Researchers Create Renewable Carbon Dioxide Sponge 206
First time accepted submitter Babu V Bassa writes "Concerned about adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? Consider a roof top coating on your car with this new material. A multinational team of researchers have developed a renewable sponge like material to capture and store gaseous carbon dioxide. The organic material is made up of gamma-cyclodextrin. Conventional metal-organic frameworks, which also are effective at adsorbing carbon dioxide, are usually prepared from materials derived from crude oil and often incorporate toxic heavy metals and are also non-renewable. The research paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society claims that its synthesis is essentially carbon-neutral and have the demonstrated ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere makes them promising materials for carbon fixation."
Redundent.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Wood already works for "carbon fixation" and you can make things with it that people will actually keep. My mother has some "fixated carbon" in the living room over 100 years old. Just grow a tree and make a desk.
Why use a simple, cheap solution when you can pay so much more for a complicated and less-effective one? The eco-industrial complex can't charge you as much for just growing a tree.
Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Great, the "eco-industrial complex" and "Big Green."
We thought the AGW Denialism Batshit Generator Engine was running at max power, but it was just warming up...
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Yeah, it's not so much "big green" as it is, GE, which owns NBC Universal, you know....
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While I am a supporter of eco-preservation and green tech, I have to agree that there is an entire industry sector out there who is eager as hell to turn saving the ecosystem into a goose laying golden eggs. While I know, of course, that planting trees, while technically a solution, isn't really a solution because people aren't going to give up urban environments any time soon (which is exactly where we need the most carbon fixing), the point is valid...there started being an eco-industrial complex the mome
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But isn't that what entrepreneurs do? Take advantage of opportunities to make a profit. I thought that was what our capitalist system was all about. Are you suggesting that green tech and renewable energy should be non-profit?
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How about this. There is no fucking way they are making me pay for the air I breath, you have a to draw a line somewhere and the line is drawn right fucking there.
I am not paying to clean up pollution so that corporations can continue to pollute beyond all reason. I am not paying so that corporations can inflate their profit margins by dumping pollution rather than properly containing on pollutants on site. What ever methods they use recycling, fixation or simply rely on clean production, it should be th
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I have, but I've got no clue what your point is. Explain?
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Sure, read the post I replied to -- "eco-industrial complex"
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Nope, I don't see it.
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So what? Solyndra was a big energy industrial corp. Every single energy industry in America has always been driven ahead by government money. And now with strategic competitors like China, a Communist country where all new industrial development is totally government planned and subsidized, keeping and making America even relevant, if not #1, requires US government investment. Because the greedy, lazy, stupid American corporations don't invest in that kind of stuff.
The oil biz is still getting $4 BILLION in
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You're right, that really would fix the carbon problem, the only way that's actually better than just waiting a bit for hydrocarbons and coal to be too expensive to use for fuel (I'm guessing that will be in the next decade, maybe two). But even without hydrocarbon fuels and CO_2, the earth is 7 billion humans and growing strong, growing at a rate that makes some hypothetical melting of icecaps and rising of oceans cosmically irrelevant.
Soylendra Green -- or a really
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You took down those strawmen like an anime action hero!
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No, not every "too-whatever" weather event is said to be due to climate change. That's just your straw man.
You deniers aren't just "naysayers" - you're a stubborn part of a problem that'll soon be too late to fix. Maybe somebody shrilly equated you to a nazi - who cares? There's shrill nazi-callers in every crowd - especially in your Teabagger crowd.
Humans adapted to Ice Ages during past climate changes. I'd rather plant more trees and stop burning coal. The idea that the climate change will be good for pla
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What's the "eco-industrial complex"? You Teabaggers used to just call them "tree-huggers". You know - the people who urged you to plant and cultivate trees.
You Teabaggers will say anything to imagine you're punching a hippie. Even if it chokes you to death.
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The wood was hand cut by a single family
Do they belong to a discriminated minority?
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Yes - people who cultivate trees.
Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, though, unless stored properly in a dry environment, wood will decay and release the carbon. If you want to store it forever, you need to bake it down into charcoal. Then you can bury it in the ground. Where it can later be dug up to fuel a power plant.
In any event, I don't know who is supporting research for this retarded carbon dioxide sponge, but it needs to stop. There are so many more important things that could be done with that time and money. Feeding the poor, curing diseases, providing me with high end hookers and a pile of coke the size of Rhode Island. You get the idea.
Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Interesting)
What you want to do to sequester CO2 is to make Terra Perta [wikipedia.org] by using the wood as a carbon source for low temperature pyrolysis called Biochar [motherearthnews.com].
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Save people - have fewer people. Which is it?
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Just like god did the dinosaur fossils - to trick the faithless into believing evolution.
Hooray! Climate change is fake and god is real! And we all get diamonds!
Faithy science is the best.
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Growing trees to carbon-fixated fruition takes patience! Who has that? You? What, are you a ritalin-and-prozac junkie or something?
Carbon Fixation (Score:5, Insightful)
A way to fix carbon permanently is to bury it underground in a specially capped storage facility. Just so long as it doesn't decay, and just acts like a rock under the dirt, we're doing good.
I call the above 'burying paper in a landfill'. Al Gore has an old newspaper he keeps on his desk that was perfectly preserved in a landfill.
So we take trees, that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, turn them into paper to sell and finance the operation. Collect the paper and "carbon sequester" it underground in a capped storage facility (landfill). We're saving the planet!
Given the above, the worst thing you can do is recycle paper.
The more recycled, the less new produced.
The less new paper produced, the fewer Douglas Fir trees planted in the managed forests.
The fewer new trees planted, the less CO2 pulled from the atmosphere.
Someone with more environmental awareness please show me where the logic is flawed. I'm unable to find it, and I've looked.
Re:Carbon Fixation (Score:5, Funny)
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Ooh better yet, require companies to keep huge amounts of paper records indefinitely! Then you don't even have to pay for the landfill! I smell a revamp to the tax code coming!
OK. This actually explains a lot... Or at least it makes more sense than most government initiatives.
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Stop recycling paper. I love suggesting it because people snap to the judgement that not recycling MUST be a bad thing. To be fair, I'm not positive not recycling would be a net carbon sequestration scheme, but it's certainly possible.
In the first world forestry companies usually plant MORE trees than they harvest, so at least 100% of the harvested trees get replaced. The paper products are basically sheets of sequestered carbon. Bury them deep enough and they'll stay that way, until they get turned int
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Then we can burn it as fuel!!!
Re:Carbon Fixation (Score:4, Insightful)
The energy needed to make paper from trees are larger then the energy needed by reusing old paper so that process will create alot more CO2.
The owner of the land will plant new trees independently if paper are recycled or not. There are other uses of trees then for paper and the need for paper is increasing in this computerised world since many 'cant read' from the screen and insist of printing it into paper.
Re:Carbon Fixation (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody reuses paper. They recycle it. And that's a whole other ballgame. Wikipedia says recycling paper actually uses MORE fossil fuels than producing new pulp because new pulp mills get energy mostly from burning wood scraps while recycling plants usually use electricity, which tends to be produced from fossil fuels, particularly in the urban areas where you want your recycling plant.
No, if you don't use paper less trees get planted. Paper is a major consumer of forestry products and most of it in the first world comes from managed forests - they're harvested then replanted, just like farms. If they're not harvested, they don't get replanted.
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Nobody? Not ever, not one single sheet? Not like how I use almost all the paper that comes to my house for notes, or the kids to draw, etc, on *before* recycling it or using in the compost heap?
OK, clearly I must be imagining using my paper 2 or 3 times typically. And printing almost nothing out of my own.
Rgds
Damon
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Little pedantic hey?
Okay, the MAJORITY of paper reuse/recycling is recycling. Happy?
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Um, you're posting in /. where precision is a good thing. You must be new here! B^> Your initial statement was palpably false and silly; your new one is fine (though I may still not agree with it).
Rgds
Damon
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When sequestering carbon replaces filthy nuke plants, that is genius.
Any nuke plant should be replaced by a geothermal power plant on the grid instead.
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False. The paper industry is one of the most toxic manufacturing industries, and destroys whole ecosystems even when it farms trees (by monoculture).
That must be a nice check the paper mills are sending you to astroturf Slashdot.
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Simple. It costs more energy to recycle paper than it does to grow new trees for the use in wood and paper products. To recycle you need to, bleach, skim, decontaminate, treat, mash, mix, repulp, then make new. Plus using waste paper as mulching and mixed with other biomaterials works wonders. I mean those of us who live in the north have been doing this for nearly a 100 years, more so when there isn't any damn topsoil.
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You are wrong. Cutting and processing trees into paper costs lots more energy, typically made by burning the tree "waste" into the atmosphere, than does recycling paper (which uses electricity, which usually produces less pollution than that).
You who live in the North lost your topsoil 100 years ago when you clearcut your forests. And you're still lying about the damage you're doing.
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Who the hell knows who will be the surprised recipient of all that crap in 10k years?
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Tell that to the quarter of Japan that just got stored nuke waste blown all over it.
You nuke fetishists can't even remember the worst nuke disaster in your lifetime even when it happened only earlier this year. Evidently radiation's brain poisoning power turns out to be unlimited by distance or shielding.
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Most or all permanent nuclear storage facilities have flaws but the possibility of a meltdown causing widespread dispersal is not one of them. Whether your point is valid or not, using badly-researched arguments to make it will make you look
The flaw (Score:2)
The problem is that much of the paper is not produced from plantation wood, but from old growth forests.
After a quick google...
Woodchipping in Australia [wikipedia.org]
Ethical Paper [ethicalpaper.com.au]
Reallly (Score:2)
Do the math... (Score:3)
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It is easy.
You just stay home, and the trees will take care of planting themselves.
Print this out and tape it to your wall. It will sequester the carbon, and remind you that earth will take care of itself.
Re:Do the math... (Score:4, Informative)
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If you planted some trees every year, they'd accumulate. So after 10 years the trees you'd planted would be sequestering 10x the carbon of a single year's planting. And of course the sapling/seed you plant weighs only a tiny percentage of the CO2 it sequesters when it's 20-50 years old.
And then there's these machines and organizations that specialize in things. They can plant 100x the amount a single person would have to, so only 1% of the people have to plant any.
Oh, and we could also stop burning as much
Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Informative)
Wood already works for "carbon fixation" and you can make things with it that people will actually keep. My mother has some "fixated carbon" in the living room over 100 years old. Just grow a tree and make a desk.
Apparently the IPCC agrees with you, even. However, relying on wood as a sole means of carbon sequestration requires [wikipedia.org] planting far more trees than we can reasonably dedicate land to.
Planting trees to counteract CO2 emissions is cheap and effective, but it's not enough. We already know how to do it, so you're probably not going to see any news about new advances in tree-planting technology on Slashdot.
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Even in the perverse world of the USPTO you could not get away with patenting the tree (yet). Therefore, trees simply cannot be the solution ;)
Re:Redundent.. agreed. (Score:2)
Trees do the job well, and they are extremely useful.
I do not understand why you were rated offtopic - I think you're right on the nose.
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I do not understand why you were rated offtopic - I think you're right on the nose.
Because we do not have a "-1 I do not agree with you" moderation. I am used to it...
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Bamboo is better. If you could plant the entire globe (including water, so you can't, but bear with me) with bamboo you'd fix all the excess carbon out of the atmosphere in one growth cycle. You can't do that, but we do have absolute shitloads of land that could sustain bamboo, which can be used for all of the same stuff we use wood for now. Sure, a lot of designs look really different when built with bamboo as compared to wood, but since you can literally use it as the core structure for skyscrapers I thin
Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Informative)
I recall seeing a documentary that included a study of this. IIRC, there was a measurable increase in plant production, but not an increase in nutrients. So, it's not going to help (and may instead degrade) the quality of your vegetables, although perhaps trees/bamboo used for construction material will improve (but maybe other qualitative aspects would be reduced, such as strength of the material). However, I think the increased level of CO2 required to measure this was beyond anything we're likely to see...but it was a long time ago, so I don't remember the details or who did the study.
Re:Redundent.. (Score:5, Informative)
Absorption-limited nutrient supply from the soil / more vegetable mass produced = less nutrients per pound. Do you have to be so rude?
MOD AC PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:Redundent.. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, his point is fairly sound if you assume the primary growth constraint on plants is the availability of CO2 (although the composition of most fertilizers proves it isn't.)
The assumption is that, when more carbon dioxide is readily available, plants will grow more. However, since the availability of other nutrients (especially exotic minerals and ions) isn't increasing, there will be less of these nutrients to spread amongst the increased number of plants. Hence, vegetables and other crops that are less able to pass on these nutrients to the people eating them.
Of course, this is all irrelevant, because plants have a huge excess of CO2 in the present atmosphere and are generally prevented from growing due to the lack of free nitrogen and phosphorus. Incidentally, I believe more than a few people have suggested (and perhaps even implemented) dumping fertilizer into the oceans to make the resultant algal blooms suck up more CO2. This is a double-edged sword, in that the blooms block out sunlight for plants growing on the ocean floor, but also eventually die off and provide a substantial food boon to the animals near the surface.
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I described results from someone else's study...and yes, I added a bit of my own speculation/interpretation.
Can you elaborate on what your disagreement is, rather than just firing off profanity and insults?
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Seems unlikely. This seems to be another spittle-and-rage-filled /. thread.
Rgds
Damon
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But wood takes forever to grow
Yes... All trees grow at the same rate. http://www.fast-growing-trees.com/FastestTrees.htm [fast-growing-trees.com] Or perhaps not.
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CO2 doesn't saturate our atmosphere overnight, either. It's the steady, relentless pumping of excess CO2 into the atmosphere that's going to destroy us.
If we planted a lot of trees now, we'd at least mitigate the worst effects of Climate Change, and possibly keep the atmosphere from jerking into a new, stable cycle far different from what we built a civilization in. We have a little time, and depending on the trees possibly enough to do it with trees.
Or just every rooftop and backyard filled with marijuana
Implications for space (Score:2)
good start. what about methane? (Score:3)
its 20 times worse than c02in regards to global warming.
Re:good start. what about methane? (Score:5, Informative)
its 20 times worse than c02in regards to global warming.
But there's more than 200x as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is methane.
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its 20 times worse than c02in regards to global warming.
But there's more than 200x as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is methane.
Unless I have eggs for breakfast...
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Carbon Neutral* excluding waste streams (Score:3, Interesting)
I always love how processes that claim to be carbon neutral exclude the largest sources of waste such as reagents and solvents used in processing which are in excess to 1000x the product achieved.
And yes while some of these can be recovered somewhat on an industrial scale their recovery is highly energy intensive process.
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Do you have citations for any of the cases that you allude to?
Rgds
Damon
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Better to make the car (or large portions of it) from wood.
Morgan has been using wood frames forever.
http://www.morgan-motor.co.uk/carpages/44/44.html [morgan-motor.co.uk]
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Except wood is one of the last materials you'd want to use in a car (well, in many things, but especially a car). It's heavy, weak, and highly susceptible to environmental degradation.
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There's a lot more of it?
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Co2 sticks around, methane doesn't (Score:5, Informative)
Because methane is a pretty reactive molecule. So it reacts spontaneously. In the atmosphere Methane has a half life of about 8 years.
We don't worry much about methane for the same reason we don't worry about H2O. Water vapor causes roughly 60% of all greenhouse effects yet since a water molecule on is in the atmosphere for about 9 days there is not much to worry about.
Co2 has a half life of centuries. So while boiling water on the stove stays in the atmosphere for a few days and cow farts stay in the air for a decade, CO2 stays up there for centuries.
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Nope. My dad had some problem with the speakers on his computer, when I got it fixed the first thing he did was rickroll himself. i lol'd so hard, he didn't get it.
Re:China + India + Coal (Score:5, Informative)
The Chinese are building more nuclear plants these days and electric scooters are very popular there. I wouldn't be surprised to see them become more environmentally friendly than the US in the next 15-30 years.
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Only if their manufacturing industry collapses. Remember that the reason you're sending all your money over there in exchange for cheap goods is twofold:
1. Labour is cheaper since unions are effectively banned
2. Environmental laws are effectively non-existent (as in, they exist but are ignored)
If their manufacturing plants start adhering to sane environmental regulations there will be higher overheads which will translate to less incentive to send manufacturing over there.
That is, if there is any manufactu
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The per-capita emissions are meaningless. The only Chinese people who count are the ones doing the emitting, which is fewer than the number of Americans. Most Chinese people live lives in undeveloped activities, but nearly all Americans pollute a lot. On the other hand, both American and Chinese pollution is largely on behalf of the rest of the world's consumers, who outsource their manufacturing to our two countries.
Which is why the meaningful measure is pollution per dollar (or yuan; convertible). The US
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but nearly all Americans pollute a lot.
[...]
However, the USA is entirely capable of becoming #1 in pollution again. Especially if the people denying climate change get the controlling power in Washington again, the way they did 1994-2006.
That's a sweet ax you're grinding there. All this talk of "pollution" ignores one really big thing. Some forms of pollution are far worse than other forms. For example, heavy metals dumped in a river versus carbon dioxide emissions. China creates a lot more of the pollution that is actually pollution.
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The heavy metals pollution is worse for the people in China. The CO2 pollution is worse for everyone else.
Which ax are you referring to?
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The heavy metals pollution is worse for the people in China. The CO2 pollution is worse for everyone else.
Heavy metals are also worse for everyone else. Coal burning plants can generate considerable air-borne heavy metal pollution for example.
Which ax are you referring to?
There are three stories here. First, that the US is an unusually polluting country. Second, that carbon dioxide emissions are equivalent to other forms of pollution. Third, that the other political party, the one that will take over US Congress in 2012, is bad for the environment, merely because they don't take your particular beliefs seriously.
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The heavy metals pollution in China is not much of a pollution problem outside of East Asia and some parts of SE Asia (closely downwind and downstream of China). The CO2 pollution is a threat to everyone.
The US pollutes an unusually large amount, primarily because it produces so much; an unusually small amount by economic efficiency, as I have explained. CO2 is not equivalent to other pollution, as I have explained.
The Republican Party (that you can't even bring yourself to name, but for which you will vote
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However, I do have a problem with these same liberals attempt to use the power of the state to force their bullshit green attitudes on the rest of us.
And I have a problem with fundamentalists and the far right attempting to use the power of the state to force their bullshit anti-science and war mongering agendas on the rest of us. I don't want Creationism anti-science taught in schools that are funded by my taxes. I don't want my taxes used to kill people, in far away places and here. (Honestly, I'd think that if the fundies were to answer the question that's hanging on the walls of most of their churches, i.e. WWJD?, we wouldn't be trying so hard to kil
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As I understand it the Affordable Care Act doesn't make it mandatory to buy health insurance. It just imposes a tax to help cover the uninsured and gives you a tax credit if you do have insurance.
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The power of the US state is used to subsidize oil, coal and nukes every which way, many $BILLIONS a year - before even counting the endless wars for oil and damage from all the pollution.
You Teabaggers are the most lopsided liars in American history. Quite a feat - take a bow! And exit the stage already.
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You obviously never compared the medical bills sent to insured people with those sent to uninsured people. The insurers have clout to bargain down the prices the medical industry charges them. Individuals without insurance have no such clout. The medical industry charges the uninsured far more for the same stuff, and charges for all kinds of nonsensical stuff that insurers have staffs to investigate and prevent. So the uninsured pay a lot more than do the insured. Otherwise insurers could never make any mon
Re:China + India + Coal (Score:5, Insightful)
China - Why be green? The Americans will still destroy the environment.
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IOW, Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.
Do we really have to make do with less because of AGW or can we just make do with something different? Starting around 200 years ago we transformed our economy to one based on fossil fuels. Why can't we make a similar transformation to renewable energy?
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No, things are changing as large numbers of people are coerced by government and economics to make do with much less waste, and currently somewhat less useful consumption. That's the only way that works nearly all the time. Giving up incandescent lightbulbs is saving money and prolonging our civilization's lifetime, but it needed to be forced. Even just measuring the energy consumption of buildings in NYC, which is the necessary step to reducing it and saving money/civilization took a law. Sure, most people
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Probably not a lot. When you live in high population poverty for a while you quickly learn that people's lives / wellbeing aren't as highly valued as they are in the west.
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I'd be very surprised if most commercial sources of CO2 didn't come from Natural gas combustion rather than acid+carbonate reaction.
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Um, Venus doesn't need any more CO2. The atmosphere there is 96.5% (965,000 ppm) already.
What we're engaged in now, carried to a ridiculous conclusion is "Venus" forming the Earth increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere. There is some speculation but plenty of disagreement that we could release enough CO2 to cause a runaway greenhouse effect as has happened on Venus. That would require burning nearly all of the available carbon sources such as tar sands and oil shale and I don't expect it to happen but it's