Organic farms as good as jungle, prairie, and coral reef at storing extra CO 2?  I think so.

Where to find an article  on how conversion to organic agriculture would restore depleted soil to act as a carbon sink.  As it did before being converted to chemical agriculture.

The key question?  How much carbon is stored in healthy organic soil?  Chemical ag destroyed soil must be near zero.

With the huge land area devoted to agriculture could this  reverse global climate disaster all on its own?

If one thinks of photosynthesis as nature's main mechanism to restore the greenhouse gas atmospheric balance to pre-human created combustion related catastrophic change, then that huge land area as a carbon sink might just be the difference that saves us, along with renewable energy replacing fossil, chemical fuel farming, and nuclear.

Prairie soil is 58% stored carbon, according to a Canadian study  http://www.agr.gc.ca/pfra/pub/pallande.pdf   

 In a natural prairie layer after layer of soil can accumulate over time.  Just how much carbon can this natural soil store.  Or say crop land where organic soil was fed 90% of the biomass of the crop  (return  the hay, manure, cornstaks, all back in.).

Could it  be enough to swing the carbon balance a few percentage points, maybe make a crucial difference?  We are talking only slight rises in average temperature over decades.  And huge areas of the earth's surface that could store carbon.  The healthy soil would also increase agricultural efficiency, decrease land area needed, and improve the quality and lower the chemical toxicity of food.

New water management policy could really help this effort.  In order to restore the wetlands and aquifers that farming depends upon, a new sort of dam and levy system on river systems needs to be used.

Many areas drained for agriculture and protected by levees need to become wetlands again.  With locks built into levees to let flood waters into these areas and then later let them drain back into the river.  Residents can have homes built on concrete barge foundations to cope with flooding as they are doing in the Netherlands.

The wetlands restore the aquifers pumped dry and polluted by chemical agrictlture.  Wind pumps can even pump the excess water up into higher and higher wetland areas to bring water to regions that now pump rivers dry, like the Colorado.

Why have flooding damage in northern Caloformia and drought in southern?  This would distribute water out and increase the photosynthetic CO 2 absorption. 

Natural wetlands are a huge carbon sink.  Water is becoming a limiting factor in restoring global climate balance.

The latest news from the DeWalt power tool nano tech lithium ion battery release is that they promise 2 to 3 times the operating time over the 18 volt model.  The 18 volt model has a 2.4 amp hour battery.

So around 7 amp hours are stored in the 36 volt lithium ion battery?  If so each battery holds around 250wh.  Since each battery weighs 2.4 pounds, 7.5 kwh of storage, the equivalent energy to one gallon of gasoline, would weigh about 70 pounds.

It looks like the NIT/A123  lithium ion nano batteries may weigh in at around 70 pounds per gallon of gasoline  energy equivalent. They are now being used in a car project by Altairno.  And a similar Hitachi battery design is being used in a Subaru test vehicle.

That's 350 pounds for a 5 gallon range.  Say 200 miles in an economy car?  With the rest of the electric components at around 150 pounds, that is 500.

Remove the motor, transmission, and related items from an economy car.  Would they weigh 500 pounds?

Pretty close.  Maybe the electric version could save weight with lighter versions of easily replaced body components.  Save 100 pounds that way and the electric version will weigh and perform the same.  With a range of 200 miles.

Add another 70 pounds of batteries for a 240 mile range?  It would depend on driving habits, extension batteries could be added for longer trips.  The added weight would be well within the vehicle's cargo capacity

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/04/pem_fuel_cells.html#comment-15958076

Very hopeful comments Harvey.  I hope that Canada and the US will build a power grid corridor for wind power from the high wind speed areas of the northern great plains to meet the power needs of both countries and abandon fossil and nuclear power.

Market forces are already impelling wind power investment to such an extent that there is a shortage of wind manufacturing capacity.

I believe there is a great future in 50 mw (equivalent kwh production to a continuously operating 50 mw source) wind machines on the plains, and 100 mw floating wave/wind platforms offshore. 

These machines would be huge and harvest wind power from much greater heights where wind is steadier and has a much greater average speed (power in the wind varies with the cube of wind speed). 

By locating them in deserted remote areas and offshore out of site the NIMBY problem could be solved.  the scale would lower the cost of power produced to levels that would more than compernsate for more costly power transmission lines.

As far as storage to even out supply and demand the upgraded grid will even that out considerably and the storage capacity of batteries in 100s of millions of electric cars and homes will do the rest.

Also energy intensive industries like glass and metal recycling sand foundries are already being used to buffer demand/supply variables.  They are operated when surplus power is available and shut down during high demand and low supply conditions.

Super conducting energy storage rings are a utility scale storage technology that deserves research and development also.

As far as tar sands, oil shale, liquid fuel from coal, agribizz biofuel, nuclear power, I think all these sources are far to garmfiul and expensive to condsider practical alternatives to pursue in the future.  They ought to be abandoned as soon as possible.

We should go all renewable electric for all power needs especially trabsportation.  Air travel can still be supplied with liquid fuel from the waste stream using algae-to-fuel technology. This is what the best possible outcome looks like to me.

I also have a different take on hydropower to make it more enviro friendly.  Gates that ipen up beside a river then let excess water into wetlands, when the river flow is low the water from wetlands would flow the other wat, into the river.

Power would be produced by underwater wind mill type devices mounted in the gate structure,that would not harm fish or wildlife. 

This would control flooding, save water in wetlands that would replenish aquifers, allow fish populations to thrive where normal dams destroy them, and still provide a lot of hydropower.

This plan would actually provide far more hydropower than is now produced because it would allow far more installations than conventional dams, that are nor being built and some actually removed because of damage to fish and aquatic ecosystems.

Imagine the Mississippi with these installations all along problem flooding areas.  It would produce huge new sources of power and restore drying up and contaminated aqifers depleted by disastrous agribizz farming techniques and desert city (like Pheonix, Las Vegas, LA..)water use.

Thomas I don't think we can agree on the urgency factor involved in conversion to renewables.  Have you seen the artcles on melting permafrost release of methane? 

Unless more people heed this warning the political will to reform energy policy on a global emergency scale may not exist in time to save life as we know it on spaceship earth.