Saturday, April 19, 2008

Strip-Mining The Sky

In a move sure to give the mud-hut contingent a near-fatal case of PSH's, a group at Los Alamos has issued a modest proposal to sieve CO2 from the sky, stir in a dollop of water, add electricity and hey-presto, complex hydrocarbons: fuel.* Fuel you can burn in your internal-combustion engine. No huge retooling of vehicles and infrastructure required. Your BMW airhead will lurve it.

The process does take rather copious amounts of electricity, for which a (booga-booga scarybad, PSHers. Ya wimps) dedicated fission plant is the ideal solution, especially since the cooling towers can incorporate the carbon dioxide scavenging system. And the fringe benefit is the whole thing is carbon-neutral at worst.

Ya wanna stop payin' neolithic goat-herders with a medieval social structure and a bad attitude towards Western Civilization for black goo to run your car? Here's how. And it beats the heck out of takin' my corn chips away, too.
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* If you read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars novels, you've already encountered a version of this neat trick. Here, Mars, pretty much all same either way.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The comments are the best.

It's still not green ENOUGH!!!!

I love the Solar Power to the People People. Everything can be powered by love and the rays of the sun. And algae. Miles and miles and miles of algae.

I bet they'd scream bloody murder if someone wanted to put the solar panels and algae farms in their back yard. NIMBY works twice as good on the Gaia humpers.

Anonymous said...

No solution that doesn't involve a UN tax scheme and a large dollop of self hate destructive to the US will be acceptable to these people.