Our inability to deal with carbon dioxide, and all greenhouse gases, in an appropriate manner is causing us to fight each other and making the planet reach a near collapse state.
Floods and hurricanes, melting ice, and drowning coastal cities, are all caused by greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere causing global warming.
It wasn’t apparent to me why we aren’t cleaning the air instead of, or at least in parallel with, reducing the emissions.
But it seems like cleaning the air is not an easy task.
So what are our current options to solve this:
- Point Capture
- Direct Air Capture
- Growing Plants
Why Aren’t We Cleaning the Air to Save the Planet?
Even though carbon dioxide is causing a lot of trouble and polluting the atmosphere, its actual concentration in the air is minimal. There are around 400 molecules of carbon dioxide in one million molecules of air components.
So you could imagine the amount of effort and energy required to capture these 400 molecules.
There are solutions already that do this job, but they use a lot of energy and cost a lot of money.
So the barrier to cleaning the air is mainly an economical barrier caused by technological challenges.
What About Point Capture?
Point capture technology aims to reduce carbon emissions at the places carbon is emitted, mainly power plants.
This requires installing new technology to capture the carbon emitted from current manufacturing equipment, or even rebuilding the whole factory so It uses clean technology to do its job.
What is the challenge with point capture and why isn’t it widely applied?
Because installing clean technology would increase the cost of production and may even reduce the efficiency of the factory.
So again, it’s an economical barrier caused by technological challenges.
Could Trees Help Reduce Climate Change?
Yes, trees could be of amazing help when it comes to climate change, but solely depending on trees isn’t enough.
Trees are good because they turn carbon in the atmosphere into branches and leaves, they use it to grow, and that is great.
But rushing into planting a million trees without considerable planning could be a waste of time. You will be faced with implementation problems on how you are going to plant those trees.
You will also be faced with the question of: what kind of trees do we need to plant? Because not all trees consume carbon at the same rate.
Even if we are successful at our efforts of planting trees this is part of the solution not the solution to the challenge.
The rate of carbon consumption of trees is below the rate of greenhouse gases production by us, so if we don’t cut the use of fossil fuels the problem still remains.