Scientists Propose Turning Carbon Pollution Into Baking Soda and Storing it In Oceans (cnn.com) 107
Slashdot reader beforewisdom shared this report from CNN:
Scientists have set out a way to suck planet-heating carbon pollution from the air, turn it into sodium bicarbonate and store it in oceans, according to a new paper. The technique could be up to three times more efficient than current carbon capture technology, say the authors of the study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances....
The team have used copper to modify the absorbent material used in direct air capture. The result is an absorbent "which can remove CO2 from the atmosphere at ultra-dilute concentration at a capacity which is two to three times greater than existing absorbents," Arup SenGupta, a professor at Lehigh University and a study author, told CNN. This material can be produced easily and cheaply and would help drive down the costs of direct air capture, he added. Once the carbon dioxide is captured, it can then be turned into sodium bicarbonate — baking soda — using seawater and released into the ocean at a small concentration.
The oceans "are infinite sinks," SenGupta said. "If you put all the CO2 from the atmosphere, emitted every day — or every year — into the ocean, the increase in concentration would be very, very minor," he said. SenGupta's idea is that direct air capture plants can be located offshore, giving them access to abundant amounts of seawater for the process.
Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study, told CNN that the chemistry was "novel and elegant." The process is a modification of one we already know, he said, "which is easier to understand, scale-up and develop than something totally new."
The team have used copper to modify the absorbent material used in direct air capture. The result is an absorbent "which can remove CO2 from the atmosphere at ultra-dilute concentration at a capacity which is two to three times greater than existing absorbents," Arup SenGupta, a professor at Lehigh University and a study author, told CNN. This material can be produced easily and cheaply and would help drive down the costs of direct air capture, he added. Once the carbon dioxide is captured, it can then be turned into sodium bicarbonate — baking soda — using seawater and released into the ocean at a small concentration.
The oceans "are infinite sinks," SenGupta said. "If you put all the CO2 from the atmosphere, emitted every day — or every year — into the ocean, the increase in concentration would be very, very minor," he said. SenGupta's idea is that direct air capture plants can be located offshore, giving them access to abundant amounts of seawater for the process.
Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study, told CNN that the chemistry was "novel and elegant." The process is a modification of one we already know, he said, "which is easier to understand, scale-up and develop than something totally new."
Where's the energy to do this going to come from? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The team have used copper to modify the absorbent material used in direct air capture.
Breaking News - Copper is not free and requires extensive mining activities, all of which generate more carbon pollution in the process.
Carbon capture is stupid, unworkable and a gigantic waste of money. Like so many other people, Professor Apu doesn't seem to understand just how big the earth's atmosphere is. Trying to remove carbon from the air is like removing a few drops of water from the ocean.
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Re:Where's the energy to do this going to come fro (Score:4, Informative)
RTFA
The demo plant is in Iceland and uses geothermal power. Iceland is a unique location that has all of the required elements, not clear how easy this is to replicate elsewhere.
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https://climeworks.com/roadmap... [climeworks.com]
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Sure, but... trying to suck CO2 out of the air with little machines is like trying to bail out the ocean with a thimble.
Re: Where's the energy to do this going to come fr (Score:2)
We've added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere with little machines to create this situation, but using little machines to remove it is crazy somehow?
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Right now there are billions of little machines emitting CO2 to the atmosphere (e.g. 1.5 billion cars, trucks and buses, and that's only 21% of human emissions) so you will need on the order of at least millions of little machines to clean that up. Or at minimum many thousands of enormously big "CO2 vacuum" machines.
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I suppose it is but one approach. New technology takes some time to mature and improve.
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Sure, but... trying to suck CO2 out of the air with little machines is like trying to bail out the ocean with a thimble.
Good point, also anything I can do to reduce my "carbon footprint" is also trying to bail out the ocean with a thimble. Furthermore if the entire US were zero emission it would still be trying to bail out the ocean with a thimble. So fuck it we wont do anything.
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SenGupta's idea is that direct air capture plants can be located offshore
Solar, wind, tidal, and possibly even deep-water heat pump power are all right there and cost only the materials and maintenance to keep them running. It's hard to find a location with more green energy options than the ocean.
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I'm sorry but I really LIKE being warm in the winter, cool in the summer. I like being able to travel quickly and comfortably at whatever time I want in my own personal car. Further I need to be able to go whatever distance I like by making 10 minute fuel stops. Indeed I just drove 16 hours to a funeral because there was no flights available. That same trip in any sort of Electric car would have taken 3 days.
I don't mind being green and I don't mind being efficient, but the solution must work at least as we
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I just drove 16 hours to a funeral because there was no flights available. That same trip in any sort of Electric car would have taken 3 days.
What a load of horseshit! Try to make your lies sound at least a little bit plausible.
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Yes, those first cars were often electric, some steam and the crappiest were naphtha. Wasn't until Exon convinced the population through mis-information that it was fine to add a spoonful of lead to each gallon of gasoline, as obviously those chemical warfare experts were full of shit about lead being harmful, proved by them not using it in chemical warfare in WWI and the starter motor was invented that gasoline powered cars were practical. There was a large price paid by the population from that lead addit
Re: Where's the energy to do this going to come fr (Score:1)
Typical libertarian myopia, you're the equivalent of an old man who beats his horse mercilessly even after it's dead. Your demand for entitled conveniences wont count for shit if crops fail and climate refugees shift from being cheap agricultural labor to become armed revolutionaries. The funerals won't be fourteen hours away anymore.
Remember the old aphorism: "Nature bats last."
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Wasn't there a story a few days ago that was explicating advocating the opposite? That pulling the carbon out of the ocean was more energy efficient than pulling it from the air BECAUSE the ocean is such a great carbon sink?
At any rate, I'm torn. I want to see a real solution to climate change, but I know there won't be one, not without a widespread curbing of using oil as fuel.
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Carbon dioxide in water != sodium bicarbonate in the water.
Acidification. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Acidification. (Score:4, Interesting)
You are correct. However OP is also correct, increased atmospheric CO2 (and other reasons, IIRC) is increasing the acidity of the ocean.. And then, adding baking soda to acidic water will result in the release CO2, thus completing the circle of absurdity.
Carbon sequestration from the atmosphere is about as helpful plastics recycling, and it will probably take twice as long to reach any useful scale as it will to get commodity fusion power.
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Carbon sequestration from the atmosphere is about as helpful plastics recycling, and it will probably take twice as long to reach any useful scale as it will to get commodity fusion power.
So what's your point?
Re:Acidification. (Score:5, Informative)
The point - if I'm reading the analogy to plastics recycling correctly - is that it absolves the industries responsible for the problem from public backlash while not addressing the problem even the tiniest bit.
Carbon capture is the band-aid the fossil fuel industry wants, because if we can "just" capture it from the air then that makes it okay to keep burning (and therefore buying) fossil fuels. Just pay no attention to the logistical absurdity of removing anywhere near as much as we're emitting, much less getting ahead and reducing overall CO2. The occasional headline about a new breakthrough or a new pilot plants being planned/built will keep everyone convinced the problem is solved.
=Smidge=
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Yeah I've heard that argument before. It still doesn't move me. Carbon capture HAS to be developed if we want any hope of reversing the warming baked in today. It would require thousands of years for CO2 levels to return to pre-industrial levels naturally.
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Capture it, turn it into synth-fuel and sell it. Needs lots of power to make the hydrogen, something to do with the excess when the wind blows etc and will likely cost close to $8 a gallon, which is close to the price of gas in most of the industrialized world, even with subsidies.
Something like that is going to be required for where electric is impracticable, air travel as an example.
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Carbon sequestration from the atmosphere is about as helpful plastics recycling
I'm not sure what you're saying here? Are you saying it's "very necessary and effective and just unable to be implemented by American politicians"? That seems to be how plastic recycling works, a grand and perfectly functional idea which several countries are too dumb to implement properly.
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It's a hard problem, too many types of plastic, which needs sorting and cleaning. The population could do it if they were motivated enough but there's enough posters here that say, too much hassle, just bury it in the landfill. With even the motivated finding the sorting part hard.
Me, I wish it was easier to just not acquire it. Too much plastic wrappings and such.
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You are correct. However OP is also correct, increased atmospheric CO2 (and other reasons, IIRC) is increasing the acidity of the ocean.. And then, adding baking soda to acidic water will result in the release CO2, thus completing the circle of absurdity.
"increasing the acidity of the ocean" should not be confused with calling ocean water an acid. If ocean water were ever classified as an acid or base, everything on the planet would have long since been dead. Most oceans sit around a pH of 8, already in the basic range and relatively much higher than even our own blood. Adding sodium (bi)carbonate will in no way result in some immediate release of CO2 back into the atmosphere. Such a statement shows a severe lack of chemistry and ecology knowledge.
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(It doesn't fix the battery, but it helps clean things up and stops the crud from burning things.)
I'd like to see the actual numbers on how much it would affect the oceans, not just vague reassurances from the guy who wrote the study.
(He may have provided that info, but the writer of the article didn't publish it. Just ask a chemist, everything is toxic, the only
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people mix it with water and pour it on that nasty acidic crud that can accumulate on batteries.
What, and get rid of all my sparkly blue bling? No thanks!
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“Carbon capture and storage is not going to be the solution to climate change,” Sandra Ósk Snæbjörnsdóttir, a geologist with Carbfix, told CNN.
“But it is a solution. And it’s one of the many solutions that we need to implement to be able to achieve this big goal that we have to reach.”
I know it's too much trouble to RTFA, so there you go. It is an "infinite sink" depending on the scale of your plans.
Re: Acidification. (Score:2)
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Let's go all the way to the source and reduce that which digs shit up and burns it to sustainable numbers.
I believe someone has a radical solution for that. His name is Sanos or something.
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Ever mix baking soda and vinegar? Lots of CO2 emitted making some interesting effects.
Even more efficient - get the CO2 from the water! (Score:3)
Brilliant move to mitigate ocean acidification directly by putting the carbon into it as a bicarbonate, a base. We may be able to take it up another notch in both efficiency and acidity mitigation by extracting the CO2 directly from ocean water [scitechdaily.com].
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Adding NaHCO_3 to an acidic solution results in the release of bubbles: Alka-Seltzer. Those bubbles are... wait for it... CO_2.
Re: Even more efficient - get the CO2 from the wat (Score:2)
I for one can't wait to swim in the carbonated fizzy ocean of the future
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Adding NaHCO_3 to an acidic solution results in the release of bubbles: Alka-Seltzer. Those bubbles are... wait for it... CO_2.
The oceans Are Not Becoming Acidic, they are becoming very slightly less basic. Seawater naturally has sodium carbonate / bicarbonate and calcium carbonate buffer systems, algae and bacteria use the carbonate and bicarbonate ions as a source of carbon to build themselves.
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And what do you do with the CO2 once you have extracted it from the ocean?
I've got a better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Sequester carbon on land and turn it into useful oxygen generators called "trees".
God humanity is stupid...
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Fast growing wood has a tendency to be weaker. Could likely be worked around.
"Trees don't really store carbon" comment in 3,2.. (Score:2)
Incoming "Trees don't actually sequester carbon" comment in 3, 2, 1...
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Tough. Each "just plant more trees" comment deserves a "not unless you cut them down" comment. Which deserves a "just planting trees is usually done badly" and a "So do it right and then cut them down". Hopefully enough people will step beyond their egos to gather on the right side of the argument eventually.
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They do, just not indefinitely. Comparing trees which are part of carbon exchange cycle between the atmosphere and the ground to say an oil well, which contained carbon for millennia is stupid.
We should absolutely be planting trees for all the very real benefits they bring. They just don't have an impact on humanity's carbon footprint.
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And for my next trick...
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Go ahead and do a 5 minute calculation on how many trees would need to grow & get back to us...
Tree three.
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No, that can't work. Don't you think we would've been doing this since times immemorial if that worked?
Re:I've got a better idea (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't matter that it works: planting trees doesn't make any money while cutting them down does. So humans, being stupid greedy humans, also deforest faster than the trees can grow.
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We seem to be rather bad at planting trees at scale that actually survive.
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We're really not, just a few dumb eco projects are. Humans have shown they are quite adept at planting things and helping them grow at a large scale when we want to (i.e. to derive profit of it). We call this "farming."
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And how many trees would it take? Where would we get the land? Perhaps by removing grassland, which surprisingly is also quite good at sequestering carbon. And if we keep harvesting those trees, what to do about the nutrient shortage that will develop?
Trees are good for many a reason but not a panacea when it comes to carbon sequestering.
That's NOT a better idea... (Score:2)
if you're a scientist hoping to make a name for yourself, or a career, or money from an obscure investment in a carbon-sequestration-in-baking-soda company...
For normal people, of course, your idea (which sorta dates back to Johnny Appleseed) is the winner. I prefer fruit and nut trees for sequestration since you might as well feed hungry people as part of the same effort. It's not just trees - ALL plants, including food crops, sequester carbon.
infinite sink (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, what? But not that long ago they were telling us the atmosphere was an infinite sink. Anyone who thinks anything is an infinite sink, needs another think.
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The oceans are a big carbon sink. Oceans become more acidic as they absorb more carbon. As oceans become more acidic they become less efficient at absorbing carbon. Adding sodium bicarbonate would work to reduce acidification. Though I think it is completely impractical, I think the idea here is two-fold; actively remove carbon from the atmosphere and do that in a way that sinks the carbon while also reducing acidification.
As others have pointed out, you need to be able to do all this in a green way and at
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Anyone who thinks anything is an infinite sink, needs another think.
We should launch it into space! Surely thats an infinite sink!
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But not that long ago they were telling us the atmosphere was an infinite sink.
I've literally only heard that from climate change deniers and oil companies spouting "the solution to pollution is dilution".
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You haven't been paying attention, every polluter makes that claim, especially historically.
City not too far away from me was still claiming that about the raw sewage they are dumping in the ocean, they dump it deep so it is diluted and fine and cheaper then treating it.
Early adopter (Score:2)
China should take the lead in doing this and tell us how it goes.
Here's my proprosal (Score:2)
Why not transform 3CO2 > 3C + 2O3, using the carbon for Graphene and the Ozone for purifying air and drinking water, industrial waste treatment, bleaching, and to make other chemicals; using a solar powered energy source?
Make seltz! (Score:2)
If only there was another way (Score:5, Insightful)
If only there was a way to develop a self replicating technology that can sequester carbon for hundreds, or thousands of years, that require little to no up keep from humans, and can seamlessly blend in to the natural environment.
.
Oh wait....
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It exists? And they are called Trees? And all we have to do is stop, or slow deforestation by planting new trees? And at the same time can reduce billions of tons of carbon from the environment?
.
Hmm.
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So are we all going to live in treehouses? Because with all that C we dug out of the earth, we are gonna need a LOT of land to plant the things and considering the carbon offset companies seem to have a rather poor track record, I'm wondering where you're going to find all those foresters that'll get things done.
Listen my dude, yours is a wo derful solution for Simpleland, where all you need to do is wiggle one knob or tweak one lever in the system to make everything right.
This, however, is the real world a
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Put the trees in the ocean. What? Oh. Turns out the algae in the oceans already make more oxygen than trees. How does pH affect them? Do they use CO_3 from the water?
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Self replicating is nice, but you really need the technology to be solar powered and use thin air and water as the feed stock.
So, solar powered, self replicating, low maintenance, constructs itself from air and water, and can blend in to the natural environment. Might as well wish that it could make a valuable building material at the same time...
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Unfortunately, while this idea feels good, it's bullshit. The carbon that we're now burning as fossil fuels took hundreds of millions of years to be absorbed by the biosphere, during a time when the entire Earth was in a natural state. We can't wait that long.
Also, the biosphere doesn't quite work the same. We now have bacteria that cause dead plants to rot and release greenhouse gasses back into the atmosphere. As a result, a mature forest with its biomass at steady state is barely a carbon sink. Re-wildin
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Yeah great.
Roughly 37 billion metric tons of CO2 released per year.
5 tons per oak tree (mature) [8billiontrees.com]
100 oak trees per acre [mast-producing-trees.org]
So that's 500 tons per acre for a dense forest of mature oak trees. Oak trees take about 20 years to mature so we'll need very roughly 20x times that number of trees (20 acres) to make that 500 tons per year; 25 tons per acre per year. 37 billion tons CO2, divided by 25 tons per acre, is 1.48 billion acres. That's 2.3 million square miles. For comparison, Australia is just a little over 2.9 m
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Also, you're often converting grassland, which is actually pretty good at sequestering carbon, to forests that aren't that much better.
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It exists? And they are called Trees?
It does not and they aren't called tress. Trees sequester carbon for 10s of years. During maturity they end up being carbon neutral. If they die or burn they release stored carbon. Comparing trees as a carbon storage to say an oil well is like comparing a plastic tarp to a hurricane shelter.
We can plant billions of trees and while it may make a world of difference to soil health, local weather, erosion control, and many other benefits, it will not make a difference to human carbon footprint in the slightest
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We may not need to bury them deep.
If we turn them into charcoal then the charcoal is stablish.
It is still a very large project that is required even with that.
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In terms of tons of CO2 absorbed per acre of plant life per year, bamboo is probably a better bet.
Whatever bubbles bubbles up... (Score:2)
Baking soda... wasn't that the stuff that we use to make dough fluffy? Wonder what those little bubbles could be filled with...
Re: Whatever bubbles bubbles up... (Score:2)
They're filled with fun
For there to be bubbles, you need an acid. (Score:2)
And the ocean is not an acid - 'ocean acidification' means making the ocean less alkaline. So creating bicarbonate and adding it to the ocean will act against acidification, The ocean already contains a fair bit of bicarbonate.
In a cake, the acid is normally tartaric acid, which is an ingredient in baking powder and self-raising flour. as dry powders/crystals, they don't mix and react, but when dissolved in a batter they react.
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That's fine in theory, but if you take a look at the ocean's acidity near the coasts, you'll find a very different picture.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, the oceans are slightly alkaline. The question is, though, whether the soda will get that far, I doubt that the solution will be to ferry it out into the middle of nowhere on large ships.
ocean are infinite sinks? (Score:2)
For future use only (Score:2)
Sequestration will always take energy, because the CO2 was emitted in the first place by chemical processes that extracted energy. As long as we're burning fossil fuels, it remains a mathematical fact that reducing that will be more efficient than continuing and adding sequestration on. It's nice to have options once we have excess green power production to utilize, of course.
Beyond that, I'd have to say that dumping CO2 in the form of unstable compounds into the oceans is a bad idea. Acidifying the ocea
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it remains a mathematical fact that reducing that will be more efficient than continuing and adding sequestration on
The point of sequestration, carbon offsetting, and all those schemes is to make us feel good about keeping doing what we are doing (emitting more CO2, directly or indirectly) . Don't you dare bring maths into it now.
Bicarbonate is alkaline, not acid. (Score:2)
Adding bicarbonate to sea water will help keep it alkaline, as it should be. And bicarbonate in seawater is fairly stable.
Why Don't They Simply Store That Baking Soda ... (Score:1)
in their 'Fridge ? :)
And the long-term effect is (Score:1)
You are restoring lost bicarbonate... (Score:2)
Ocean 'acidification' is robbing the oceans of bicarbonates, so restoring them sounds like a good idea, apart from the fact it stores carbon.
The long term effects of doing nothing, however, are pretty clear, and pretty nasty.
The elephant in the room (Score:3)
According to this source - and it's in rough agreement with just about everything else I've heard and read on the subject - methane is the culprit we should be tackling first:
For me the takeaway is this:
"Here’s the kicker: methane, the gas produced extensively by the livestock industry worldwide, traps up to 100 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide within a 5 year period, and 72 times more within a 20 year period. The good news is that methane also leaves the atmosphere within a decade. This makes for a short-lived, but intense climate changer. So methane warms the planet rapidly, but it dissipates from the atmosphere more quickly than carbon dioxide. According the EPA, the GWP of methane is 21, which indicates its effect over a 100 year period. A 2009 report published by The World Watch Institute stressed that the more relevant GWP figure is 72, since it’s within the next 20 years that we desperately need to act to stop climate change before a domino effect is initiated and our imbalanced bio-systems spiral out of livable conditions."
This would seem to indicate that methane is the greenhouse gas we should be trying to lower first. Doing this will have a greater effect in a shorter period of time than will lowering CO2, and we don't need unproven wild-ass schemes to deal with it. We simply, (where 'simply' is far from synonymous with 'easily'), fix or shut down the oil and gas operations that are releasing it from the ground, and transition rapidly away from our unreasonably heavy dependence on animal sources of food.
Doing this will be hard and I'm fairly certain that we won't get our shit together to do it. But it's perhaps the one set of changes we could make which might save our asses with "merely" resolve and sacrifice. We don't need to throw a bunch of grand, expensive, and impractical high-tech and high-science schemes at the wall to see what sticks.
I'm not saying we shouldn't work on reducing CO2 as well - we still need to do that. But relying on that alone to save us will probably kill us. If we tackle methane, we buy ourselves time in the short term to solve the CO2 problem. Increasingly, it seems it's going to take us more time than we have to both curb CO2 emissions and pull the stuff from the atmosphere.
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And then the CH4 turns back into CO2 which is turned into a grass that the cows eat. Closed cycle no net increase to the carbon levels.
Sell the Baking Soda (Score:1)
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The baking soda in the store is the last dirt-cheap thing there. Soda made by high tech is unlikely to be competitive until they ban mining the stuff, at which time making muffins will cost $10 per muffin.
The oceans "are infinite sinks" (Score:2)
...shudder...
Maybe instead (Score:3)
vs water extraction (Score:2)
Yay! We can pollute the ocean indefinitely!!! (Score:2)
"... and released into the ocean at a small concentration." So how's that work? Collect CO2, presumably lots of it, then release it into the ocean in small concentrations?
You know the ocean is even less understood than the atmosphere, right?
All the fear-mongering over climate change has come to schemes like this. At which point it seem reasonable to say that it is easier to live with climate change than to apply potentially more dangerous "solutions". Let's call climate change a lesson learned and try t
one major concern about this (Score:2)
Yes, in the old days the ocean was considered an infinite sink. It seemed huge and endless to the people in the 17th, 18th, maybe even the 19th centuries.
We know now that it is not infinite and cannot be used as a infinite waste can.