Sequestering of Atmospheric Carbon through Permanent Disposal of Crop Residue

We propose the sequestering of crop residues to capture a significant fraction (26%) of the present US atmospheric carbon emission. With adequate fractions of farm waste left in and on the soil to supply nutrients and retard erosion, the bulk of the waste could be shipped at low cost, using the existing crop transport network, at a cost of $22.5 billion per year. Disposal in river deltas may ensure carbon capture for years at best. Deep ocean disposal would probably sequester carbon for millennia. Globally, roughly 20% capture of currently emitted carbon seems possible by this method. Costs are lowest for those nations already exporting grains, which have transport systems in place. The leverage of this approach comes from an acre of corn's ability to hold 400 times the carbon that human emissions deposit annually in the air above it. All such methods for pulling CO2 from the air enjoy a leverage of 2.2 over sequestering before emission, since the biosphere absorbs over half of all gross human emissions. Implementation of this proposal would not only allow the US to meet the emissions levels stipulated under the Kyoto Accord, but would permit the US to continue its current carbon emission increase of 1.5% per year for the next 9 years. Seen in the largest perspective, our current atmospheric buildup of CO2 stems from our first great invention, the discovery of fire. Given that, our eventual discovery of fossil fuel and our political short time horizons made a greenhouse problem inevitable. Perhaps we can offset our species' greenhouse effects by using our second great invention, agriculture, with some help from the wheel. Farming is the largest scale human activity, covering about 10% of the globe. Perturbing this large effect seems a wise way to affect our atmosphere, based on a simple fact: a field of corn