Giant Plastic Trees To Save Planet by the Removal of CO2

I found it interesting – in a report published by the BBC – that the scientist who originally coined the phrase “global warming” is backing a radical solution to stem further damage to the planet caused by CO2.

Speaking at the Hay Literary Festival in Powys, Wales, Wallace Broecker suggests the way forward must surely lie with the construction of millions of “carbon scrubbers.”

These carbon scrubbers would be giant artificial trees that would pull CO2 from the atmosphere via a specially designed plastic and the gas would either be liquefied under pressure to be pumped underground or converted to mineral.

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So how exactly does this all work? From The Guardian:

The team [led by Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University in New York] says [the device] can trap the CO2 from air on absorbent plastic sheets called ion exchange membranes, commonly used to purify water. Crucially, it has discovered that humid air can then make the membranes “exhale” their trapped CO2. The discovery was “some serendipity and some working out,” Lackner said. “When I saw it the first time, I didn’t believe it.

Guardian coverage in full with a full explanation of the potentials behind the project.

An extremely interesting idea and one I hadn’t personally come across before. The concept appears to me to be a hybrid of Isaac Asimov and Lego and not at all off-putting.

There will of course be those who bleat, maintaining that these pretend trees are going to look somehow ugly. These same people casually watch the news each evening but always find it infinitely more interesting to wander over to the fridge when there’s some feature detailing further destruction of rainforest.

Personally, I find the concept of 60 million of these devices constructed worldwide (the figure given in the BBC report) not nearly so offensive a view as a bunch of apes driving around in machines yelling at each other in a smog of road rage and inconsideration.

Source:

BBC Click here for initial source.

Image Credit:

garryknight at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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