According to the new U.S. secretary of energy, Ernest Moniz, the key to fighting against climate change is to develop cheap and effective techniques for carbon capturing and storage.
Despite the economic crisis and budget cuts, many companies and research institute have already acknowledged the importance of carbon capturing in the battle against global warming and are looking into alternative techniques.
Carbon capturing and storage does not seem to attract as much investments as renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, however this does not undermine the role it has in reducing the greenhouse gas effect.
Moreover, some predictions indicate that although energy from renewable sources will increase by 2020, coal burning will increase even more. In this sense, companies and policy makers should pay even closer attention to carbon capturing techniques.
A project, which looked into finding ways to develop cheaper techniques for carbon capturing and storage, was the FutureGen project. The aim was to construct a power plant, which produces hydrogen and electricity. Unfortunately, due to the high cost of the project, it was shut down and then resumed with an aim to retrofit existing plants.
Besides constructing plants, developers have looked into finding sources that produce concentrated stream of carbon dioxide, or using carbon dioxide for oil recovery. These, however, were not found to be cost-effective.
In any case, carbon capturing and storage techniques would have an influence on climate change only if strict carbon taxes are introduced.
We can not reforest other continents freely as we should, though we have been spending our fortune to support for anti deforestation and afforestation, However, we should focus our homeland and use the afforestation and reforestation to hold the fresh water in our soils and sequester all of carbon dioxides emitted from our activities. No any other human made technologies can more efficiently and efficaciously solar energy than the forests to achieve these two goals/
All other industrial apporoaches would consume too much of energy to sequester the CO2, and potentially generate unexpected damages to human and environments. Taking the carbon sequestration by algea growing for example, 80% of algea is water, and its growing needs to move a huge amount of water, that only would cost a huge amount of energy to move around. Remember the energy cost fossil fuel to make so far. In constract, forests and grasses in non-farm lands use free energy from solar light to convert the CO2 into cellular woods and O2 if we provides them with waters through the irrigation network systems at local nature conditions, where in flood areas, we can build the waster reserviors, and in the drought areas , we can build the seawater desalination centers and rainmaking forces. All those would cost much less than what Obama’s approaches would cost for us in term of job loss and tax dollar wasting.
Reforestation and restoring grasslands at a continent scale, such as in northern America, not only provide the critical quantity of biomass for economy sustainable biofeul industries (econocmic incentive to maintain the best conditions of forest growing and to prevent the wildfires by harvesting the fireharzadous biomasses), but also really improve our living environments by sequestering carbon from airs and retaining fresh water in soils. The most important is that those real green approaches will generate millions of job opportunities for Americans, in many sects of industries and Academics as well.
For example, 20% increase of reforestation a year in USA would sequester about 1000 million tons of carbon from atmosphere, which is more than what amount of co2 we release a year
Build more products out of wood and paper and plant more trees. Stop recycling paper products and bury paper waste in land fills. Ouch! That sounds crazy right! Not really paper products represent sequestered carbon that has been taken directly out of the air. Many wood products also represent sequestered carbon taken from the air. The desk I’m sitting at is sequestered carbon taken from the air. Plants are the best option for cleaning the air, that is what they were made for (it’s what they do). Stop trying to reinvent the wheel, round is round. We already have a method of cleaning the air and sequestering carbon we simply need to augment it a bit, you could bury cellulose in played out coal mines (it will actually turn back into coal given enough time) or plant more forest FOR HARVEST and process the wood products into things that will be around for years. So we have a solution but it wont be considered because it doesn’t redistribute any wealth or generate any new centers of power or cut down on fossil fuel use. But it will fix the problem if there actually is one. Nature will extract the extra carbon from the system all on it’s own it has in the past and it will in the present and the future.