Reversing Climate Change One Step at a Time

Author: Alex Madison | Published: February 11, 2017

Carbon is the basis of all life. Plants, animals, humans and everything living is made up of the element, but carbon once combined with oxygen becomes carbon dioxide, the excess of which is the primary cause of global warming.

In fact, just recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced 2016 as the hottest year on record. As in the hottest year since modern record keeping began in 1880. 2015 and 2014 made the same record in their time.

Although President Trump has previously said global warming is a “hoax” created by China, and the climate change webpage has now been removed from the White House’s website, an overwhelming consensus of scientists disagree.

In California, a large contributor to CO2 emissions is agriculture, accounting for more than 8 percent of the emission in the state, and globally accounting for roughly 16 percent. This is due to a number of factors like tilling and the manure and gas of livestock. California being one of the leading agricultural states in the nation, took action with the passing of a climate law in July 2016 to regulate cow methane, which requires the reduction of methane emission coming from dairy farms by 40 percent by 2030.

So what are farmers doing? Or maybe the better question, who is helping these farmers understand sustainable agriculture practices and how to become part of the solution, not the problem?

This is the ambition of Torri Estrada, environmental scientist and co-founder of the Carbon Cycle Institute in Petaluma. Its mission is to stop and reverse climate change by advancing natural, science-based solutions that remove atmospheric carbon. For the Carbon Cycle Institute, it’s all about the soil.

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