Scientists and inventors never cease to amaze. They have now come up with a product to help combat global warming in an entirely new way. To date, most emphasis has been put on reducing the emissions into the atmosphere at the point of origin. Namely, this would include installing scrubbers at power plants and on individual cars (which contribute 20% of emissions). Unfortunately, it would be pretty much impossible to retrofit all the power plants and automobiles in the world.

However, a new device claims to be able to take the carbon dioxide that is already in the air and extract it. They are likening the whole process to a big CO2 vacuum cleaner. This is the same principle of trees removing carbon dioxide through natural processes except that this vacuum can extract the CO2 1,000 times faster than plants can. That gives us a little advantage. The device works by using absorbants to extract the CO2 molecules from the air. The CO2 then has to be "scraped" off the absorbant for disposal.

Interestingly, I was recently fortunate enough to have sat in on a presentation by a graduating chemistry student covering the surface absorbtion of gold molecules onto pyrite (fool's gold) and arsenopyrite. Sounds to me like the same sort of principles are being applied here. Afterward, I talked to him about the possibility of being able to extract this gold for business purposes. His response was that these particles were so extremely small that it would not be profitable or maybe not even possible to do so. I wonder what method the creators of this vacuum are using to extract the CO2? I suppose this is why that part of the process is the most costly.

So what do we do with all this carbon dioxide that we extract from the atmosphere? Some people think it might be a good idea to "inject" it back into the Earth in areas of porous rock or empty mines. I'm not sure how much good that will do us. We'd probably end up finding out that putting that much CO2 into the Earth's crust causes it to slowly leak out all over the world and suffocate people, plants, and animals (or some other dire consequence). Of course, we could always eject it into space, but throwing away all that matter could also cause serious problems on the planet.

Like always, this is another one of our attempts to simply hide our problems rather than get to the root cause. It seems to be our preferred method of problem "solving" - push your problems somewhere else until they cause a new one. I personally favor much stronger emissions control laws and environmental protection. If you have other ideas of what do with this CO2, let me know.