Wyoming Produces More Carbon Dioxide in 8 Hours than Vermont Produces in a Year.

Wyoming has a <em>smaller</em> population than Vermont:



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070602/ap_on_sc/global_warming_states_1

And do something useful with it?

Does it HAVE to spew into the atmosphere?

But, it adds to the costs, so it is opposed.

What you're describing is carbon sequestration, where the CO2 is stored somewhere harmless. Unfortunately, it's not a terribly useful or valuable gas, at least when you consider that there's huge amounts of it already available in the atmosphere, so mostly the ideas are simply to stick it into compressed pockets in the ground. It might work a little bit, but over the long term the answer is to stop burning coal.

Fertilizing our depleted soil sounds like a VERY useful use.

We could put a contraption on our faces and collect the CO2 we breathe out.... It's much easier to start with small ideas and move to larger more expensive inventions... Also, with coal plants, there is more than CO2 coming out. And with bio-refuge, its the methane that's the problem. Of course if we hadn't modified every damn thing, then they would do what they have with manure for years, and use it as fertilizer. But its not very healthy now and will cause salmonilla outbreaks.

Thousands of years ago, Amazonian indians buried charcoal into thin rainforest soils. Nowadays (thousands of years later) the soil is STILL deep, dark and rich, full to the brim of buried carbon. Scientists are just now realizing what an accomplishment this was and is, and are thinking of modern applications. Lots of ideas have been bandied about, but I think the best is something known as pyrolysis. A quasi-non-profit company known as EPRIDA has come up with the following technique and initial tests have been encouraging.



Maybe not a magic bullet, but it 1) sequesters CO2 into the soil 2) raises soil fertility and 3) generates hydrogen to boot. Its a CARBON-NEGATIVE process!

Charts always save the world.

Carbon dioxide recovery on significant scale is largely a fantasy right now and will remain so for at least a decade, maybe much, much longer.

Climate change is happening now, not in some far off future.

To offset our current emissions, you'd need to process just over 0.25 billion hectares of forest per year to generate enough charcoal (or bio-char, if you prefer.)

We only have 4 billion hectares left: trees just don't grow fast enough.

nice gig if you can get it, but

not everywhere can be non-carbon-disneyland.

It is not a technical challenge, but a political one.

In many states - Wisconsin is one, Maine is another - there is a need to sing the "renewables will save us song" while burning fossil fuels.

But states can go nuclear. Vermont is a nuclear state, and produces the vast majority of its electricity, by far, from nuclear energy, the highest percentage in the nation, almost 80%. As always there are a bunch of enery mystics who wish to change this state of affairs and to begin burning fossil fuels, but hopefully this silliness will be avoided.

Vermont is special though. It is small and it has significant hydroelectric resources.

Since Vermont is part of a large North Eastern grid (a large DC transmission line from Canada goes through it) it can easily either import or export electricity when it needs to do so. I would expect that there are many nights when Vermont exports significant power to Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut - maybe even those gas burners over in Maine. Anyone who owns a gas plant will want to shut it off whenever it is possible - the fuel is too expensive.

Last night, my Goldens could have given "green house gasses" a totally new meaning - cough...