We can say goodbye to global warming, as new factories will inhale all that nasty CO2 for you. Well, not really, they will technically suck up all the emissions which we can’t really contain, like those from cars, ships, planes, which climate change activists have been complaining about since the dawn of time.
And no, you can’t really say goodbye to climate change. Not yet. And not on account of just a few places in which emissions will be dropped. But there is hope that someday, we will stop hearing all these apocalyptic scenarios in which Florida sinks, or we all get asthma, or heart disease.
In a pretty remote part of Canada, a team of researchers led by Harvard’s David Keith is working on a very, very ambitious plan. Funded in small portion by Microsoft’s own Bill Gates, one of the most charitable figures of the world at the moment, the project is really planning to pack a serious blow to the threat of climate change and global warming.
The long term plan of the Carbon Engineering company is to make these types of plants available on a much wider and global scale. This would eventually reduce carbon emissions by enough so as to thwart the damaging and ever-growing effects of Global Warming. Geoff Holmes, a manager for business development at the company says that the problem must be tackled in a way that will assure carbon neutrality within 20 years.
The plants will function through technology developed together by three leading companies and research groups in the economic sector. These are the aforementioned Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat – a New York based project, a well as Climeworks, a Swiss company. The later conducted an experiment back in April, which was financed by Audi, to prove that CO2 capturing directly from the air is not only feasible, but it can turn a profit.
Climeworks passed the carbon they had captured over to Sunfire. The German fuel company transformed the carbon dioxide they received into eco-friendly, low carbon (or “zero-carbon”) diesel fuel. This process shows that recycling works just as well for things we’re releasing into the air, as for things we’re dumping on the ground.
The biggest problems that are to be faced by these types of carbon sucking factories have to do with money. As you may have guessed, to make a difference on a global scale against climate change, they would have to be produced in many, many numbers. As you may have also guessed, making these plants requires a great deal of dollars. Dollars which, sadly, governments are not yet ready to give.
Image source: societyforscience.org
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