Word: carbonizing
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Still, individuals too can move the carbon needle, but how much and how fast? Different green strategies, after all, yield different results. (See "51 Things We Can Do," page 69.) You can choose a hybrid vehicle, but simply tuning up your car and properly inflating the tires will help too. Buying carbon offsets can reduce the impact of your cross-continental travel, provided you can ensure where your money's really going. Planting trees is great, but in some parts of the world, the light-absorbing color of the leaves causes them to retain heat and paradoxically increases warming...
...Earth is choking on greenhouse gases, it's not hard to see why. Global carbon dioxide output last year approached a staggering 32 billion tons, with about 25% of that coming from the U.S. Turning off the carbon spigot is the first step, and many of the solutions are familiar: windmills, solar panels, nuclear plants. All three technologies are part of the energy mix, although each has its issues, including noise from windmills and radioactive waste from nukes...
Until we can dial down the carbon, a more immediate strategy might be to find somewhere to put it all--to sequester it underground. In the same way we store radioactive waste from nuclear reactors, so too could we collect the gaseous CO2 from power plants...
Would that be safe? Carbon dioxide can be lethal, a fact grimly illustrated in 1986 when a giant surge of the stuff bubbled up from Lake Nyos in Cameroon, asphyxiating 1,700 people as they slept. Nonetheless, investigators involved in the Thornton project insist there is little cause for worry. "The fields held oil and gas for millennia," says Larry Myer, an earth scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and the project's director, "so geologically we know they're going to hold...
...separate CO2 from power-plant exhaust so that there will be something to stash in the cavities in the first place. There are two promising methods. One is to gasify coal before it's burned, reducing it to a high-pressure synthetic gas that can be stripped of its carbon, leaving mostly hydrogen behind. The alternative is to pulverize coal as power-plant operators do now but then rely on new hardware to separate the CO2 after burning. Both methods are at least 20 years away from being fully developed, predicts Ernest Moniz, co-director of the M.I.T. Laboratory...