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Please consider Biochar production and use as a fundable climate
mitigation strategy.   
Climate Change will define our Brave New World.
The swirling power of the CO2 heat engine violently defines our
Brave New World, with portents of devastation equal only to our
human hubris, and represents a new conflagration that confronts our
comfortable assumptions of normalcy, and the patterns of daily
life.
The summer of 2012 the US confronted droughts, wildfires, and
massive storms that knocked out power, followed by heat waves. Each
repeated. Similar excesses were expressed worldwide. 
Bill Mckibben notes that 350 PPM CO2 is the first data point in
history to become a rallying cry. He offered these facts in his
July 2012 Rolling Stone article “June broke or tied 3,215
high-temperature records across the United States. That followed
the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere - the 327th
consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe
exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by
simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than
the number of stars in the universe. Meteorologists reported that
this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation - in fact,
it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the
"largest temperature departure from average of any season on
record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had
rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest
downpour in the planet's history.”
Considering the energy already loaded in our atmosphere and ready
to spring at the next tipping point, we know that at best, we face
forced adaptation. We can plan for that to some degree and we must,
but we also know that violent heat engine will express itself
erratically. The lessons of that summer are just murmurs of what’s
coming. 
The summer of 2012 tested our fragile support systems and
infrastructure, and found them wanting. Trains derailed due to
heat-distorted tracks, roads buckled due to drought parched road
base cracking, and overheated asphalt runways glued planes to the
ground. July 12th, scientists verified that 97% of the Greenland
ice surface had melted, forming continent wide pools.   
These bullet points of Inconvenient Truth are the predicted makers
of inevitable change. Each of these markers suggests a counterpoint
and demands an imperative action on our part. Nature is sending us
a message and we had better listen: we are not separate and we are
not in charge.  We must change to comply with Nature’s rules. And
the last time I checked, Nature owned physics. Our adaptation must
be informed by understanding, guided by wisdom, solved by
inspiration and built by skilled hands. It sounds like a jobs plan,
and it is. It is also our emergency preparedness plan, and our
survival plan. More importantly, this is also the path of
mitigation, actively changing our circumstance. It is what
sustainability looks like. We must feel, we must know, deeply, that
our failure would be our undoing. 
Guiding the implementation of AB32, the CARB must move quickly to
slow and reverse the impact of climate change, and use all tools
available. Biochar offers such a practical application, ready to
move actively to the field, ready to build soil and sequester
carbon, ready to filter nutrients. 
We stand ready to offer Biochar for Our Brave New World- one big
tool in a toolbox of survival responses. Reversing a 200 year
pattern of mining carbon from the ground and dumping it in the air,
we can re-mine carbon from the air through the plants that capture
it, use new clean technology to process out the carbon into its
stable, elemental form, Biochar, and store that carbon in soils.
Biochar is the “fast mitigation technology” that promises to unload
our imbalance. We can build a virtuous cycle, a positive feedback
loop with biochar from biomass, sequestered in soils, benefitting
agriculture. That benefit is demonstrated in increased water
holding capacity and nutrient holding capacity, encouraging life
and building topsoil. 
Biomass, like the solar energy that built it, is diffuse.
Similarly, technology must be scaled and deployed to match.  A
design goal here is to re-localize control of our inputs and
outputs, where local biomass creates local jobs, local soils are
built and agriculture improved. Where local carbon creates a global
response. 
Our goal at the Sonoma Biochar Initiative is to educate, advocate,
and demonstrate the value of biochar production and use to benefit
our climate and agriculture. Biochar demonstrates that not only is
our climate crisis man made, but so is our solution.
Again, let me urge you to make Biochar production and use a
fundable climate mitigation strategy.  
Thank You,
Ray Gallian, Founder and Chief Biochar Advocate
Sonoma Biochar Initiative