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Researchers Create Renewable Carbon Dioxide Sponge
First time accepted submitter Babu V Bassa writes "Concerned about adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? Consider a roof top coating on your car with this new material. A multinational team of researchers have developed a renewable sponge like material to capture and store gaseous carbon dioxide. The organic material is made up of gamma-cyclodextrin. Conventional metal-organic frameworks, which also are effective at adsorbing carbon dioxide, are usually prepared from materials derived from crude oil and often incorporate toxic heavy metals and are also non-renewable. The research paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society claims that its synthesis is essentially carbon-neutral and have the demonstrated ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere makes them promising materials for carbon fixation."
A way to fix carbon permanently is to bury it underground in a specially capped storage facility. Just so long as it doesn't decay, and just acts like a rock under the dirt, we're doing good.
I call the above 'burying paper in a landfill'. Al Gore has an old newspaper he keeps on his desk that was perfectly preserved in a landfill.
So we take trees, that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, turn them into paper to sell and finance the operation. Collect the paper and "carbon sequester" it underground in a capped storage facility (landfill). We're saving the planet!
Given the above, the worst thing you can do is recycle paper.
The more recycled, the less new produced.
The less new paper produced, the fewer Douglas Fir trees planted in the managed forests.
The fewer new trees planted, the less CO2 pulled from the atmosphere.
Someone with more environmental awareness please show me where the logic is flawed. I'm unable to find it, and I've looked.
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Absorption-limited nutrient supply from the soil / more vegetable mass produced = less nutrients per pound. Do you have to be so rude?
Actually, his point is fairly sound if you assume the primary growth constraint on plants is the availability of CO2 (although the composition of most fertilizers proves it isn't.)
The assumption is that, when more carbon dioxide is readily available, plants will grow more. However, since the availability of other nutrients (especially exotic minerals and ions) isn't increasing, there will be less of these nutrients to spread amongst the increased number of plants. Hence, vegetables and other crops that are less able to pass on these nutrients to the people eating them.
Of course, this is all irrelevant, because plants have a huge excess of CO2 in the present atmosphere and are generally prevented from growing due to the lack of free nitrogen and phosphorus. Incidentally, I believe more than a few people have suggested (and perhaps even implemented) dumping fertilizer into the oceans to make the resultant algal blooms suck up more CO2. This is a double-edged sword, in that the blooms block out sunlight for plants growing on the ocean floor, but also eventually die off and provide a substantial food boon to the animals near the surface.
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its 20 times worse than c02in regards to global warming.
But there's more than 200x as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is methane.
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The Chinese are building more nuclear plants these days and electric scooters are very popular there. I wouldn't be surprised to see them become more environmentally friendly than the US in the next 15-30 years.
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Because methane is a pretty reactive molecule. So it reacts spontaneously. In the atmosphere Methane has a half life of about 8 years.
We don't worry much about methane for the same reason we don't worry about H2O. Water vapor causes roughly 60% of all greenhouse effects yet since a water molecule on is in the atmosphere for about 9 days there is not much to worry about.
Co2 has a half life of centuries. So while boiling water on the stove stays in the atmosphere for a few days and cow farts stay in the air for a decade, CO2 stays up there for centuries.
America - Why be green? The Chinese will still destroy the environment.
China - Why be green? The Americans will still destroy the environment.