Health & Fitness

Dr. Mercola Interviews the Experts

This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interviews various experts on a variety of health issues. To see more expert interviews, click here.

Thomas Seyfried, Ph.D., professor of biology at Boston College, is a leading expert and researcher in the field of cancer metabolism and nutritional ketosis. His book, "Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management and Prevention of Cancer" is a foundational textbook on this topic, and in August 2016, he received the Mercola.com Game Changer Award for his work.

Here, we discuss the mechanisms of cancer and the influence of mitochondrial function, which plays a crucial role in the development and treatment of this disease. His landmark cancer theory is available as a free PDF.

Many of his views are now encapsulated in his most recent paper,¹ "Mitochondrial Substrate-Level Phosphorylation as Energy Source for Glioblastoma: Review and Hypothesis," published online December 27, 2018. He's also published a number of other papers^2,^3,⁴ on the metabolic underpinnings of cancer.

"The paper … is a review and hypothesis paper identifying the missing link in Otto Warburg's central theory," Seyfried explains. "[Warburg] defined the origin of cancer very accurately back in the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s in his work in Germany. Basically, he argued and provided data showing that all cancer cells, regardless of tissue origin, were fermenters. They fermented lactic acid from glucose as a substrate.

Even in the presence of oxygen, these cells were fermenting. This is clearly a defect in oxidative phosphorylation. The problem is that for decades, people said Warburg was wrong — mainly because we see a lot of cancer cells take up oxygen and make adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from within the mitochondria … People began to question, 'If cancer cells have normal respiration, why would they want to use glucose as a fermentable fuel?'

The whole concept became distorted … The cancer cells simply choose to ferment rather than respire. Now, of course, if you look under the electron microscope at majority of cancers, you'll see that the mitochondria are defective in a number of different ways. Their structures are abnormal. The numbers are abnormal. There are many abnormalities of mitochondria seen directly under electron microscopy. Clearly, Warburg was not wrong."

Why Biopsies Are Risky

Before we go delve into the meat of how cancer actually occurs it would be good to review a diagnostic strategy that nearly all of us are offered when confronted with a cancer diagnosis. It is vital to understand that this may not be your best strategy and that for many it would be wise to avoid the biopsy.

Seyfried warns against doing biopsies, as this procedure may actually cause the cancer to spread. A tumor is basically a group of proliferating cells in a particular part of your body. For purposes of diagnosis, a small biopsy sample will often be taken to ascertain whether the tumor is benign or malignant.

The problem is that when you stab into the cancer microenvironment to remove a part of the tissue, it creates a wound in that microenvironment that in turn elicits the invasion by macrophages and other immune cells.

If you already have an acidic microenvironment, you run the risk of causing a fusion hybridization event in that microenvironment between your macrophages and cancer stem cells (as discussed below). This could turn a potentially benign situation into a malignant one, and if the tumor is malignant, stabbing into it could make a bad situation worse.

"The question is, what is the value of doing a biopsy in the first place? We take biopsies of breast tissue to get a genomic readout of the different kinds of mutations that might be in the cells. Now, if cancer is not a genetic disease and the mutations are largely irrelevant, then it makes no sense to do that in the first place. If the tumor is benign, why would you want to stab it? If the tumor is malignant, why would you ever want to stab it?

I came to this view by reading so many articles in the literature based on brain cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, liver cancer showing how needle biopsies have led to the dissemination of these tumor cells, putting these people at risk for metastatic cancer and death," Seyfried says.

In metabolic therapy, you would not touch the tumor; you would not disturb the microenvironment. By leaving it alone, you allow the tumor to shrink and go away.

"When you start to look at this as a biological problem, many of the things that we do in cancer make no sense. We have, in brain cancer, people say, 'You have a very low-grade tumor. Let's go in and get it out.' What happens is you go in and get it out, and then the following year it turns into a glioblastoma.

How did that happen? Well, you disturbed the microenvironment. You allowed these cells that are marginally aggressive to become highly aggressive. Then you lead to the demise of the patient," Seyfried says.

"That happens significantly because it's called secondary glioblastoma arising from therapeutic attempt to manage a low-grade tumor. The same thing can happen with all these different organs. You stab breast tumors, you stab colon tumors, you run the risk of spreading the cells …

My argument is the following: If the patient has a lump, whether it's in the breast, in the colon, lung or wherever or a lesion of some sort, that should be the cue to do metabolic therapy.

Do metabolic therapy first. In all likelihood, it will shrink down and become less aggressive. Then the option becomes, 'Should we debulk completely rather than doing some sort of a biopsy?' We want to reduce the risk, because if we can catch the whole tumor completely, then we don't run the risk of spreading it …

In our procedure, you bring the body back into a very high state of metabolic balance, and then you strategically go and degrade the tumors slowly without harming the rest of the body.

Radiation, chemo and the strategies that we're using today don't do this. They're based on the gene theory of cancer that genetic mutations are causing the cell cycle to grow out of control. Well, this is not the case. Again, a lot of these toxic procedures need to be rethought, reanalyzed in my mind."

Solving the Warburg Theory's Dilemma

In biology, structure determines function. This is an evolutionarily conserved concept. So, how can mitochondria be structurally abnormal in tissue, yet have normal respiration? As Seyfried notes, this doesn't make sense. Confusion has arisen in part because many study cancer in culture, and "make profound statements and comments regarding what happens in culture," Seyfried says.

"If you look at cancer cells in culture, many of them do take in oxygen and make ATP, but at the same time, they're fermenting. This was the conundrum. They called it the Warburg Effect. They're fermenting, but many people at the same time thought their respiration was normal.

This was the main problem with Warburg's theory. But Warburg clearly said in his papers [that] it's not the fact that they take in oxygen; it's how much ATP they can generate from oxidative phosphorylation, which is the normal respiratory capacity of the mitochondria."

As explained by Seyfried, if you measure ATP and look at oxygen consumption in tumor cells, it appears they're making ATP and taking in oxygen, therefore, their respiration is assumed to be normal. However, when you look at the tissues in cancer patients, the mitochondria are abnormal.

"What I and Dr. Christos Chinopoulos from Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, who is the world-leading expert on mitochondrial physiology and biochemistry … realized [was] that the mitochondria of tumor cells are actually fermenting amino acids, glutamine in particular. They're not respiring. They're fermenting an alternative fuel, which is glutamine," Seyfried says.

Warburg's Cancer Theory Proves Correct

With this understanding, Warburg's theory can be proven correct — cancer arises from damage to the mitochondria's ability to produce energy through respiration in their electron transport chain.

The compensatory fermentation involves not only lactic acid fermentation, but also succinic acid fermentation using glutamine as a fermentable fuel. It's been known for decades that glutamine is a main fuel for many different kinds of cancers, but most people thought it was being respired, not fermented.

Seyfried and Chinopoulos' discovery confirms that cancer cells in fact have damaged respiration, and to survive, the cancer cells must use fermentation. The two most available fermentable fuels in the cancer microenvironment are glucose and glutamine. Hence, targeting glucose and glutamine is a crucial component of cancer treatment.

Without glucose and glutamine, the cancer cells will starve, as they cannot use ketones. The simplest approach to cancer then is to bring patients into therapeutic ketosis, and then strategically target the availability of glucose and glutamine.

"Basically, what we're saying [is] that mitochondrial substrate-level phosphorylation is a non-oxidative metabolism mechanism inside the mitochondria that would generate significant amounts of energy without oxidative phosphorylation," Seyfried says.

Genetic Mutations Are Not the Cause of Cancer

According to Seyfried, mitochondrial dysfunction is at the heart of nearly every type of cancer. Unfortunately, few oncologists have this understanding and many still believe cancer is the result of genetic defects. However, nuclear transfer experiments clearly show cancer cannot be a genetic disease.

"There's been no rational scientific argument that I have seen, to discredit the multitude of evidence showing that the [genetic] mutations are not the drivers but the effects [of mitochondrial dysfunction]," Seyfried says.

"As a matter of fact, there's new information now where people are finding so-called genetic drivers of cancer expressed and present in normal cells, normal skin and also esophagus … This is another [issue] — how you get these so-called driver mutations in normal tissues. We're also finding some cancers that have no mutations, yet, they're fermenting and growing out of control.

There are a number of new observations coming out that challenge the concept that cancer is a genetic disease. And once you realize that it's not a genetic disease, then you have to seriously question the majority of therapies being used to manage the disease. This [helps] explain [why] we have 1,600 people a day dying from cancer in the United States.

Why do we have such an epidemic of suffering and death when we have been studying this disease for decades? Well, if you look at the massive amounts of scientific papers being written on cancer, you'll often find that they're structured around gene defects.

What I'm saying is that if cancer is not a genetic disease and the mutations are downstream epiphenomena, why would the field continue to focus on things that are mostly irrelevant to the nature of the disease? What I'm saying is very devastating, because I'm telling the majority of the people in the field that they're basically wasting their time …

I think we can drop the death rate of this disease by about 50% in 10 years if cancer is treated as a mitochondrial metabolic disease, targeting fermentable fuels rather than using toxic therapies that are focused on downstream effects.

Radiation is designed to stop DNA replication. DNA replication requires energy. If you pull the plug on their fermentable fuels, they're not going to be able to replicate anyway … All of the things that we're doing to treat cancer is basically approaching the disease from a misunderstanding of the biology …

We know viruses can cause cancer. We know radiation causes cancer. We know carcinogens cause cancer. We know intermittent hypoxia causes cancer. We know systemic inflammation causes cancer. We know just getting older puts you at risk for more cancer.

We know there are inherited mutations in the genome that can cause cancer. But how are all these things linked through a common pathophysiological mechanism? The common pathophysiological mechanism is damaged through the structure and function of the mitochondria.

Every one of the issues … including inherited mutations, damage the respiration of a particular population of cells in a tissue. You look at the breast cancer gene (BRCA 1), for example. People will say, 'Cancer must be a genetic disease because you inherit a mutation that causes the disease.'

You only get the disease if that mutation disrupts the function of the mitochondria. Fifty percent of women who carry the mutation never get cancer or breast cancer because the mutation, for some reason, did not damage the mitochondria in that person."

So, to summarize, the true origin of cancer is damage to the respiratory function of the mitochondria, triggering compensatory fermentation, which is run by oncogenes. Oncogenes play a role by facilitating the entry of glucose and glutamine into the cell to replace oxidative phosphorylation.

Why and How Cancer Spreads

Seyfried also has a very different view on the biology of metastasis (the spread of cancer). He explains:

"We've looked at cancer stem cells in a number of our preclinical models … These guys grow like crazy in place. The tumor just keeps expanding, but it doesn't spread. It doesn't spread into the bloodstream or metastasize to various organs.

We discovered a very unusual cancer 20 years ago. It took us 10 to 15 years to figure out what it was. You can put a few of these cells anywhere in the mouse's body and within three to four weeks, this mouse is full of metastatic cancer. It made the cover of the International Journal of Cancer, when we published this back in 2008, but we had worked on the problem for years.

We couldn't figure out what it was that made these cells so incredibly metastatic. We found out that once we identified the biology of the cell, it turned out [it has] many characteristics in common with the macrophage, which is one of the most powerful immune cells in our body.

We said, 'Wow. Is this unique only to this kind of cell or do metastatic cancers in humans also express characteristics of macrophages?' We looked and we found that almost every major cancer that metastasizes has characteristics of macrophages. Then we said, 'Well, how could this possibly happen? Is it coming from the macrophage?'

A number of scientists ... have all clearly shown that there is some fusion hybridization character going on. In other words, macrophages, our wound-healing cells, they come into a microenvironment where you might find many proliferating neoplastic stem cells, but they don't have the capacity to metastasize.

It's only when the macrophages fuse with these stem cells that you have a dysregulated energy metabolism coming in this hybrid cell. This hybrid cell now has characteristics of both stem cells and macrophages.

The stem cell is not genetically equipped to enter and exit tissue. The macrophage, as a normal cell of your body, is genetically equipped to enter and exit tissue and live in the bloodstream. They're very strongly immunosuppressive. These are all characteristics of metastatic cancer."

Metastatic Cancer Is a Hybrid Cell Combination

According to Seyfried, metastatic cancer cells are essentially a hybrid, a mix of an immune system cell and a dysregulated stem cell, the latter of which could originate from a disorganized epithelial cell or something similar. In short, it's a hybrid cell with macrophage characteristics.

Macrophages are essential for wound healing and part of our primary defense system against bacterial infections. They live both in the bloodstream and in tissues, and can go anywhere in the body. When an injury or infection occurs, they immediately move in to protect the tissue.

"The metastatic cancer cell has many of those same properties," Seyfried explains, "But the energy and the function of the cell is completely dysregulated, so it proliferates like crazy but has the capacity to move and spread through the body, so it's a corrupted macrophage. We call it a rogue macrophage."

Like macrophages, metastatic cancer cells can also survive in hypoxic environments, which is why most angiogenic therapies are ineffective against metastatic cancer.

So, what do these metastatic hybrid cells need to survive? Both macrophages and immune cells are major glutamine consumers, and according to Seyfried, you can effectively kill metastatic cells by targeting glutamine.

Conventional Cancer Treatments Are Unnecessarily Deadly

However, it must be done in such a way so as to not harm the normal macrophages and the normal immune cells. In other words, it must be strategic. For this reason, Seyfried developed a "press-pulse therapy" for cancer, which allows the patient to maintain normal immune system function, while at the same time targeting the corrupted immune cells — the macrophage fusion hybrid metastatic cells — as well as inflammation.

"The therapies we are using to attempt to kill these [metastatic] cells put us at risk for having the cells survive and kill us. You can control these cells for a short period of time, but they can hunker down and enter into some sort of a slightly dormant state, but they reappear.

People say, 'Oh, these tumor cells are so nifty and smart they can come back at you.' The problem is you've never really challenged them on their very existence, which is they depend on fermentation to survive. If you don't target their fermentation, they're going to continue to survive and come back at you.

Many of the therapies that we use — radiation, chemo and some of these other procedures — are not really going after the heart of the problem. That oftentimes put you at risk for the recurrence of the disease. Your body is already seriously weakened by the toxic treatments. And in the battle, you lose. If you are fortunate enough to survive … your body is still beat up.

You have now put your [body] at risk for other kinds of maladies … Why are we using such toxic therapies to kill a cell when we know what its weaknesses are? These are the paradigm changes that will have to occur as we move into the new era of managing cancer in a logical way."

A Strategic Approach to Killing Cancer Cells

To properly address cancer, then, you need to clean up the microenvironment, because the microenvironment will strategically kill cells that are dependent on fermentation while enhancing cells that aren't. At the same time, the microenvironment will also reduce inflammation.

"You also have to be very careful not to kill your normal and healthy immune cells, because they need glutamine too," Seyfried says. "What we find is that when we strategically attack the tumor this way, it turns out that our immune cells are paralyzed.

The cancer cells are killed, but the normal immune cells are paralyzed. They're not dying, they're just not doing their job. What we do is we back off the therapy a little; allow the normal immune cells to regain their biological capacity, pick up dead corpses, heal the microenvironment, and then we go after the cancer cells again.

It's a graded response, knowing the biology of the normal cells and the abnormal biology of the tumor cells. This is a beautiful strategy. Once people know how you can play one group of cells off another, and how you can strategically kill one group of cells without harming the other cells, it really becomes a precision mechanism for eliminating tumor cells without harming the rest of the body.

You don't need to be poisoned and irradiated. You just have to know how to use these procedures to strategically kill the cells. Protecting normal macrophages is part of the strategic process. Killing the corrupted ones is part of the strategic process. Again, you have to put all of these together in a very logical path. Otherwise, you're not going to get the level of success that we should be getting."

The Press-Pulse Strategy

This strategy is what Seyfried calls "press-pulse treatment," and essentially involves restricting the fermentable fuels — glucose and glutamine — in a cyclical fashion to avoid causing damage to normal cells and tissues. Glucose is effectively restricted through a ketogenic diet. Restricting glutamine is slightly trickier.

The press-pulse strategy was developed from the concept of press-pulse in the field of the paleobiology. A "press" was some chronic stress on populations, killing off large numbers, but not everything, because some organisms can adapt to stress. The "pulse" refers to some catastrophic event.

The simultaneous occurrence of these two unlikely events led to the mass extinction of almost all organisms that existed on the planet. This was a cyclic event over many hundreds of millions of years. The geological records show evidence for this press-pulse extinction phenomenon.

"What we simply did was take that concept and say, 'Let's chronically stress the tumor cells.' They need glucose. You can probably kill a significant number of tumor cells by just stressing their glucose. That's the press. The press is different ways to lower blood sugar. You put that chronic stress on top of the population either by restricted ketogenic diets [or] therapeutic fasting. There are a lot of ways that you can do this.

Also, emotional stress reduction. People are freaked out because they have cancer, therefore their corticoid steroids are elevated, which elevates blood sugar. Using various forms of stress management, moderate exercise — all of these will lower blood sugar and contribute to a chronic press and stress on the cancer cells.

However, you're not going to kill all cancer cells if you just take away glucose. Because the other fuel that's keeping the beast alive is the glutamine. We have to pulse, because we can't use a press for glutamine targeting, because then you're going to kill your normal immune cells or impair them, and they are needed for the eventual resolution of the disease.

What we're going to do is we're going to pulse various drugs. We don't have a diet system that will target glutamine. Glutamine is everywhere. It's the most abundant amino acid in your body … But you have to use [the drugs] very strategically; otherwise they can harm our normal immune system and then be counterproductive ...

I think that once we understand how we can target effectively glutamine without harming our normal immune cells … this is the strategy that will make most of these other therapies obsolete ... It's cost-effective and non-toxic and it will work very well.

But we're still at the very beginning of this. We need to continue to develop the doses, timing and scheduling of those drugs that are most effective in targeting glutamine that can be done without harming the rest of the cells in our body."

If you would like to support Dr. Seyfried's research, please consider making a donation to the "Foundation For Metabolic Cancer Therapies." The donation tag is on the top row of the of the foundation site. This Foundation is dedicated to supporting Dr. Seyfried's studies using metabolic therapy for cancer management with 100% of the donated funds going directly to research on metabolic therapy for cancer.

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How Biochar Is Triggering a New Industrial Revolution

In this interview, Albert Bates, director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology and author of "Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth," discusses how biochar can transform agriculture while simultaneously normalize our climate.

Biochar also has a wide range of other industrial uses that can allow us to radically reduce carbon in our atmosphere. Many believe climate change is a fabrication concocted by political scientists with a vested interest.

But the reality is, we have changed our world with pollution and destructive agricultural practices that are devastating the ecosystem and influencing our global weather patterns. The good news is, adding biochar to soil and building materials of all kinds is a simple and inexpensive strategy that can remediate much of this damage.

Moments of Revelation

Bates began his investigation into this issue while working as an attorney. He explains:

"I was doing environmental law and represented a group of plaintiffs who were suing a chemical company for polluting a local water supply … an aquifer, which is federally protected. It was kind of a slam-dunk case.

But the chemical company came into court and argued that there's plenty of water in Tennessee. We don't need to be protecting sources that are 1 kilometer underground. I brought in experts to show climate change is going to change the amount of water that we need in the future.

Population growth is going to change the amount of water we need. We really should be protecting those sources … I won the case, but I lost my nerve. I began to [think], 'Oh my gosh. What's going to happen here on Earth?' … I had this revelation at that time. I left the practice of law and went off and became a mushroom farmer …

It was a time for me to just take stock, to sit back and to be with my forest and to think about things and not be in the conflict zone until I'd sorted it out … Eventually I became more involved with permaculture. I became a permaculture instructor.

That took me to a conference on permaculture in Brazil. While there, I [saw] what they call the 'terra preta de indio' … the Amazonian dark earths. This was a mystery that had been around for 400 years.

How did people living at the equator make these rich, deep black soils that go meters deep into the ground, when, really, everywhere you look that's at that latitude, it's a two-season system with a rainy season and a dry season?

The ground doesn't store the nutrients. The plants do. When a plant dies, it's immediately taken back up into the living biomass. There's really no soil wealth like we have in the temperate zones. So how did it happen that they have this rich, deep black soil in the Amazon?

The answer was that they had made it. They had made that fertile soil … I had to understand, 'How does this work? How did you actually build soils?' It turns out the secret ingredient was charcoal … they had created a structure in the soil. It wasn't chemistry that was making the fertility. It was biology. That hard, mineralized carbon became a habitat for soil microbes."

The Importance of Soil Biology

As explained by Bates, soil microbes create what you might think of as a coral reef in the soil — a highly fertile area of water storage, air storage and nutrient storage that can nourish a wide variety of soil microbes. This soil biology makes for very nutrient-dense plants. That, in turn, allowed large civilizations to flourish in the Amazon.

The charcoal also takes carbon from the atmosphere, sequestering it in the earth for long periods of time — thousands of years, typically, provided you don't use destructive agricultural processes such as tilling. So, this carbon sequestration benefits not only soils and plants but also the atmosphere.

"Right now, at this point in time, we really need [carbon sequestration] for another reason; we need to have that timeout to give us some time to slow our emissions down, to go carbon-neutral.

This is what you might call carbon-negative or a drawdown effect of carbon actually leaving the atmosphere, leaving the ocean and coming back into the land, where it had been, as fossil fuels, before."

How Biochar Is Created

Now, a simple wood fire is not sufficient, as this will merely create ash, which doesn't create the carbon structure needed. What you need to do is burn the biomass without oxygen. This creates a type of charcoal typically referred to as biochar.

"Biochar is distinguished from charcoal," Bates explains. "Every fire goes through two stages. The first stage is you warm up the material or maybe strike a match and the phosphor in the end creates the flame. That heats up the match for just a moment, and then you get the burning, the smoke and the flame.

As it begins to burn down the match, it leaves behind a charcoal stick. That's the first phase of the fire. That's carbonization. That's actually the burning of the gases … Each [gas has] its own kindling temperature. The last to go would be carbon. Finally, what happens is the carbon oxidizes and joins with oxygen.

It turns into CO₂ or CO. As that carbon stick on the end of the match turns into ash, that's the second stage of the fire. In the process of making charcoal — I'll distinguish that from biochar in a second — the process is to stop it before it oxidizes.

The way you do that is to deprive the fire of oxygen … So, you're baking at the first stage. You're burning off the gases … And then you're holding that last stage, the hard carbon stage, in a permanent condition and not letting it go to ash and not creating smoke. That's the pyrolysis process. That's the carbonization …

If you look at it under a microscope, you see that it's got all of these pores. Some of that is the original plant structure and some of that is the volatile gases. As they explode, they cratered the sides of the original vessels of the plant and left behind the skeletal structure …

What you get there is this ability to absorb and adhere things. It's got a cation exchange. It's kind of magnetic in the way that it sticks things to its walls. It's particularly strong in sticking nitrogen [and] sulfur …"

Biochar for Detox and Cattle Feed

The ability to absorb is what makes activated charcoal and biochar so effective for detoxification. Caution needs to be used when taken internally, as it will chelate beneficial minerals as well. I like to take it at least one hour before or two hours after a meal.

But it's really inexpensive and something, I think, most people can benefit from, considering it's nearly impossible these days to avoid toxic chemical exposures. You need some type of detoxification agent to help eliminate some of these toxins. Biochar can be an effective tool for that. Biochar is also used to great benefit in livestock. When you add biochar to the animals' diet, it helps eliminate the need for antibiotics.

"It's especially significant in cattle," Bates says. "Cows have enteric digestion. They've got their rumen. They're doing fermentation in their stomachs. You've got this process of fermentation, which is a microbial soup. It's bacterially active ferment.

If you can add a little bit of biochar to that, it actually improves it the same way it improves the microbial habitant in soil. It becomes that coral-reef effect within the gut of the animal … Their rumen gets really good. The antibiotic need diminishes to zero. They then add weight faster.

They have a higher efficiency of feed conversion, so less food puts on more weight or produces more milk than it had before they started supplementing 1% to 2% biochar into their diet. Not only that, when it comes out the back end of the animal, first off, you're getting about 30% less methane production … when you add biochar to the diet at 1%.

But now, that manure is now rich in biochar, and so, it's going to compost about one-third or a quarter faster than normal composting operations would take. It scavenges nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide. It takes those elements that would become greenhouse gases in the composting process, holds them, uses them and puts them back into what's the final product that's going into the soil.

A cow that's been grazed in an open pasture and is being fed biochar as a supplement is fertilizing that pasture to the point where the roots of the grasses grow deeper and thicker. The grasses come up faster and more nutrient-dense, so that, again, reduces the cattle feed requirement.

You can graze more cattle on the same amount with faster rotations because of this. And then you have the effect of the cattle — the pasture recovering [faster] and being able to resist floods and droughts. It just continues to get better year after year because the biochar is slowly being added to the soil from the cow. So, you've got this beneficial loop."

In his book, Bates features an Australian farmer, Doug Powell, who fed his cows biochar and added large amounts of dung beetles to his fields. The beetles roll up balls of manure and bring them underground. In the first year, he increased profits by $20,000 simply by bringing more biochar into the ground. This is just one innovative solution offered in "Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth."

Climate in Crisis

Bates has investigated the predicted effects of 1, 2 or 3 degrees Celsius of warming. In his 1990 book, "Climate in Crisis," Bates made some predictions that are now coming to pass.

"Right now, we're seeing this breakdown of the polar vortex … We used to have just this circular motion around the pulse of the Jetstream. The North Pole, in particular, had this very even circular motion. It had a little bit of waves in it.

We get cold fronts every now and then coming down to the Northern United States. But for the most part, it was a fairly even average distribution. Then, starting about two to three years ago, we had what we call Rossby Waves.

They may begin to break and dive deep into the continent and at the same time drive heat far up into the Arctic. That's had the effect of accelerating the melting of the Arctic, the Greenland ice [and] Siberian permafrost, which is an accelerant, because the permafrost is full of methane …

That's now being released to the atmosphere. This year we're seeing forest fires above the Arctic Circle … There are methane fires coming out along the coastlines. We're seeing this rapid melting of Greenland and of the Arctic …

If you look at a map today, right now, where is the temperature at this moment in the world? You will see it's really hot in Greenland. And then just right next to that, in Scandinavia and the Northwestern corner of Russia, it's extremely cold. [In] China it's extremely hot.

And then you go a little bit farther around and you find that it's hot in Southern Alaska. Now we're starting to see this alternating heat and cold as that big wave motion is happening from the pole to the equator.

That's climate weirding. It's making it extremely difficult for farmers to do normal crops, to predict when's the cold going to be too extreme or when they're going to get a drought.

They're actually getting these enormous swings of high temperatures and then cold temperatures, and then high temperatures and then cold temperatures. We hit records all across Europe last week: 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Paris. The next day, the Tour de France stage had to be cancelled because of ice, snow and slush on the roadway.

That's what I'm talking about. It's these extremes that are very challenging. When I start to look for solutions, I have to say it's about trees. It's about forests. It's about more photosynthesis."

Again, even if you don't believe in climate change, the solutions Bates offers are good for the planet no matter what. There is absolutely no downside to using them.

It's going to lower pollution levels (and who doesn't want cleaner air, water and soil?), improve the quality and nutrient density of crops, reduce chemical runoff and thus reduce toxic algae growth in our oceans. These strategies are also economically beneficial, so there's a significant profit motive as well.

Novel Uses for Charcoal

Aside from adding biochar to farm fields, there are myriad other uses. As noted by Bates, you can add it to steel, concrete, asphalt, buildings, bridges, roads and tunnels.

"Let's start putting carbon into everything. Let's start using more wood. Let's start having more of a wooden kind of a vernacular to our way of living.

Actually, it's very beautiful and it has benefits, like it makes the cement stronger. It makes the asphalt less likely to form potholes. There are all these benefits that you get when you start to experiment with these materials," he says.

"We've had this problem in the scientific community, which was looking for ways to go beyond just emissions reductions and actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere. They found limits to this biochar strategy …

How many trees would you have to have, or how much waste material from one source or another would you have to have in order to make enough biochar to make a difference, and then where would you put that biochar? They figured maybe 2 billion tons a year could be put into agriculture and into making fertilizers. That's not enough.

We need to get about 50 billion tons out of the atmosphere every year because we're putting 40 billion tons up there. We need to take out what we're putting up there and another quarter or so in order to start bringing down the concentrations in the atmosphere, in order to restore the climate back to normal.

We need to have an active drawdown system. How do you do that? My co-author, Kathleen Draper, and I began to look at, 'Where can we store biochar besides agriculture?' We started to look at biochar plastics. I could actually make a polymer using biochar that is comparable to the kind of polymers that you would use to make roofing tiles, surfboards, boats or any number of things.

It's hard. It's durable. It's going to be there but it's also taking carbon out of the atmosphere. I looked at cement. If you take normal cement and replace part of the sand that's in the cement, if you can replace up to maybe 8%, you're not reducing the strength of the concrete. The first 2% actually increases the strength.

There's no reason for a cement maker not to be replacing sand with biochar. The cost is comparable and the price of sand is going up and the price of biochar is coming down. So, let's make cement with a biochar content …

You're increasing the strength. You're increasing the crack resistance, the anti-spalling, which is heat resistance. You're increasing the tensile strength and the compressive strength. All of that just by changing out sand for biochar."

Biochar Provides EMF Shielding

Another reason for using biochar in building materials is the fact that the carbon acts as an electromagnetic field (EMF) shield, thus insulating you from EMFs from the environment. It also intercepts Wi-Fi and blocks infrared. In essence, it's an effective solution for creating a Faraday cage, radically reducing the amounts of radiofrequencies that are entering your home environment from the outside.

"I go around looking at electromagnetic sources with my meter. I get spikes near the electrical boxes. I think it would be so easy if the plastics that make those circuit boxes or those wall-framing sockets were just made of this kind of material instead of just plain plastic. They could be blocking that electric spectrum from entering the room, just that simply," Bates says.

Biomass Sources

Now, we wouldn't necessarily want to burn down our forests to create biochar, and the good news is we don't need to. Bates cites an Australian study that looked at novel sources for biochar. Two sources, chicken litter and paper mill waste, could provide biochar into the indefinite future for Australia, the paper found.

Other sources include municipal sewage or biosolids, industrial pallets, textile scraps, sawdust and scrap wood from furniture factories. At present, only 20% or so of the waste stream is being utilized. According to Bates, it's large enough that we don't need to cut down trees to make biochar.

"You can be making biochar on a local scale, community scale, from small reactors, close to source; identifying waste streams ahead of time and then tapping those to make your biochar with.

If it's a little bit contaminated … you wouldn't want that in your garden. But you could use it for a cement. You could put it into the roadways. If you add it to asphalt, it reduces a number of potholes. It makes the highway more flexible. The cars get better mileage both on gasoline and on the tires.

You actually have this beneficial effect from adding it to asphalt. All of those things are possible. You could use those waste streams that are contaminated and put it into those products that don't have to be as pure as your food."

China Leads the Way in Biochar Innovation

After finishing his book (which is why this is not in there), Bates went to China, where he discovered biochar has become a new industrial revolution. China, Bates says, is far ahead of everyone else in this area, installing biochar reactors in areas where suitable waste streams are located.

They get rid of the waste and create biochar that is 15% more effective than conventional fertilizers yet costs less. Bates explains:

"In China, they went from small scale field trials to building the first prototype large reactors — rotary kilns that are processing thousands of tons a day — to … deploying six of them in strategic places around the country. And then the next year, going to 24. And then this year, going to 200. Next year, they're going to put it out on the new Silk Road to India, Africa and so on.

These are like plug-and-play. You just drop the reactor on the site where you've got a lot of biomass coming in from waste. You put it back into those fields and [they become] drought-resistant and flood-resistant. You get better yields and the price is less than fertilizer …

They're building ecovillages. They want to build 100 ecovillages in five years. These are villages that will be net draw down. They'll be taking more carbon out the atmosphere. They'll be self-sufficient in food and clean water and education and so forth within the village.

For the farmers who are moving to those villages, it's a better life. It's a better system than they had before. They provide the labor that's needed to work in those large biochar-producing units that they're putting in."

Sweden Has Embraced Biochar-Infused Pavement Materials

Sweden is also taking advantage of biochar technology, placing biochar underneath pavement and using biochar-infused streets and sidewalks. A small-scale test showed it massively improved tree growth and helped clean water supplies.

According to Bates, Stockholm had originally planned to meet its biochar needs using municipal wastes. They soon realized they needed more, so Finland is now producing biochar for them as well. Sweden reinvented a 200-year-old pavement recipe using gravel and wood oil instead of tar, and biochar (up to 20%) instead of sand. The water-cleansing effect is particularly noteworthy.

"Just the fact that the water itself is being cleaned from the streets and it goes back to the oceans clean — this is very important, especially when you think about microplastics and all of that kind of contaminants that you put into the environment all the time. That's being cleaned too. None of that is reaching the ocean," Bates says.

Activating the Biochar

An important point not to be overlooked is that when you're using biochar for agricultural purposes, you first need to charge or activate it before you put it into the soil. (It does not need to be activated when used in building materials.) As explained by Bates, the "Four M's" to remember are:¹

Moisten — Moisture must be added to the biochar. Fresh from the kiln, biochar is bone dry and hydrophobic (water-repelling). To make it retain water and support microbes, it needs to be made hydrophilic (water-absorbing) again, and this is done by adding sufficient amounts of water, without making it waterlogged. Typically, water is added to the kiln to cool it and stop the fire.
Micronize — Next, the biochar must be broken down into a smaller size through crushing, grinding and screening. Smaller particle sizes increase the surface area and allows the biochar to retain more water and allows for greater ion penetration.
Mineralize — Lastly, you need to mineralize it, meaning you need to add to it the minerals your garden needs, such as rock powder or sea minerals. That will provide the microbes' the nourishment they need to thrive. It will also add to the plant stores in your garden, allowing your plants to thrive.
Microbial inoculation — Next, you want to add microbes, fungi, bacteria and nonparasitic nematodes. These are aerobic bacteria that can be added through a compost tea. Alternatively, you can add the biochar to your compost pile.

When a plant is deficient in a trace mineral, say magnesium, the exudates that comes out from its roots will trigger a signal through the fungal network that this plant needs more magnesium.

If you have activated biochar in the soil at the root zone, there's automatic storage of minerals there. When there's too much of a given mineral, it's stored in the biochar's reef-like structure, and when something is needed, it's taken from that storage and transferred to the plant by nematodes. It is this dynamic structure of the biochar that allows for enormous plant growth.

Adding activated biochar can quadruple plant growth in the first year, Bates says. But you have to charge it properly. If the biochar is not activated, it will store nutrients but not release them to the plant, which can have the opposite effect that you're looking for.

More Information

For entrepreneurs, biochar now offers opportunities on par with those available at the beginning of the industrial revolution. "That kind of scale of change is underway," Bates says. "It's an enormous opportunity for microenterprise, for new businesses, for whole new industries to start."

One place to find opportunities is to visit the International Biochar Initiative (IBI) website.² "On any given day, you're going to find new material there and webinars and opportunities to learn about some of these new industries," Bates says. If any of this has struck a chord in you, you'll also want to pick up a copy of his book, "Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth."

The U.S. Biochar Initiative also holds an annual conference in North America,³ and the International Biochar Initiative has an international conference.⁴ There are also a number of other biochar conferences and symposiums where you can learn a lot in a very short amount of time.

Another valuable resource is the Innovations In Biochar website — a joint creation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service. It includes downloadable references such as how to build a kiln, how to use biochar in barns and compost piles, and much more.

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