We've done the science, what we don't have is enough resources to educate and train people, to establish demonstrations so farmers can see the benefits of using biochar, to develop this new industry," he says.
However this is slowly changing as large corporations are purchasing carbon dioxide reduction certificates (CORC's) to offset their emissions, which is boosting the profile of biochar in Australia.
Blue Carbon
1NC – Solvency
Coastal wetland restoration solve all excess effects of warming---it’s an alt cause.
Sylvia Troost and Stacy Baez 21, Sylvia is a senior manager at the Conserving Marine Life in the US project, Baez is an officer at the Protecting Coastal Wetlands and Coral Reefs Initiatives, Coastal 'Blue Carbon': An Important Tool for Combating Climate Change, PEW research center, 9-20-2021, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2021/09/coastal-blue-carbon-an-important-tool-for-combating-climate-change/, yao
Coastal wetlands, including salt marshes, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows, are among the most productive—and threatened—ecosystems on the planet. They provide many benefits to people and nature, such as helping communities adapt to severe storms, flooding, and other climate-related threats and sequestering carbon from the water and atmosphere in their branches, leaves, roots, and underlying soils. These carbon stores are known as “blue carbon” because they are located in places where the land meets the sea. However, these wetland habitats have lost more than a third of their area over the past half-century.
Because coastal wetlands provide carbon sequestration and other important benefits, conservation and restoration of these areas is an important nature-based strategy for mitigating the effects of climate change, and helping communities internationally and across the United States adapt to a changing climate.
Coastal wetlands are among the world’s key ‘carbon sinks’
Coastal wetlands can store far greater amounts of carbon than they naturally release, which makes them one of the world’s most important natural “carbon sinks.” Research suggests that, despite occupying less than 5% of global land area and less than 2% of the ocean, they store roughly 50% of all carbon buried in ocean sediments.1
The capacity of coastal wetlands to capture and store carbon depends on a variety of chemical and physical factors. But a crucial element is the wet, low-oxygen conditions of tidally influenced and submerged soils characteristic of these ecosystems that slow the decay of plant and other organic material. During photosynthesis, plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and water and use the carbon to support their growth. When the plants die or shed old leaves or roots, the carbon in that decaying organic matter becomes locked in the soils. Healthy coastal wetlands can keep that carbon stored away for millennia, providing a natural way to prevent it from being released into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.2
However, when coastal ecosystems degrade, those vast stores are released in the form of three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.3 Worldwide, an estimated 450 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—equivalent to more than 97 million cars’ worth—is emitted from the destruction of coastal wetlands each year, accelerating planetary warming and climate change.4
Because protection and restoration of coastal wetlands can substantially contribute to achieving climate mitigation a

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