Building Machines to Clear the Atmosphere of Excess CO2
When I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, I remember reading in the paper about some new manufacturing plant (steal, if memory serves), that promised to return the water it used to Lake Erie cleaner than before it passed through the plant. This was back in the days when people thought that the Great Lakes, especially Erie, would require some 100 or more years to recover from their status as "dead lakes."
I used to think, if you can clean the water as a byproduct of some industrial process, surely it would be worth the time and investment to build massive machines to clean the water of the lakes as a goal in itself. All it seemed to require, to my seven year old mind, was to deploy some filters, blown up to colossal proportions, to clean and purify the water; an industrial process to redress the harm industry had wrought. It had a nice symmetry, and I desperately wanted the industrial landscape in which I grew up to stand not just for apparent destruction.
A few decades on, a similar, if both more urgent and immense, problem: arresting, if not reversing, the calamity that climate change promises for our civilization. Here (by way of boing boing) is a link to an interview with Wallace Broeker, a geochemist who proposes building machines that clear the air of excess CO2. Read on for the rationale...
Posted: June 23, 2008 7:51 pm | 0 comments
Tags: climate change
